MuleSoft Certified Architect MCIA-Level-1 Reddit Questions

MuleSoft's API development best practices emphasize a design-first approach, which starts with writing and approving an API contract before any implementation begins. This approach ensures that the API's interface is agreed upon and understood by all stakeholders before the backend is built. It involves creating an API specification using tools like RAML or OpenAPI, which serves as a blueprint for development. This method promotes better planning, communication, and alignment between different teams and stakeholders, leading to more efficient and predictable API development processes.

References:

• API Design Best Practices
• MuleSoft's Approach to API Development

To meet the requirements of enriching logging with more context and improving throughput while reducing latency, the customer should use an asynchronous logging approach. Here's why option B is correct:

• Async Logger: Asynchronous logging helps in improving the performance by decoupling the logging from the main thread of execution. This reduces the latency of message processing since logging operations are offloaded to a separate thread.
• Logging Level Greater than INFO: Logging at levels such as WARN, ERROR, or FATAL ensures that only essential logs are written asynchronously, further enhancing performance. Avoiding DEBUG or TRACE levels unless necessary reduces the overhead of logging.
• Pattern Layout with [%MDC]: Using the pattern layout with [%MDC] in the log4j2.xml configuration file allows the inclusion of mapped diagnostic context in the logs. MDC is a feature that provides context-specific information, such as transaction IDs or user IDs, which helps in tracing and debugging.

Example configuration in log4j2.xml:

This configuration ensures that the logs are enriched with context information provided by MDC and processed asynchronously to maintain high throughput and low latency.

References

• Log4j2 Asynchronous Logging
• Mapped Diagnostic Context (MDC) in Log4j2

Explanation

* Correct answer is To directly reference one shared and customized log4j2.xml file from multiple Mule applications. Key word  to note in the answer is directly.

* By default, CloudHub replaces a Mule application's log4j2.xml file with a CloudHub log4j2.xml file. This specifies the CloudHub appender to write logs to the CloudHub logging service.

* You cannot modify CloudHub log4j2.xml file to add any custom appender. But there is a process in order to achieve this. You need to raise a request on support portal to disable CloudHub provided Mule application log4j2 file.

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* Once this is done , Mule application's log4j2.xml file is used which you can use to send/export application logs to other log4j2 appenders, such as a custom logging system MuleSoft does not own any responsibility for lost logging data due to misconfiguration of your own log4j appender if it happens by any chance.

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* One more difference between customer-hosted Mule runtimes and CloudHub deployed mule instance is that

- CloudHub system log messages cannot be sent to external log management system without installing custom CH logging configuration through support

- where as Customer-hosted runtime can send system and application log to external log management system

MuleSoft Reference:

https://docs.mulesoft.com/runtime-manager/viewing-log-data

https://docs.mulesoft.com/runtime-manager/custom-log-appender

To convey the necessary non-functional requirement (NFR) related to protecting backend services from a high rate of requests according to SLAs, the following steps should be taken:

• Create a Shared RAML Fragment: Develop a RAML fragment that defines the NFR, including the SLAs for different subscription levels ("Gold", "Silver", "Platinum"). This fragment should include the details on rate limiting and throttling based on the new parameter added to the Accounts object.
• Update API Specifications: Integrate the shared RAML fragment into each API specification. This ensures that the NFR is consistently applied across all relevant APIs.
• Publish to Exchange: Publish the updated API specifications and the shared RAML fragment to Anypoint Exchange. This makes the NFR visible and accessible to all stakeholders and developers, ensuring compliance and implementation consistency.

This approach ensures that the NFR is clearly communicated and applied uniformly across all API implementations.

References

• MuleSoft Documentation on RAML and API Specifications
• Best Practices for API Design and Documentation