Tips for passing the Mulesoft Certified Integration Architect Level -1 exam without any Training***
Who should take ?
Solution and technical architects or lead/senior developers have past experience developing and delivering non-trivial Mule applications who are focused on designing enterprise integration solutions.
Pre- Requisites
a) Since the exam covers many areas of enterprise integration one should try to see how they can be achieved using Mulesoft.
b) Mule application development and deployment experience, as evidenced by clearing Mule Certified Developer Level -1(Mule 4) certification .
c) It’s a good idea to keep an eye on this page for latest updates.
It’s all about Perspective
Developing an architect’s perspective before taking the MCIA exam will greatly aid in preparation. As an experienced developer, you must have focused on implementing the business requirement while only vaguely paying attention to what happens after your development or why we need to implement a specific requirement.
So rather than memorizing a list of topics, let’s try to understand how we can instil an architect’s perspective by analyzing your current project.
Assuming you are a senior Mulesoft certified developer, here are a few questions you should try to answer and explore ways to accomplish them with Mulesoft.
Q1) Is your application exchanging data with external systems(SaaS,Database, Mainframe etc) for exchanging data?
— Use Anypoint Connectors
Q2) How to interpret a Mule event I receive?
Q3) Can you identify your applications Integration Patterns?
a) Synchronous : Are you dealing with a source that will wait until you respond, or do you update data into the end system instantly?
In Depth—
i) SOAP VS REST
ii) WSDL vs RAML
b) Asynchronous : Are you dealing with a source that will does not wait until you respond, or do you accept the request and process it later stage ?
In Depth—
i) Async scope
ii) VM connector
iii) JMS
iii) Persistent Queue, VM Connector and Object Store
iv) VM vs Obj v1
c) Streaming : Are you dealing with data that is generated continuously by a large number of data sources that typically send in data records in small batches (order of Kilobytes)?
d) Parallel Processing : Does your api make multiple backend requests at the same time ?
e) Iterative Processing : Is your API grouping together multiple items and running them as a single event?
i) For-each
iii) For-each vs Parallel For each
iv) For-each vs Parallel-For Each vs Batch
v) Parallel vs Sequential processing
vi) Scatter gather vs Parallel for each
f) Scheduler: Does your api trigger at periodic intervals?
i) How does scheduler work in Mule?
ii) Overview of Batch Processing
iii) Batch Processing Deep Dive
v) Identify how you control your Mule Flow?
Q4) What does your API do when you’ve accepted the request?
I) Transform —
Is there any Transformation ? —
a) Is Dataweave the only option ? — Dataweave vs Custom Java Code
b) How to handle repeated requests ? — Cache it!
II) Route —
How can you route the request once you built it ? — Message Routing
Understand what happens and where it goes using features available in Anypoint Platform — Monitoring , Auditing & Logging
Now that we have our API and Application up and running, it’s time to learn how to use the auditing and logging
III) Logging —
a) Understand how your application makes use of/can make use of the logging options provided by Mule 4 — Focus on number of appenders needed for each scenario.
b) How you can log while you develop?
c) Traceability- How to trace my message ?
d) Ways to Externalize Mule Application Logs
IV) Monitoring —
a) Utilizing Anypoint Monitoring
b) What can be monitored ?
c ) Your API— API Analytics
d) How will you be notified about your API? — API alerts in API Manager
e) How will you be notified about your application? — Application Alerts in Runtime Manager
V) Auditing —
a) Configure Audit Logs
b) Using the Audit Log API
Now that you’ve determined which systems your application connects to, what protocol it uses, and which Anypoint connector you’ll use with one of the many integration patterns, it’s time to figure out where it can be deployed.
As you might be aware Anypoint Platform is capable of many things it’s predominantly divided into
a) Runtime plane- You can deploy your APIs and Mule applications from here.
b) Control Plane- You can design, deploy, and manage APIs and Mule applications from here.
