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

An enterprise is designing IBM Cloud Pak for Data (CPD) on OpenShift for multiple business units. Each BU requires strict network isolation, but the platform team wants to centrally manage upgrades and shared platform services. Which architecture best balances isolation with operability while remaining aligned with CPD design patterns?

A CPD deployment uses a remote IBM Cloud Pak for Data common services/IBM Cloud Pak foundational services stack on the same OpenShift cluster. After enabling additional CPD services, the platform becomes unstable: pods are evicted and some stateful services repeatedly restart under peak workloads. Cluster metrics show memory pressure and frequent node-level OOM events. The team cannot add nodes immediately. What is the MOST effective short-term remediation that reduces instability while preserving critical workloads?

A solution architect must design CPD storage for a mix of services: (1) metadata-heavy governance services requiring low-latency reads/writes, (2) large analytic workloads with high throughput, and (3) object-store-backed datasets used by multiple services. The environment is on OpenShift with multiple storage classes available (RWO block, RWX file, and S3-compatible object storage). Which mapping is MOST appropriate and avoids common performance/availability pitfalls?

A team is implementing near-real-time ingestion into CPD from multiple on-prem relational databases. Requirements include minimal source impact, exactly-once semantics where feasible, schema evolution handling, and the ability to replay events for downstream consumers. Which approach best satisfies these requirements in a CPD-centric architecture?

A CPD environment uses Data Virtualization (DV) to provide a unified view across several databases and object storage. Analysts complain that a frequently used virtualized view becomes slow during peak hours, and query plans show repeated remote scans and expensive joins pushed down inconsistently. The architect must improve performance without duplicating all data. What is the BEST remediation strategy?

A migration to CPD introduces DataStage for ETL. A nightly pipeline intermittently fails with deadlocks on the target database. Investigation shows multiple parallel DataStage jobs writing to overlapping key ranges, and retries amplify contention. The target database team refuses configuration changes. What DataStage design change is MOST likely to eliminate deadlocks while maintaining throughput?

A data science team trains a model in CPD and deploys it for online scoring. After deployment, model latency is acceptable but accuracy drops sharply compared to training metrics. Drift monitors show feature distribution changes, and investigation reveals the online service receives slightly different feature engineering steps than the training notebook. What is the MOST robust architectural fix using CPD best practices?

A regulated client requires that every model deployed in CPD has provable lineage from training data through preprocessing to deployment, and that only approved models can be promoted to production. They also need rollback to a prior approved model if monitoring detects unacceptable bias. Which solution design best satisfies these requirements?

A CPD instance integrates with an enterprise directory for authentication. The security team mandates: (1) least-privilege access to catalogs and projects, (2) separation of duties between platform admins and data stewards, and (3) auditable access reviews. Which approach best meets these requirements in CPD?

After enabling encryption-in-transit requirements, a CPD deployment must enforce TLS for all internal service-to-service traffic and also support custom certificates signed by the enterprise CA. Shortly after changes, some CPD services fail to connect to others with certificate trust errors, while external access works. What is the MOST likely root cause and correct architectural remediation?