50 IBM Cloud Pak for Data v4.x Solution Architect Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

A solution architect is designing IBM Cloud Pak for Data on OpenShift for a regulated enterprise. The platform must integrate with the corporate identity provider and enforce group-based access to projects and services. Which approach is recommended?

A team wants to implement a repeatable, auditable way to move Cloud Pak for Data configuration changes (e.g., platform settings, custom resources, namespaces) across environments. Which method best aligns with best practices?

A data engineering team needs to move data from multiple sources into curated datasets and wants built-in scheduling and monitoring of the pipelines in Cloud Pak for Data. Which capability is most appropriate?

An operations team wants a simple way to isolate workloads for different lines of business on the same Cloud Pak for Data cluster, while still enabling centralized platform management. Which approach is most appropriate?

After deploying Cloud Pak for Data, a solution architect notices that several services remain in a pending state because persistent volumes are not being provisioned automatically. What is the most likely root cause?

A company requires that all datasets in Cloud Pak for Data have consistent business terms, owners, and classification tags for governance and search. Which service provides the core capabilities to implement this requirement?

A project needs to access data stored in an external database without copying it into Cloud Pak for Data, and the organization wants centralized control of credentials and connectivity. What is the best approach?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment experiences intermittent performance issues during heavy usage. The platform shows frequent pod evictions due to memory pressure on certain nodes. What is the most appropriate first action?

A regulated customer must ensure that data used by Cloud Pak for Data services is encrypted at rest, including persistent volumes. They also require that encryption keys are managed by the organization. Which design best satisfies this requirement on OpenShift?

A team uses Watson Machine Learning to deploy models for real-time scoring. The SRE team requires that model deployments can be updated with zero downtime and that rollbacks are possible if latency or error rates regress. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A Cloud Pak for Data (CPD) architect needs to ensure that platform users can access CPD using corporate credentials and that group membership controls which projects and catalogs users can access. What is the recommended approach?

A team is troubleshooting a CPD deployment where users report that they can log in, but they cannot see any storage-backed assets in projects, and uploads fail. Cluster administrators confirm that pods are running. Which platform dependency is the MOST likely root cause?

A bank must design CPD so that data scientists can work with sensitive data while ensuring that raw data never leaves the data center. The organization also requires encryption in transit and at rest and strong network segmentation. Which design best meets these requirements?

A project uses Data Virtualization to provide a logical view across multiple source systems. Users complain that some queries are slow and occasionally time out, especially for large joins. What is the BEST first optimization step for the solution architect to recommend?

An organization wants to standardize how datasets are discovered and reused across business units. They need business-friendly descriptions, tags, and controlled sharing with auditability. Which CPD capability is primarily intended for this purpose?

After enabling external access through a route/ingress, users intermittently receive authentication redirect loops when accessing CPD via the corporate URL. Internal access works consistently. Which configuration issue is the MOST likely cause?

A CPD administrator needs to set up platform monitoring so operations can quickly detect issues like pod restarts, storage pressure, and service degradation, and also correlate them with OpenShift cluster health. What is the BEST approach?

A data engineering team wants to ingest data from multiple relational sources into curated datasets, perform transformations, and publish them to a governed catalog for reuse. They want a repeatable, visual pipeline with scheduling support. Which CPD approach best matches these needs?

A global enterprise runs CPD with multiple heavy services. During peak hours, interactive workloads slow down because batch training jobs consume resources. The architect must ensure predictable performance for interactive users while still allowing batch workloads to run. What is the BEST solution?

A regulated customer requires that only approved container images be used for all CPD services and that image provenance be enforced. They also want to reduce the risk of supply-chain attacks. Which control is MOST appropriate at the platform level?

A security team requires that Cloud Pak for Data users authenticate with the corporate identity provider and that group membership determines which projects and services users can access. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A solution architect needs to ensure that a new Cloud Pak for Data deployment can run data virtualization queries against multiple external databases without replicating the data into the platform. Which capability should be selected?

An administrator wants to verify whether a failing Cloud Pak for Data service pod is failing due to an image pull issue or a readiness/liveness probe issue. What is the most direct first step?

A company needs to separate duties so that platform administrators can manage the cluster and operators, but data scientists can create projects, deploy models, and manage notebooks without cluster-admin privileges. Which design best supports this requirement?

