50 IBM Assessment: Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

A team is comparing deployment models. They want cloud resources dedicated to their organization but hosted and operated by a third party. Which cloud deployment model best fits this requirement?

A customer needs to run a legacy application that requires full OS control, custom kernel modules, and specific security hardening. Which compute option is most appropriate?

A company wants to centralize monitoring and automatically open incidents when certain thresholds are exceeded across servers, storage, and network devices. Which approach best aligns with smarter infrastructure practices?

A solution architect is designing a highly available application on cloud infrastructure. Which practice most directly improves resiliency against a single data center failure?

A retail application experiences unpredictable traffic spikes during promotions. The team wants to scale out quickly while minimizing manual intervention. Which design choice best supports this goal?

A company needs a storage solution for large volumes of unstructured data such as images and backups. Data should be accessed via an API and optimized for durability rather than low-latency block access. Which storage type is the best fit?

A customer is migrating workloads and wants to keep sensitive data on-premises while running web and application tiers in the cloud. They also need secure connectivity between environments. What architecture best matches this requirement?

After moving an application to cloud VMs, users report intermittent timeouts. Monitoring shows high CPU on the database VM and frequent disk I/O waits. What is the most likely first remediation step?

A financial services firm is designing a cloud environment and must meet strict segregation-of-duties requirements. They want to ensure administrators cannot both provision resources and approve access privileges. Which control best addresses this requirement?

A company runs a multi-tier application across two availability zones. Despite having redundant instances, an outage still occurs when one zone fails because sessions are lost and users must re-login. Which change most effectively improves user experience during zone failure?

A team is deciding between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS for a new internal application. They want to reduce operational overhead for OS patching and runtime maintenance but still control their application code and deployments. Which cloud service model best fits?

An operations team wants to implement a standard control to ensure that if a public cloud virtual server is compromised, the attacker cannot directly access the management interfaces of other servers. Which approach best supports this goal?

A customer asks what distinguishes "elasticity" from "scalability" in cloud computing. Which statement is most accurate?

A web application on IBM Cloud experiences periodic spikes and the team wants requests to be distributed across multiple instances while enabling health checks and removing unhealthy instances automatically. Which solution best meets this requirement?

A company must integrate on-premises systems with cloud workloads and wants private, predictable connectivity that does not traverse the public internet. Which connectivity option is most appropriate?

A storage administrator is choosing between object storage and block storage for a cloud migration. The application requires low-latency random I/O and a filesystem on the storage device attached to a virtual server. Which storage type is the best fit?

An organization wants to improve incident response by collecting infrastructure and application logs in a centralized location, enabling search and correlation across systems. Which practice best supports this outcome?

A data center uses a smarter infrastructure approach to reduce unplanned downtime. Sensors detect rising temperature in a rack, and the system should automatically trigger cooling adjustments and notify staff. Which capability is being primarily demonstrated?

A multi-tier application is deployed across two availability zones for high availability. During a failure test, the database fails over correctly, but the application tier continues sending traffic to the failed database endpoint for several minutes. What is the most likely design gap?

A company is building an IoT solution where thousands of devices send telemetry to the cloud. They need to handle bursty ingestion, decouple producers from consumers, and process messages reliably even if downstream systems are temporarily unavailable. Which architecture component best addresses this?

A project team is comparing cloud service models. They want to deploy custom application code without managing the operating system or runtime patching. Which cloud service model best matches this requirement?

A customer is migrating an internal web application to IBM Cloud. They want a fast way to publish HTTP(S) endpoints, route traffic to multiple back-end instances, and perform basic health checks. Which component best addresses this need?

An operations team wants to reduce the risk of accidental data loss in a virtualized environment. Which approach best supports rapid recovery of a VM after an administrator mistake?

A company is implementing a hybrid cloud design. The application tier runs on IBM Cloud, but it must access an on-premises database with consistent latency and without exposing the database to the public internet. What is the most appropriate connectivity approach?

