IBM Assessment: Fundamentals of Hybrid Cloud v1 Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A financial services company is modernizing a mission-critical claims system. The core database must remain on-premises for data residency and latency reasons, while customer-facing microservices will run on a public cloud. They need consistent deployment, policy enforcement, and traffic management across both environments, and they want to reduce coupling to any single cloud provider. Which architecture decision best meets these requirements?

An enterprise has two environments: an on-prem private cloud with strict change-control and a public cloud used for rapid experimentation. A shared set of microservices must be promoted from dev (public cloud) to prod (on-prem) without drift, while ensuring that prod-only configurations (e.g., stricter resource quotas, network policies) are always applied. Which approach best prevents configuration drift while supporting environment-specific constraints?

A retail company has a hybrid deployment with latency-sensitive checkout services running across on-prem and public cloud regions. During peak traffic, users intermittently see increased response times. Metrics show CPU is stable, but network round trips between services spike unpredictably. The team suspects cross-environment service calls are occurring more often than intended. Which design change most directly reduces the likelihood of these latency spikes while maintaining resilience?

A company is standardizing hybrid cloud operations and wants a single platform to run containerized workloads consistently on-prem and across multiple clouds. They require built-in governance capabilities such as centralized policy enforcement, cluster lifecycle management, and an ecosystem for middleware services. Which IBM solution best aligns to these requirements?

A logistics enterprise needs to integrate events from on-prem mainframe applications and cloud-native microservices. They require once-and-only-once processing semantics for certain business events, tolerance for intermittent network outages between sites, and the ability to replay events for audit and downstream reprocessing. Which integration pattern is the best fit in a hybrid cloud context?

A healthcare organization uses IBM Cloud services for analytics while keeping patient records on-prem. They want to ensure sensitive identifiers are never exposed to the cloud analytics workloads, yet analytics must still be useful for cohort analysis and trend detection. Which approach best balances privacy and analytics utility in a hybrid model?

A platform team operates multiple clusters across on-prem and public cloud. They need consistent observability for distributed traces across services, and they must quickly isolate whether latency originates from application code, service mesh routing, or cross-environment network links. Which observability strategy best supports rapid root-cause analysis in this hybrid scenario?

An organization wants to enforce that all Kubernetes workloads deployed to any cluster (on-prem or cloud) meet guardrails: approved container registries only, mandatory resource limits, and prohibition of privileged containers. The platform team also wants developers to self-serve deployments without filing tickets. What is the most effective control approach?

A hybrid workload spans on-prem and public cloud and must comply with strict regulatory requirements. During an audit, the organization must demonstrate who changed routing rules and when, and must be able to roll back to a known good configuration quickly. Which practice most directly supports both auditability and rapid recovery?

A multinational enterprise runs regulated workloads in a hybrid cloud. They must ensure least privilege, reduce blast radius, and meet compliance expectations for separation of duties across environments. Which security design best aligns with these goals?