IBM A1000-004 - Assessment: Cloud Computing and Platform Services v1 Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A regulated enterprise is migrating a legacy three-tier application to IBM Cloud. The database tier must remain on-premises for at least 12 months due to compliance, but the web and application tiers will run on IBM Cloud. The application requires low-latency, private connectivity to the on-prem database and must not traverse the public internet. Which approach best satisfies the requirements with the least operational risk?

A team runs a microservices workload on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS) in a VPC. Pods can reach the internet, but they intermittently fail to resolve internal service names (e.g., "orders.default.svc.cluster.local"). External DNS lookups (e.g., "ibm.com") continue to work. CPU and memory look normal, and restarting failing pods temporarily fixes it. What is the most likely root cause to investigate first?

A SaaS provider needs to design a multi-tenant API platform on IBM Cloud. Requirements: per-tenant isolation of secrets, ability to rotate credentials without redeploying services, centralized audit of secret access, and minimal risk of secret leakage in CI/CD logs. Which solution best meets these requirements?

A financial services company is implementing a new event-driven architecture. Events must be delivered at least once, consumers must be able to replay events for 7 days for forensic analysis, and message ordering must be preserved per customer ID. The workload is expected to spike unpredictably. Which IBM Cloud service and design best fit?

A company built a globally used web application. They need DDoS protection, global load balancing, WAF controls, and the ability to serve cached static assets closer to users. Their origin app runs in IBM Cloud VPC and must only accept inbound traffic from the edge layer. Which combination best meets the requirements?

A team is designing a DR strategy for a mission-critical service hosted in IBM Cloud. RPO must be near-zero, RTO under 30 minutes, and the system uses a managed database plus stateless APIs. They can tolerate higher ongoing cost to reduce risk. Which architecture best satisfies these targets?

A DevOps team uses Terraform to provision IBM Cloud resources. Their pipeline occasionally creates duplicate resources when rerun after a transient failure. They also observed that two parallel pipeline executions sometimes overwrite each other’s changes. What is the best practice to prevent these issues?

A product team must choose between deploying a new API as serverless functions or containers on Kubernetes. Requirements: predictable latency under sustained load, long-running background tasks up to 30 minutes, custom networking within a VPC, and the ability to run sidecars for service mesh. Which deployment model is the best fit?

A security team mandates: (1) no long-lived API keys embedded in applications, (2) least-privilege access per microservice, and (3) ability to trace which workload accessed which resource. Microservices run on IKS and need to call IBM Cloud services (e.g., databases, object storage). What is the best approach?

An application team reports that their cloud migration has reduced agility rather than improved it. They moved VMs to the cloud unchanged, operations still require manual ticketing, and deployments are infrequent. They ask what cloud characteristic they are failing to leverage and what change would most directly address it. Which answer is best?