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 business requires that platform services remain available during the loss of a single worker node. Which design choice best supports this requirement?

During installation planning, a team needs a reliable method for Cloud Pak for Data components to persist state across pod restarts and node reboots. What OpenShift capability is primarily required?

A data governance lead wants business terms and technical data assets to be linked so analysts can discover trusted datasets and understand their definitions. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best addresses this?

An administrator needs to separate duties so that a team can manage datasets and projects within a specific area without being able to change cluster-wide settings. What is the best practice approach?

A team is designing for predictable performance of data integration workloads. They want to ensure heavy ETL jobs do not contend with platform services. Which approach is most appropriate?

After applying network policies, users report they can log in to Cloud Pak for Data but cannot connect to a configured external database from within notebooks and data integration jobs. What is the most likely cause?

A company wants to standardize how data quality rules are applied before datasets are published to analysts. The solution should support repeatable validation and integration into data pipelines. Which approach is best?

A team is moving an existing machine learning workflow into Cloud Pak for Data. They need to promote models from development to a controlled environment where deployments are managed and auditable. Which Cloud Pak for Data construct is designed for this purpose?

An organization requires end-to-end TLS and strict certificate management for the Cloud Pak for Data ingress endpoint. They also need automated certificate rotation aligned with enterprise PKI. Which design is most appropriate?

A Cloud Pak for Data cluster must support an in-place upgrade with minimal downtime. The environment hosts multiple services and stateful workloads. Which preparation step is most critical to reduce upgrade risk?

An enterprise is planning an IBM Cloud Pak for Data deployment on OpenShift. The platform team wants to minimize cross-namespace access while still allowing common platform operators to function properly. Which namespace strategy is most appropriate?

A project requires business users to search, understand, and request access to governed data products across multiple databases. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best addresses this requirement?

After a successful Cloud Pak for Data installation, a team needs to provide users with a stable HTTPS URL for the platform. What is the standard OpenShift resource that exposes the Cloud Pak for Data web endpoint externally?

A security team requires that all outgoing connections from Cloud Pak for Data workloads to external endpoints (for example, external databases and SaaS APIs) must be explicitly allowed and audited. Which OpenShift capability best supports this requirement?

A data engineering team wants to standardize on a reusable ingestion pattern where pipelines can be parameterized, scheduled, and promoted across environments with minimal manual steps. Which approach aligns best with Cloud Pak for Data best practices?

A solution architect must design for disaster recovery. The requirement is to restore Cloud Pak for Data services and metadata after a regional outage with minimal data loss. Which design is most appropriate?

Users report that they can log in to Cloud Pak for Data, but they cannot access a governed data asset in the catalog even after being added to a catalog collaborator role. What is the most likely missing configuration element?

A team deploys a model for online inference and needs consistent low-latency scoring with controlled rollout and the ability to monitor deployments. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best fits this requirement?

During an upgrade planning workshop, the operations team is concerned about breaking changes in platform operators and custom integrations. What is the most appropriate upgrade approach to reduce risk in a regulated environment?

A company must ensure that sensitive columns are consistently protected across multiple consumption paths (catalog access, virtualization queries, and downstream analytics). They want centralized policy enforcement with auditability. Which approach best meets the requirement?

A solution architect is planning the initial storage layout for IBM Cloud Pak for Data on OpenShift. The customer wants to minimize risk of instability caused by undersized storage and prefers an approach aligned with IBM best practices for stateful platform services. Which storage approach is most appropriate?

A security team requires that all analytics users authenticate with the corporate identity provider and that access can be controlled using centralized groups. Which approach best satisfies this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A team wants to standardize how business terms and data definitions are managed so that data engineers and data scientists use consistent terminology across projects. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best addresses this need?

An OpenShift cluster hosting Cloud Pak for Data must support a planned maintenance window where worker nodes may be drained and rebooted. The customer wants platform services to continue running with minimal disruption. Which design choice most directly improves resilience during node maintenance?

After configuring a new data source connection in Cloud Pak for Data, users can connect successfully but cannot see expected tables when browsing metadata in governance tooling. The data source team confirms the tables exist and the user can query them using SQL. What is the most likely missing step to enable metadata visibility for governance?

A customer needs to move large datasets from an on-premises database into an object storage-based data lake while applying transformations and scheduling recurring loads. They want a low-code approach managed within Cloud Pak for Data. Which capability best fits?

