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

An enterprise is designing a multi-tenant IBM Cloud Pak for Data (CP4D) platform on OpenShift. Tenants must be isolated such that they cannot (a) view each other’s projects/assets, (b) access each other’s data sources/credentials, or (c) impact each other’s compute resources during peak workloads. The organization also wants a shared platform operations team and minimal platform sprawl. Which architecture best meets these requirements with the strongest isolation while maintaining centralized operations?

A solution architect must design CP4D connectivity from workloads (e.g., DataStage flows and notebooks) to on-premises data sources. The enterprise mandates: no inbound firewall openings to the data center, no direct pod-level routing to internal subnets, and all traffic must traverse a controlled egress path with inspection. Which design best satisfies the constraints while preserving functional connectivity?

A CP4D platform must support disaster recovery. Requirements: RPO near-zero for metadata and configuration, automated failover with minimal manual steps, and the ability to restore services consistently. The organization already has enterprise storage replication available. Which approach is the most appropriate starting point for a robust DR design for CP4D on OpenShift?

During a CP4D installation, the operator reports that custom resources are created but multiple pods remain in Pending state. The cluster has available CPU and memory on worker nodes, but events show repeated messages about failing to provision volumes and unbound immediate PersistentVolumeClaims. What is the most likely root cause and best next action for the solution architect?

After deploying CP4D, a team enables strict cluster-level security controls. Immediately, a CP4D service upgrade fails: the operator can’t reconcile resources, and logs show repeated authorization errors when attempting to list/watch resources in multiple namespaces. The platform previously worked. What is the most likely cause and the correct remediation approach?

A customer installs CP4D and configures external object storage for platform services. Shortly after, users report intermittent failures when uploading large assets (hundreds of MB to multiple GB) to projects. Smaller uploads succeed. No CPU/memory pressure is observed. Network traces show connection resets after several minutes. Which action is most likely to address the issue while aligning with best practices?

A data engineering team uses DataStage and notebooks on CP4D. They must ingest from an RDBMS and land data in an analytics-optimized store while preserving lineage in Watson Knowledge Catalog (WKC). Additionally, they need to enforce column-level masking policies at query time for downstream consumers. Which combination of CP4D capabilities best meets these requirements end-to-end?

A team created a governed catalog with business terms and classifications. They observe that sensitive data is still appearing unmasked in queries executed through a virtualized layer by users who should be restricted. Investigation shows policies exist, but enforcement is inconsistent depending on whether users query via notebooks, SQL clients, or published APIs. What is the most likely explanation and the correct architectural fix?

A production CP4D environment shows sporadic slowdowns during peak usage. OpenShift nodes are not CPU/memory saturated, but storage latency spikes correlate with longer job runtimes across multiple services. The cluster uses a shared storage backend for many PVCs. What is the most effective optimization approach to improve performance predictability for critical workloads?

A platform team is implementing proactive operations for CP4D. They need to detect early signals of failure that commonly precede outages: certificate expiration impacting routes, degraded operators, and persistent storage capacity exhaustion. They want actionable alerts with minimal noise and clear ownership. Which approach best aligns with OpenShift/CP4D operational best practices?