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

An enterprise plans to deploy IBM Cloud Pak for Data on Red Hat OpenShift in a restricted (air-gapped) environment. Which approach is a best practice to ensure images can be installed and updated reliably?

A project team wants a shared, governed catalog of business terms and data assets so analysts can find trusted datasets. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability is primarily used for this purpose?

A data engineer needs to create a reusable pipeline that ingests data from a JDBC source, applies transformations, and writes to object storage. Which capability best fits this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A solution architect needs to let data scientists build and train models in notebooks and then promote them to a managed deployment endpoint with versioning and rollback. Which service is used to manage and deploy the models?

A company wants a single logical view across multiple databases so analysts can query data without copying it into a new repository. They also need centralized access control and auditing for those queries. Which approach best meets the requirement?

A regulated customer requires that only specific groups can access sensitive columns (for example, SSN) in a dataset published to a catalog, while other users can still access non-sensitive fields. What is the recommended way to meet this requirement?

A team reports that scheduled data integration jobs intermittently fail during peak usage due to resource contention in the OpenShift cluster. Which architectural recommendation best addresses this issue for Cloud Pak for Data workloads?

A data science team wants to standardize model development and ensure experiments are reproducible across users. They also want to promote artifacts through environments with approvals. Which combination best supports this operating model?

A global organization needs strong tenant separation for multiple business units using a shared OpenShift cluster. Each business unit requires isolated governance artifacts, separate workloads, and minimal risk of cross-access. What is the most appropriate design choice in Cloud Pak for Data?

After integrating Cloud Pak for Data with an enterprise identity provider, users can log in but are not authorized to create projects or access services they should have. Cluster administrators confirm the users exist in the IdP. What is the most likely missing configuration step?

A solution architect must validate that an existing OpenShift cluster can host IBM Cloud Pak for Data. Which prerequisite is MOST critical to confirm before any service installation begins?

A data engineering team needs to transform and load large files from object storage into curated tables on a schedule. They want a visual design experience and the ability to operationalize the flow. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability BEST fits this requirement?

A governance lead wants to ensure that business terms and their definitions can be shared across teams and linked to data assets for consistent understanding. Which component should be used?

A company wants analysts to query data across multiple sources without moving it, while still enforcing consistent access controls and auditing. Which design is MOST appropriate in Cloud Pak for Data?

A data science team needs to promote a trained model from development to a controlled production environment with approval gates and separate access permissions. Which approach BEST supports this lifecycle in Cloud Pak for Data?

After enabling an external identity provider, users can authenticate but cannot access any Cloud Pak for Data services due to authorization failures. What is the MOST likely missing configuration?

A client requires that sensitive columns (for example, national IDs) are automatically masked for most users but visible to a restricted group across cataloged datasets. Which solution BEST meets the requirement?

A solution architect needs to design for predictable performance of multiple Cloud Pak for Data services on a shared OpenShift cluster. Which practice BEST helps prevent noisy-neighbor issues?

A regulated enterprise must ensure that model predictions can be explained and monitored for drift over time, with evidence for audits. Which combination of capabilities BEST addresses this requirement?

A company is migrating to Cloud Pak for Data and needs to separate duties so that platform operators can manage cluster-level resources while data stewards manage governance artifacts (glossaries, policies) without administrative control of the cluster. Which approach BEST satisfies this separation of duties?

A solution architect is planning an IBM Cloud Pak for Data deployment on OpenShift and wants to separate storage concerns: fast persistent storage for databases/services and inexpensive object storage for data lake workloads. Which approach best aligns with Cloud Pak for Data architecture best practices?

A team needs to ingest data from an external SFTP server into Cloud Pak for Data on a schedule, perform basic transformations, and land the results in object storage for downstream analytics. Which capability is the most appropriate fit?

A data scientist trained a model in Watson Studio and needs to provide a REST endpoint for real-time scoring that can be consumed by an external application. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability is primarily used to deploy and expose the model as an API?

An organization has strict tenant isolation requirements. Different lines of business must not see each other’s projects, assets, or compute workloads, but the platform team wants a single OpenShift cluster to reduce operational overhead. Which design best meets the requirement?

A team wants business glossary terms and data classifications to be automatically suggested when new datasets are added, reducing manual curation time. Which feature/capability should be enabled to support automated metadata enrichment?