A team deployed multiple application instances across subnets. Users report intermittent failures. Monitoring shows one instance is unhealthy, but traffic is still being sent to it. What is the most likely missing configuration?

A security architect wants to enforce least privilege in IBM Cloud access management. Which approach best aligns with this principle?

A company is adopting an event-driven design. They want application components to react asynchronously to events and avoid tight coupling between producers and consumers. Which architecture pattern best matches this goal?

A regulated workload requires that encryption keys are controlled by the customer and that the cloud provider cannot access the plaintext keys. Which solution best meets this requirement?

A mission-critical application must remain available during a single-zone outage. The application uses stateless web tiers and a stateful database. Which design best supports this requirement?

An SRE team wants to introduce safer changes in a cloud environment. They need a deployment approach that allows routing a small percentage of traffic to a new version, monitor key metrics, and roll back quickly if error rates increase. Which approach is most appropriate?

A startup wants developers to deploy code without managing servers. The application has unpredictable traffic spikes and the team only wants to pay for actual execution time. Which cloud model best fits this requirement?

A customer wants to understand who is responsible for applying security patches to the guest operating system on their cloud virtual machines. In a typical shared responsibility model for IaaS, who owns guest OS patching?

An operations team is asked to define a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for a business application. What does RPO describe?

A company wants to reduce the attack surface of their cloud environment. Which practice most directly supports this goal?

A retail company is migrating a 3-tier web application to IBM Cloud. They require the web tier to be publicly reachable, but the application and database tiers must not be directly accessible from the internet. Which network design best meets this requirement?

A team reports that after a deployment, users intermittently receive errors because some requests are routed to instances that have not finished starting. What is the best practice to prevent traffic from reaching unhealthy or unready instances?

An enterprise wants to prevent configuration drift across hundreds of servers and ensure consistent, repeatable deployments. Which approach is most appropriate?

A company wants to improve incident detection for their cloud workloads. They already collect system and application logs but struggle to identify issues quickly. What is the most effective next step?

A regulated customer must ensure that encryption keys used for sensitive data are not accessible to cloud administrators and that key usage is auditable. Which solution best meets these requirements?

A company is designing a multi-region architecture for a customer-facing application. They want automatic failover with minimal downtime and must avoid split-brain behavior between regions. Which design choice best supports these goals?

A team wants to quickly validate an application idea without purchasing hardware. They need on-demand access to compute and storage and expect usage to fluctuate week to week. Which cloud characteristic best describes this requirement?

An organization is designing a hybrid solution where some workloads remain on-premises and others run in IBM Cloud. They want a consistent way to control who can create, modify, and delete resources across cloud services. What is the MOST appropriate control mechanism?

A customer wants to improve data center operations by automatically identifying underutilized servers and recommending workload placement changes to reduce energy consumption. Which Smarter Infrastructure capability best matches this goal?

A production web application experiences occasional traffic spikes that overload a single virtual server. The team wants to improve resilience and scale-out with minimal application changes. Which design is MOST appropriate?

A security team needs to ensure application-to-database traffic in IBM Cloud is not exposed to the public internet. Which approach BEST meets this requirement?

A monitoring dashboard shows that a microservice’s response times increase during peak load, but CPU utilization remains low. Network latency and database times are normal. Which issue is the MOST likely cause?

A company is migrating an on-premises application to the cloud. They want to minimize changes initially but plan to modernize later. Which migration approach aligns BEST with this strategy?

A team deploys a new version of an application and wants to reduce risk by gradually shifting traffic to the new version while continuously monitoring key metrics. Which release strategy is MOST appropriate?

A regulated customer must demonstrate that only approved changes are made to cloud infrastructure and that every change is traceable to a requester and approver. Which practice BEST supports this requirement?

A global application requires very low latency for users in multiple regions and must continue operating even if an entire region becomes unavailable. Which architecture BEST meets these requirements?