Q5)Analyze your project’s setup and you will realize that it falls into any one of the combinations of these planes that result into
a) A short video Overview Deployment Topologies in Mulesoft
b) Which one is the best ? Comparison of Deployment Options
c) If you have a Hybrid Set Up Connection options between On-Premise and CloudHub
Q6) Once your applications are running in any of the possible deployment options, it is imminent for you to maintain your Mule 4 application’s state with below options —
Overview of State persistence Options in Mule
a) Using Object store — a comparison of Obj store v1 vs V2
b) Using Cloud Hub persistent Queues — When and how to use them?
c) Using Persistent or Transient Queues
e) Using External database like Redis.
f) Using Watermark
Q7) How to re-use your Deployment Config?
a) How to configure Mule effectively to make the most of these connectors effectively ? Mule- Configuration
b) How to share resources on-premise? Mule Domain Projects
c) Mule Domain support for various Deployment Options
d) Configure system properties at startup
Q8) How to Automate Your Deployment Lifecycle?
Now that you have the application and API running on the appropriate Anypoint Platform, it is a good idea to learn how to automate deployments.
a) What is CI/CD and why is important — CI/CD Importance
b) How anypoint Platform support for Industry Standard tools —
i) Mule maven plugin
iii)Anatomy of MUnit Test Suite
c)How to implement CI/CDfor full api life cycle?
Q9) How to meet your Non- Functional requirements ?
Before proceeding further It’s important to understand what Non-functional Requirements actually are ?
Q10) Understand how to make your enterprise applications/api’s Scalable, Reliable and Highly available based on deployment options
a) What do Scalable, Reliable and High Availability mean ?
b) How can you achieve them on a On-premise setup ?
c) Understand Primary Node difference for JMS, File etc connectors
d) Multicast vs UniCast Clusters
e) What are the concurrency issues solved by Clusters?
f) How can you achieve them on CloudHub?
g) How can you achieve reliability on CloudHub?
h)How to achieve Reliability using different scopes and routers ?
i) Distribute your traffic using SLB & DLB
j) How to configure SLB & DLB?
Q11) What is Transaction Management ? How does your application achieve it?
a) Try Scope
b) VM vs JMS vs JDBC options for Reliability Patterns
c) Error Scope
d) Single Resource vs XA Transactions
e) What are SAGA patterns and when to use them ?
f) How to manage JMS transactions?
Q12) How to implement Performance tuning ?
Q13)Now that you validated enterprise set up (cloudhub/on-premise),fine tuned your application let’s also explore how to apply security to your application/api.
i) Network Level — On CloudHub
a) VPC + DLB(complete isolation)
Q15) How to secure Mule Applications ?
At User Level —
a) Restrict who can access the application — how to manage user access to the applications running in Environments in Anypoint Platform using Organization, Business Groups and Roles .
b) Client Management — Which API Clients will be able to access my managed api instance.
c) Identity Management — Who can log in to the anypoint platform’s web UI.
Q16) How to secure data in transit ?
At Application Level—
b)Mutual Authentication in Mule & How to configure Part 1 & Part 2
c) Application Properties — Secure configuration File
d) How to secure properties before deployment?
e) Cryptography
Q17) How to secure your API’s ?
a) Implement Policies in API manager
ii) Tokenisation
iii)Secrets Manager
Q18) Does your application implement Reliability pattern ?
— Reliability pattern implementation using VM, JMS, and JDBC
Q19) What are common Development Standards ?
I hope these questions aided you in exploring Mulesoft integration capabilities that are already (or could be) implemented in your project and shifted your perspective from a senior developer to a Mulesoft Integration Architect.
D-Day
For a pleasant experience ensure that
a) You have already registered for ProctorU with the same username of your Mulesoft Training Anypoint Account.
b) The name in your Mulesoft Anypoint Profile & ProctorU account is exactly same as your original ID which you plan to share with Proctor on the day of your exam.
c) Once you launch your exam from Mulesoft Training Anypoint Account. you will be redirected to ProctorU where you can connect to a Proctor using their live feature.
d) After completing your exam successfully you can download the certificate from Dashboard → Certification Exams section in Mulesoft Training Anypoint Account.
Recommendations
a) Review MCD — Self Assessment Quiz
b) Review MCIA — Practice Quiz
c) Search before asking at Mulesoft Help Centre.
d) Attend any of the Mulesoft Meetups and win a FREE training voucher.
e) Register for a free MCIA session here
f) Join Mulesoft Developer Community on Linkedin for latest updates.