A team deploying models must meet an audit requirement to prove which training data, code, and configuration produced each model version and to compare model behavior over time. Which Cloud Pak for Data approach best satisfies this requirement?

During an in-place upgrade planning workshop, the customer asks how to reduce the risk of prolonged outages if an operator-managed component upgrade fails. Which practice is most appropriate for a solution architect to recommend?

A regulated enterprise requires that only a specific set of namespaces and node pools can host Cloud Pak for Data workloads, and that network traffic between CP4D services and other cluster workloads is restricted by default. Which combination best meets these requirements on OpenShift?

A data governance team wants to ensure that when sensitive columns are discovered during scans, they are automatically tagged and protected so that unauthorized users cannot view the raw values, while still allowing analytics on non-sensitive fields. Which design is most appropriate in Cloud Pak for Data?

A customer wants to integrate Cloud Pak for Data with their enterprise SSO so that user authentication is centralized and Cloud Pak for Data relies on the corporate identity provider. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A solution architect is planning persistent storage for Cloud Pak for Data on Red Hat OpenShift. Which storage characteristic is most important to validate for stateful services before installation?

A data governance team needs a business glossary with terms, classifications, and stewardship assignments that can be applied consistently across data assets in Cloud Pak for Data. Which capability should be implemented?

An architect is designing a multi-tenant Cloud Pak for Data environment. They want to isolate teams while still allowing shared platform administration. What is the most appropriate isolation mechanism?

A company wants to standardize data ingestion from multiple sources into curated tables, with scheduling, dependency management, and operational monitoring. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best fits this requirement?

After installing additional Cloud Pak for Data services, new pods remain in Pending state. The OpenShift events show the scheduler cannot find available resources matching requested CPU/memory. What is the most likely cause and best next action?

A team must ensure that personally identifiable information (PII) is automatically detected and tagged when new datasets are added, and that access policies can be enforced based on those tags. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A data scientist needs to deploy a trained model and expose it for online scoring to an application with consistent runtime behavior across environments. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability is designed for this purpose?

A regulated customer requires encryption in transit for all connections to Cloud Pak for Data and also requires that internal service-to-service traffic uses trusted certificates. Which design best addresses this requirement?

A solution architect must design Cloud Pak for Data for high availability. The customer asks what key platform dependency most directly impacts Cloud Pak for Data control plane and service resiliency across node failures. Which answer is most accurate?

A platform team is planning a Cloud Pak for Data deployment on OpenShift and wants to standardize storage. They need an approach that supports both ReadWriteOnce and ReadWriteMany workloads used by different Cloud Pak for Data services. Which is the best practice for storage planning?

After a successful Cloud Pak for Data installation, an administrator wants to confirm the platform and services are healthy using OpenShift-native tooling. Which action is the most appropriate first check?

A data governance team wants business analysts to find trusted datasets across multiple projects and understand who owns them, how they are classified, and where they are used. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best meets this requirement?

A security team requires Cloud Pak for Data user authentication to integrate with the corporate identity provider and enforce multi-factor authentication centrally. What is the recommended architectural approach?

A data engineering team wants to provide a single SQL endpoint that can join data across multiple remote sources without moving the data into a new warehouse. Performance is acceptable for interactive queries, and they want to minimize data duplication. Which approach is most appropriate?

During an operator-driven installation of a Cloud Pak for Data service, the service custom resource remains in a pending state. Logs indicate missing permissions for creating resources in the namespace. What is the most likely cause?

A solution architect must design how teams collaborate across Cloud Pak for Data while maintaining separation between business units. Each unit needs isolated compute and assets, but a small central team needs read access to selected published assets across units. Which design best fits?

A data steward wants to ensure that when sensitive columns are identified in a dataset, users without clearance can still use the dataset for analytics but only see masked values. Which capability supports this requirement in a governed way?

A regulated customer requires that administrative actions and configuration changes across Cloud Pak for Data be traceable for audits. They also want to detect suspicious behavior (e.g., repeated failed logins). Which approach is most appropriate?

A team deploys a model for real-time scoring. Under load testing, requests intermittently fail with timeouts even though CPU usage is moderate. They suspect contention on shared resources. Which design change is most likely to improve resilience and throughput?