A DataStage job that reads from a JDBC source intermittently fails after a database password rotation. The platform team wants to avoid updating job parameters in multiple pipelines each rotation. What is the recommended approach?

A company needs to ensure that only approved, governed datasets can be used for model training in shared projects. Data scientists should be able to discover data, but access must require an approval workflow and be auditable. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment experiences periodic performance degradation during peak usage. Investigation shows node resource pressure and frequent pod evictions for analytic workloads. The cluster team wants an architecture that improves reliability and performance isolation for heavy compute users. What is the best recommendation?

A regulated enterprise requires end-to-end lineage showing how a curated dataset was derived from multiple sources, including transformation steps, and wants to expose this lineage to auditors. Which capability combination most directly addresses this requirement?

A team deploys a real-time scoring endpoint for a model. Under load testing, latency spikes and timeouts occur, but CPU utilization on the serving pods remains low. Network traces show many new TLS handshakes. What is the most likely architectural improvement?

A solution architect is preparing a Cloud Pak for Data deployment on Red Hat OpenShift for multiple teams. The platform team wants to prevent teams from accidentally consuming excessive cluster resources while still allowing self-service provisioning of services. Which approach best aligns with this requirement?

A company wants users to publish and discover governed datasets for analytics and AI projects in Cloud Pak for Data. Which capability is primarily used to create a searchable, curated inventory of data assets with business context?

A data engineer is building pipelines that need to ingest data from multiple sources, apply transformations, and load curated outputs for downstream analytics in Cloud Pak for Data. Which service is most appropriate for designing and running these data integration flows?

A project team needs to develop a machine learning model and later deploy it as a REST endpoint for applications to consume. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability is primarily responsible for model deployment and serving?

An organization must integrate Cloud Pak for Data with its corporate identity provider so that users sign in with existing enterprise credentials and groups can be used for access control. What is the recommended integration approach?

A team wants analysts to run SQL queries across data stored in multiple databases without copying data into a new warehouse. The team also needs a single logical view to minimize changes to existing BI tools. Which capability best fits?

After enabling governance, users report that they can discover assets in the catalog but cannot access the underlying data when they try to use it in projects. Which configuration is the most likely missing element?

A data science team needs to promote a model from development to production with approvals, version tracking, and separation of duties. Which approach best supports this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment must meet strict regulatory requirements: all service-to-service traffic inside the cluster must be encrypted, and the organization wants to standardize certificate rotation without modifying each service individually. Which solution best addresses this requirement?

During architecture design, a customer requires disaster recovery for Cloud Pak for Data with the ability to resume critical analytics and AI workloads in a secondary site. They want an approach that accounts for both platform state (Kubernetes resources) and persistent data. What is the most appropriate high-level design choice?

A solution architect needs to validate that a new Cloud Pak for Data deployment can support planned workloads and integrations without oversizing the cluster. Which activity is most appropriate early in the planning phase?

A team wants to make datasets easily discoverable across multiple projects while ensuring business users can understand meaning and ownership. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best supports this requirement?

A data engineer needs to build an ingestion pipeline that reads from multiple relational sources and writes curated tables to a target database, with scheduling and operational monitoring. Which service is the best fit?

A customer requires that only a restricted set of namespaces and network paths can reach the Cloud Pak for Data web UI and APIs. Which approach best aligns with Kubernetes/OpenShift best practices for controlling inbound access?

A data science team wants to train models using data that remains in several existing databases without copying it into the platform, but they still want a single SQL access layer for feature extraction. Which capability should the architect recommend?

A team reports that some users can see catalog assets but cannot open or query the underlying data. Catalog membership is correct. What is the most likely missing configuration element?

A solution architect must design a model deployment pattern where online inference must remain available during model updates and allow safe rollback if the new model performs poorly. Which approach best satisfies this requirement?

A regulated enterprise requires that sensitive data fields be masked differently for different groups (for example, full access for fraud investigators, partial masking for analysts). Which governance approach best supports this requirement within Cloud Pak for Data?

After enabling additional analytics services, a Cloud Pak for Data cluster experiences intermittent failures where pods cannot be scheduled even though average CPU utilization is moderate. The failures correlate with large batch jobs. What is the most likely root cause and best corrective action?

A company must design for disaster recovery where an entire OpenShift cluster could be lost. They need to restore Cloud Pak for Data to a secondary site with minimal data loss and consistent governance metadata. Which architecture choice most directly supports this requirement?