IBM A1000-002 - IBM Assessment: Cloud Computing Architecture V1 Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A financial services firm is adopting cloud with strict regulatory controls. Their security team insists that all customer data must remain encrypted end-to-end, including during processing, and that cryptographic keys must remain under customer control with auditable separation of duties. The application has bursty workloads and must autoscale. Which architectural approach best meets these requirements while preserving cloud elasticity?

A product team claims their application is “cloud-native” because it runs in containers. In production, deployments routinely fail during autoscaling events because multiple replicas contend for a local filesystem lock, and session affinity is required at the load balancer to prevent users from being logged out. Which refactoring change most directly addresses the root cloud-native design issues while improving resiliency?

A SaaS provider uses a microservices architecture. One service publishes events to an event bus; several downstream services update their own databases. During partial outages, the team observes duplicate events and occasional out-of-order delivery. Some downstream services perform non-idempotent updates, causing data corruption. What is the most appropriate architectural remediation?

An enterprise is designing a multi-region architecture for a customer-facing API with an RPO near zero and an RTO under a few minutes. The API reads and writes to a relational data store. The team proposes active-active across two regions, but the chosen database supports only asynchronous cross-region replication. Which design best satisfies the business targets with the fewest consistency surprises?

A bank must segment workloads into multiple security zones (public, application, data) and enforce least privilege with strong egress controls. They also require secure private connectivity to on-prem for a legacy mainframe and must prevent data exfiltration to the public internet except via approved egress points. Which design best aligns with these requirements?

A team is building an API platform consumed by internal teams and third parties. Requirements include: per-consumer rate limiting, request/response transformation, threat protection (e.g., basic OWASP protections), consistent authentication enforcement, and detailed analytics. The platform must allow backend services to evolve without breaking consumers. Which architecture component is most appropriate as the primary control point?

A mission-critical batch pipeline runs nightly and sometimes exceeds its time window. Investigation shows large variance in input size and frequent retries due to transient downstream failures. The organization wants better reliability and cost efficiency while maintaining observability and controlled concurrency. Which cloud design is most appropriate?

A team is troubleshooting intermittent latency spikes in a containerized web application. Metrics show CPU is moderate, but tail latency increases sharply during autoscaling. Logs show frequent connection establishment to the database and occasional DNS timeouts. Which combination of infrastructure/service changes most likely addresses the root cause?

During a migration, an on-prem monolith is moved to VMs in the cloud (lift-and-shift). After cutover, users report slower performance and higher error rates during peak hours. Monitoring shows the application tier is stable, but the database tier has high I/O latency and frequent lock waits. The original on-prem system used a SAN with very high IOPS and low latency. What is the best next step to remediate with minimal application code changes?

An enterprise is integrating cloud services with multiple on-prem systems using APIs and asynchronous messaging. They need end-to-end traceability across hybrid flows, guaranteed processing of critical messages despite transient failures, and the ability to replay events for audit and recovery. Which integration design best meets these needs?