50 IBM Assessment: Platform Associate Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

In an IBM Platform deployment, which component is primarily responsible for authenticating users and enforcing access permissions to platform resources?

A team is deploying a new application to the platform and wants to externalize configuration (e.g., connection strings and feature flags) without rebuilding the container image. What is the recommended approach?

An administrator needs to ensure that application logs are available for troubleshooting even if containers restart. Which design choice best meets this requirement?

A platform user can log in successfully but cannot create a new project/workspace due to permission errors. What is the most likely cause?

You are designing a highly available platform service that must continue operating if a single node fails. Which approach best supports this requirement?

During deployment, a workload cannot pull its container image. The error indicates 'unauthorized' when accessing the registry. What should you verify first?

A team wants to separate duties so that developers can deploy apps but cannot modify cluster-wide networking or security policies. What platform capability best supports this requirement?

An application experiences intermittent latency. Metrics show CPU throttling on its containers even though node CPU utilization is moderate. What is the most likely explanation?

A critical platform component repeatedly restarts shortly after launch. Logs show it fails to connect to its backing database due to connection timeouts. Which action is the BEST next step to isolate the root cause?

You are designing a platform deployment for a regulated workload that requires encryption in transit for all service-to-service communication and strong identity between services. Which architectural approach best satisfies this requirement?

An application team wants to understand the major building blocks of an IBM platform solution and how workloads interact with shared services. Which description best represents a typical platform architecture concept?

A platform administrator is asked to apply configuration changes to multiple environments (dev/test/prod) with minimal drift and a clear audit trail. Which approach is the best practice?

A team is troubleshooting a failed deployment. The platform indicates the container image cannot be pulled from the registry. Which is the most likely root cause to check first?

A platform team wants to enforce least privilege for application teams while still enabling self-service provisioning. Which capability best supports this goal?

A solution architect is designing a platform landing zone. They want network segmentation so that management components are isolated from application workloads, while still allowing controlled connectivity. What is the best design choice?

After enabling centralized logging, a team reports they cannot correlate a user’s request across services. What platform practice most directly enables end-to-end correlation in distributed systems?

A deployment pipeline to production fails because the platform blocks it due to a policy violation (e.g., missing required labels and security settings). What is the most appropriate remediation approach?

A platform admin needs to ensure that secrets used by applications (API keys, passwords) are not stored in plaintext in code repositories or container images. Which approach is recommended?

A production workload experiences intermittent downtime. Metrics show memory usage steadily increases until the container is restarted by the platform. Logs show no obvious errors. What is the most likely explanation and the best next diagnostic step?

A regulated enterprise requires strict separation of duties: developers can deploy to non-production, but only an operations group can approve and promote releases to production. Which platform capability best supports this requirement while maintaining auditable controls?

A Platform Associate is explaining the purpose of an API gateway in a cloud-native platform. Which statement best describes the primary role of an API gateway?

A team wants to deploy the same application configuration across development, test, and production while ensuring environment-specific differences (e.g., endpoints) are controlled and auditable. What is the best practice approach?

An operator needs to quickly determine whether a reported incident is caused by an application issue or a platform infrastructure issue. Which initial action is MOST appropriate?

A platform uses role-based access control (RBAC). A developer can view resources but cannot create deployments in a specific namespace even though they are in the correct user group. What is the MOST likely cause?

A team is designing a platform architecture for microservices. They need consistent service-to-service authentication, encryption in transit, and traffic management (retries/timeouts) without changing application code extensively. Which platform component best addresses these requirements?

After deploying an application, pods remain in a "Pending" state. Cluster nodes show sufficient CPU and memory. What is the BEST next step to identify the cause?

A security team requires that only approved container images can run on the platform and that deployments failing policy checks are blocked automatically. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A platform team must design a high-availability control plane to minimize downtime if a single control-plane node fails. Which design is MOST appropriate?

A production rollout introduces a new configuration that causes elevated error rates. The team wants the ability to quickly revert to a known-good state while keeping an audit trail of changes. Which approach is BEST?

A regulated workload requires strict separation between teams, including limits on east-west traffic between namespaces while still allowing shared platform services (e.g., logging) to be consumed. Which solution best satisfies this requirement?

A new team member asks how the platform can securely store an application password so it is not hard-coded in scripts. Which platform capability is most appropriate?

You are designing a platform-based microservices solution. Which approach best reduces the impact of a single service failure on other services?

After deploying an application, the platform reports the app is running, but users cannot reach it externally. Which is the MOST likely missing configuration?

An operator needs to confirm what changes were made to platform configuration and who made them. Which capability addresses this requirement?

A platform team wants to standardize deployments so that the same application definition can be promoted from development to test to production with only environment-specific values changed. What is the BEST approach?

A new application release causes higher-than-normal error rates. The team wants to minimize user impact while validating the release. Which deployment strategy best supports this goal?

A platform administrator must ensure developers can deploy applications but cannot modify cluster-wide networking or security policies. What is the BEST way to implement this?

Users report intermittent slow responses from an application. Metrics show CPU is not saturated, but memory usage steadily increases until the application restarts. What is the MOST likely next step for troubleshooting?

A regulated enterprise requires that only approved container images can be deployed, and that images are scanned for vulnerabilities before running. Which platform design best meets this requirement?

A mission-critical workload requires high availability across failure domains. Which design choice most directly improves resilience to a single zone failure?

An application running on the platform must call an external API. The security team requires that no long-lived credentials be embedded in code and that access can be revoked centrally. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A platform administrator needs to provide read-only visibility into deployments and logs for an audit team without allowing changes. What is the best practice to meet this requirement?

A new workload must be deployed to the platform quickly and consistently across environments (dev, test, prod). Which approach most directly improves consistency and reduces human error?

After enabling autoscaling for a microservice, users still experience slow responses during peak traffic. Metrics show CPU is low, but request latency and queue length are high. What is the most likely next step to address the issue?

A team wants to separate workloads by sensitivity so that a development workload cannot impact production availability. Which platform design choice most directly supports this goal?

A platform operator is asked to enable centralized observability so teams can correlate metrics, logs, and traces across services. Which combination best supports end-to-end troubleshooting?

A deployment succeeded, but the application cannot reach a database in a private network. The application logs show timeouts, and DNS resolution is successful. What is the most likely cause to check first?

A team needs to roll out a configuration change with minimal risk. They want to verify the change with a small subset of traffic before full rollout and be able to quickly revert. Which deployment strategy best fits?

A regulated workload requires encryption in transit between internal services and strict identity-based authorization, even within the same cluster or network segment. Which approach best satisfies these requirements?

After a platform update, multiple services intermittently fail with connection resets. The issue occurs across different nodes and disappears after restarting pods, but returns later. Which troubleshooting approach is most appropriate to isolate the root cause?