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

A solution architect is planning an IBM Cloud Pak for Data deployment on Red Hat OpenShift. The platform team requires that all workload pods can be scheduled even when one worker node fails, without changing application code. Which design choice best supports this requirement?

A team is onboarding data assets into Cloud Pak for Data and wants business users to find datasets by business terms and see ownership and classifications. Which capability should the architect recommend?

A company wants to limit which users can create projects in Cloud Pak for Data while still allowing them to use existing projects and services they are entitled to. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A data scientist needs to deploy a trained model as an online REST endpoint for real-time scoring, with versioning and governance controls. Which Cloud Pak for Data service is primarily used for this?

An organization must ensure Cloud Pak for Data platform components and services are monitored for resource saturation and availability, and that the operations team can visualize trends over time. Which architecture choice is most appropriate?

A company needs to expose governed data to analysts without replicating it. Data resides in multiple databases, and analysts require a single logical view with access controls enforced consistently. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best fits?

During installation, Cloud Pak for Data operators are running, but service pods remain in a pending state. The OpenShift events show messages indicating that no nodes match the pod's resource requests. What is the most likely cause and best next action?

A security team requires that sensitive columns (for example, SSN) be masked for most users while still allowing a small group to view full values in Cloud Pak for Data cataloged assets. Which approach best satisfies this requirement?

A regulated enterprise requires end-to-end lineage showing how a curated dataset was produced from multiple sources, including transformations, and they want auditors to review the lineage from within Cloud Pak for Data. Which solution design is most appropriate?

A company is designing for disaster recovery. They want to be able to recover Cloud Pak for Data services after a site outage with minimal data loss for persistent data used by multiple services. Which approach is most aligned with best practices?

A Solution Architect must plan networking for Cloud Pak for Data on Red Hat OpenShift in an enterprise environment. Security policy requires that users access the platform only through a single controlled entry point and that internal service-to-service traffic remains inside the cluster network. Which design best satisfies this requirement?

An organization wants to ensure that only certain user groups can view sensitive columns (for example, SSN) in curated data assets while still allowing broader access to the same tables for analytics. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best addresses this requirement?

A team needs to deploy Cloud Pak for Data services and wants repeatable, auditable installation steps across multiple OpenShift clusters. Which approach is most aligned with IBM best practices for repeatable deployments?

A customer needs to allow data scientists to train models using Watson Machine Learning but must ensure that training workloads do not starve other platform services. Which OpenShift/Cloud Pak for Data design is most appropriate?

A company wants consistent business definitions and ownership for key terms (for example, "Customer", "Active Account") and needs those definitions to be discoverable by analysts in Cloud Pak for Data. Which service should be implemented?

After configuring an external LDAP identity provider for Cloud Pak for Data, users can authenticate but do not see expected platform roles (for example, Administrator, Editor). What is the most likely missing configuration?

A governance team requires that every published data asset include an assigned owner, a classification tag, and a review date before it can be made visible in catalogs. Which feature should the architect recommend?

A customer plans to use Data Virtualization to provide a unified SQL access layer across multiple databases. During planning, they ask what the primary architectural benefit of Data Virtualization is in Cloud Pak for Data. Which answer is most accurate?

A regulated enterprise requires end-to-end auditability showing who accessed a sensitive dataset, who modified its governance policies, and when model scoring endpoints were invoked. Which architecture best meets these audit requirements in Cloud Pak for Data on OpenShift?

A customer reports intermittent failures when deploying models to a Watson Machine Learning online deployment: some deployments succeed, others fail with timeouts during image pull and startup. The OpenShift cluster uses shared worker nodes for all workloads, including CI/CD builds that frequently consume network and disk. What is the most appropriate remediation?

A team is designing an IBM Cloud Pak for Data (CP4D) deployment on Red Hat OpenShift and wants to isolate user workloads from core platform services for better governance and blast-radius reduction. Which approach is the best practice?

An organization wants business users to discover trusted data assets in CP4D and understand what the data represents without reading technical schema details. Which capability best supports this requirement?

A CP4D administrator wants to restrict a group of users so they can run notebooks and create projects but cannot install services or modify cluster-level settings. What is the most appropriate control to use?

A regulated enterprise requires that all data access in CP4D be auditable, including who accessed which governed asset and when. They also need to demonstrate policy enforcement during audits. Which design best meets the requirement?

