IBM Cloud Pak for Integration v2021.4 Solution Architect Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

An enterprise is designing a multi-tenant Cloud Pak for Integration deployment where different business units require strict isolation of their integration assets, logs, and runtime resources. The platform team wants to minimize infrastructure overhead while ensuring complete namespace-level separation and independent scaling. Which architectural approach best satisfies these requirements?

A financial services organization is implementing an integration solution that must handle sensitive customer data across API Connect, App Connect Enterprise, and MQ. The security team requires that data be encrypted at rest and in transit, with cryptographic keys rotated every 90 days and audit trails maintained for all key access. Integration flows must never have direct access to encryption keys. Which combination of Cloud Pak for Integration features best implements this security architecture?

An integration architect is designing a high-throughput message processing solution using MQ and App Connect Enterprise within Cloud Pak for Integration. The system must process 50,000 messages per minute with guaranteed delivery and maintain message ordering per customer ID. During peak loads, the system experiences queue manager connection saturation. What architectural modifications would best resolve this bottleneck while maintaining message ordering guarantees?

During a Cloud Pak for Integration deployment, the API Connect Gateway pods repeatedly fail with CrashLoopBackOff errors. Investigation reveals that the gateway is unable to establish connections to the Management service, and logs show intermittent DNS resolution failures for the management endpoint. The OpenShift cluster uses a custom DNS configuration with split-horizon DNS for internal and external traffic. What is the most likely root cause and remediation approach?

A global enterprise requires an integration architecture that supports active-active deployment across three geographic regions with automatic failover and data consistency for API policies, integration flows, and messaging configurations. The solution must minimize RPO (Recovery Point Objective) to near-zero while maintaining independent regional operations during network partitions. Which architectural pattern best addresses these requirements?

An App Connect Enterprise integration flow consuming REST APIs experiences intermittent timeout errors under load. Performance analysis reveals that while individual API calls complete in 200ms, the overall flow throughput degrades significantly when processing more than 100 concurrent messages. The flow uses HTTPRequest nodes with default settings and processes messages sequentially. Thread dumps show most threads in WAITING state. What optimization strategy would most effectively improve throughput?

A Cloud Pak for Integration deployment must comply with regulatory requirements mandating that all integration artifacts, API definitions, and message flows be versioned, approval-gated, and traceable from development through production. The solution must integrate with existing GitOps workflows and provide rollback capabilities. Which combination of Cloud Pak capabilities and practices best implements this governance model?

An organization is experiencing data inconsistency issues in a distributed integration scenario where App Connect Enterprise flows update records in multiple backend systems (SAP, Salesforce, and an on-premises database) as part of a single business transaction. If any update fails, partial updates in other systems create data integrity problems. The business requires that either all updates succeed or none do, but the backend systems don't support XA transactions. How should the solution architect address this requirement?

A Cloud Pak for Integration solution uses Event Streams (Kafka) as the backbone for event-driven integration between multiple App Connect Enterprise flows and external microservices. The architecture must guarantee exactly-once processing semantics for critical financial transactions while maintaining high throughput. The system currently experiences duplicate message processing during rebalancing and after integration server restarts. What configuration changes would achieve exactly-once semantics?

An API Connect deployment serves APIs to both internal applications and external partners with different SLA requirements. Internal APIs require sub-100ms response times while external APIs have relaxed latency requirements but strict rate limiting. The current deployment uses a single gateway cluster, and performance monitoring shows that high-volume external traffic is causing latency spikes for internal APIs. The gateway CPU and memory utilization remain below 60%. What architectural change would best resolve this performance isolation issue?