IBM Cloud Pak for Data v4.x Solution Architect Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

An enterprise is deploying IBM Cloud Pak for Data (CP4D) on OpenShift in two data centers (active/active) to serve regulated analytics workloads. They require: (1) a single logical platform URL for users, (2) ability to withstand loss of one data center with minimal user disruption, and (3) no data corruption for stateful CP4D services. Which architecture best meets these requirements with the least risk?

A platform team must run CP4D for multiple business units on a shared OpenShift cluster. Requirements: (1) hard isolation of workloads and data paths between tenants, (2) separate lifecycle management windows per tenant, and (3) ability to enforce different network egress policies per tenant. Which approach best satisfies these constraints?

A customer reports intermittent authentication failures to CP4D after integrating with corporate LDAP over TLS. Symptoms: users can log in for a while, then logins fail with certificate validation errors; restarting the identity-related pods temporarily resolves it. Investigation shows the LDAP server certificate was rotated, and some pods still trust the old CA chain. What is the most robust remediation to prevent recurrence during future certificate rotations?

During a CP4D deployment, several operators remain in a degraded state with errors indicating they cannot create routes and cluster-scoped resources. The OpenShift cluster uses restricted SCC policies and the platform team has limited cluster-admin access. Which action is the best next step to resolve the issue while maintaining least privilege?

A CP4D environment experiences periodic performance drops during peak ETL windows. Metrics show high etcd latency and API server throttling correlated with many short-lived pods created by data processing jobs. The customer cannot reduce job parallelism due to SLA. Which change most directly addresses control-plane pressure without reducing workload throughput?

A governance team needs to ensure that sensitive columns in a shared analytics dataset are masked consistently across notebooks, SQL queries, and dashboards. Different user groups should see different masking rules, and the policy must be centrally managed and auditable. Which design best achieves this in CP4D?

A bank must enable self-service data access while ensuring only curated, lineage-tracked assets are discoverable. Data originates from multiple sources and is frequently updated. The bank also requires that data quality rules and glossary terms remain attached as the data evolves. Which approach best aligns with these requirements?

A team uses virtualized data access to expose datasets from several sources. Users complain that some queries are slow and occasionally time out, especially when joining large tables across sources. The team cannot replicate all data due to residency rules, but they can stage derived results within the same residency boundary. What is the most effective optimization strategy?

A customer wants to adopt GitOps for CP4D configuration changes. They need repeatable promotion across dev/test/prod and strict separation of duties: developers can propose changes, but only platform admins can apply them. Which implementation approach best satisfies this?

After onboarding a new data source, users report that catalog searches show duplicate assets and inconsistent lineage paths. Investigation finds that the same physical tables are being harvested by two different connection definitions owned by different teams, each with slightly different naming and metadata. What is the best remediation to restore a single source of truth while minimizing disruption?