A Cloud Pak for Data environment must support secure inbound access from corporate users while keeping internal service traffic private. The customer also requires TLS termination to be managed consistently at the edge. Which OpenShift mechanism should be used?

A data governance team wants users to discover trusted data sets, understand their meaning, and request access through a controlled workflow. Which Cloud Pak for Data component best addresses this end-to-end requirement?

After enabling a new data source connection, analysts report that queries through Data Virtualization are slow and sometimes time out. The source database team confirms the database is healthy, but network latency to the source is high. Which architectural change is most likely to improve performance while preserving a virtualized access pattern?

A financial services client requires encryption of all persistent data used by Cloud Pak for Data services and wants keys managed by an enterprise key management system. Which approach best satisfies this requirement in a typical OpenShift-based deployment?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment spans multiple worker nodes. During peak usage, some analytics jobs fail with out-of-memory errors, while cluster monitoring shows overall free memory remains available. Which action most directly addresses this symptom?

A regulated customer needs to promote machine learning models from development to production with approvals, full traceability of training data/parameters, and the ability to roll back to a previous model version. Which solution design best meets these requirements in Cloud Pak for Data?

A solution architect is planning a new IBM Cloud Pak for Data deployment on Red Hat OpenShift. The security team requires that workloads for regulated data are isolated from other workloads and only scheduled on a dedicated set of worker nodes. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A team wants data scientists to access curated datasets without granting them direct access to the underlying source systems. They also need consistent business definitions and controlled sharing across projects. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best addresses this requirement?

An administrator needs to confirm that Cloud Pak for Data platform services are healthy after a maintenance window. Which action is the most appropriate first step?

A project team wants to move notebooks and related assets from development to production with minimal manual steps and an auditable process. Which approach best supports this goal in Cloud Pak for Data?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment must integrate with an enterprise identity provider and enforce group-based access to projects and services. What is the recommended design approach?

A data engineering team reports that scheduled DataStage jobs intermittently fail with connectivity errors to an external database. Ad-hoc runs from the same environment succeed. Which is the most likely cause to investigate first?

A customer wants to adopt a lakehouse approach on Cloud Pak for Data. They require ACID transactions on data files and the ability for multiple analytics engines to access the same curated tables. Which approach best aligns with this requirement?

After onboarding a new service, users complain that platform performance degrades during peak hours. The cluster shows CPU contention on worker nodes. Which action is the best optimization step that preserves tenant isolation and improves predictability?

A regulated environment requires that all data at rest used by Cloud Pak for Data services is encrypted with customer-managed keys and that key usage can be audited. Which design best meets this requirement?

An enterprise has multiple Cloud Pak for Data instances and needs consistent governance policies for data classification and access across all instances. They also require a separation of duties between policy authors and platform administrators. What is the best approach?

A solution architect must ensure that only specific user groups can view certain projects and deploy services in IBM Cloud Pak for Data, while all users can still authenticate using the enterprise identity provider. Which approach best satisfies this requirement?

A project team needs to copy a dataset from an external S3-compatible object store into Cloud Pak for Data for data science work, while preserving metadata and allowing governed reuse. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability is most appropriate?

An administrator wants a simple way to check whether core Cloud Pak for Data platform services are healthy after a maintenance window. Which approach is most appropriate?

A regulated organization requires that workloads running in Cloud Pak for Data cannot make outbound connections to the internet, but must still access an internal container registry and internal object storage. What is the best design approach?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment uses external object storage for the platform's shared storage needs. Users report intermittent failures when uploading large files, and logs show timeouts to the object store endpoint. Which action is the most appropriate first step?

A data governance team needs business terms to be consistently applied to data assets used in multiple projects, and wants policies to control who can access sensitive columns. Which combination best supports this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A team wants to operationalize model deployments and ensure that promotions from development to production follow a controlled workflow, including approvals and traceability. Which Cloud Pak for Data approach best aligns with this goal?

After enabling strict network policies in an OpenShift cluster, some Cloud Pak for Data service pods cannot reach required internal endpoints, causing readiness probe failures. What is the best troubleshooting approach?

A customer requires disaster recovery for Cloud Pak for Data with minimal data loss for critical governed assets and service configuration. They have a secondary OpenShift cluster in another site. Which strategy is most appropriate?

A large enterprise plans to onboard hundreds of users and many projects, and wants to prevent runaway compute consumption from notebooks and jobs while maintaining good user experience. Which design is most appropriate?