A solution architect must plan for high availability of CP4D platform services on OpenShift. Which approach is most aligned with HA best practices at the application platform layer?

A data engineer reports that queries against a virtualized table are slow and repeatedly hit the remote source system. The architect wants to reduce load on the source while improving response times for common queries. Which capability should be applied?

During an implementation, the team needs to integrate CP4D authentication with the corporate identity provider and ensure group membership drives authorization in CP4D. What is the best approach?

A CP4D deployment uses NetworkPolicies to limit traffic. After enabling stricter policies, a Watson Studio notebook can no longer access a governed catalog connection, even though user permissions are correct. Which is the most likely root cause?

A financial services company must ensure that sensitive columns (for example, SSN) are masked for most users but visible to a small privileged group, and this must work consistently across catalogs and analytics tools within CP4D. Which design best meets this requirement?

A customer wants to expose a machine learning model as a production API with consistent scoring, versioning, and controlled promotion from dev to test to prod. Which approach is most appropriate in CP4D?

A solution architect is planning a new Cloud Pak for Data deployment on OpenShift. The platform team requires that workloads used for analytics be scheduled only on a dedicated set of worker nodes. Which approach best satisfies this requirement?

A company wants Cloud Pak for Data users to log in with their corporate credentials and have group membership drive platform permissions. Which integration is the recommended approach?

A project team wants to publish curated datasets so analysts can discover and request access in a governed way. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best addresses this?

A data scientist needs to run a notebook that uses an existing project’s connections and environment, then schedule the notebook to run unattended. Which approach is most appropriate?

A team reports that after enabling network restrictions, a Cloud Pak for Data service cannot reach an external database used by a platform connection. Other services can still access the internet. What is the most likely cause?

An enterprise requires encryption in transit for all platform communications and wants to standardize on internal certificate authorities. Which is the best practice approach for Cloud Pak for Data on OpenShift?

A customer wants to design Cloud Pak for Data storage so that both object storage and persistent volumes are highly available across worker node failures. Which design choice best supports this requirement?

A security team requires that a curated dataset can be accessed by multiple teams while ensuring sensitive columns are masked for most users, and access decisions are centrally enforced regardless of the consuming tool. Which capability best meets this need in Cloud Pak for Data?

A multinational organization must meet strict data residency requirements. They want a single Cloud Pak for Data experience but require that data and workloads for Region A never leave Region A, and similarly for Region B. Which architecture best addresses this requirement?

A customer needs to allow data scientists to build and deploy models, but the security team mandates strict separation of duties: data scientists must not have cluster-admin privileges, and operational changes must be controlled. Which design best satisfies this while still enabling MLOps on Cloud Pak for Data?

A team is preparing to install Cloud Pak for Data on OpenShift and wants to minimize cluster privileges for the installation process. Which approach best aligns with least-privilege practices?

A data steward wants to ensure that only approved business terms can be used in governed metadata and that term changes follow a review workflow. Which capability should be implemented?

A solution architect is asked how Cloud Pak for Data isolates different teams that share the same OpenShift cluster while using CPD services. What is the primary isolation boundary used?

After onboarding multiple databases into Watson Knowledge Catalog, users report that some tables are not visible in catalog searches even though the connection test succeeds. Which is the most likely cause?

A company wants data scientists to consume governed datasets without directly accessing raw source credentials. The design must ensure access decisions are enforced centrally and audited. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A CPD environment integrates with a corporate directory for single sign-on. Users can authenticate, but group membership is not reflected, causing incorrect role assignments in CPD. What is the most likely configuration issue?

A solution requires running scheduled model scoring jobs and ETL tasks reliably with lineage and operational monitoring. Which CPD capability best supports orchestrating and scheduling these workflows?

An architect must decide between using data virtualization versus physically moving data into a lakehouse-style storage within CPD. The key requirement is minimal data movement and faster time-to-access across multiple sources while maintaining consistent access controls. Which approach is most appropriate?

A regulated enterprise must enforce row-level filtering and dynamic masking based on user attributes for cataloged data assets. They want enforcement to occur at query time without creating multiple physical copies of datasets. Which design best satisfies this requirement?

A CPD deployment experiences intermittent failures when multiple analytics services scale up during peak usage. Investigation shows nodes have sufficient CPU but pods frequently fail with 'Insufficient memory' and are evicted. What is the best architectural remediation?