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

A solution architect must propose a platform layout for IBM Cloud Pak for Data on Red Hat OpenShift. The organization wants to minimize blast radius between platform operations and data workloads while keeping governance centralized. Which approach best meets this requirement?

During an IBM Cloud Pak for Data deployment, the installation job fails with a message indicating insufficient permissions to create cluster-scoped resources (for example, CustomResourceDefinitions). What is the most likely root cause?

A data governance team needs business terms and data classifications to be consistently applied across datasets used by analytics and AI teams. They want a central catalog for metadata and governance workflows. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best addresses this need?

A team is building a churn prediction solution. They need a repeatable way to train, track, and deploy models into a runtime that can be consumed by applications through APIs. Which Cloud Pak for Data service is primarily responsible for model deployment and online scoring?

A customer wants to enable data access for analysts without moving data out of existing databases. They also require fine-grained access control and consistent auditing. Which approach best meets these requirements on Cloud Pak for Data?

After installing Cloud Pak for Data, users report intermittent access failures to the web UI. The OpenShift routes exist, but DNS intermittently resolves to an old IP after a load balancer change. What is the best next step to stabilize access?

A bank must enforce that only approved datasets can be used for model training and that usage is traceable for audits. Which combination best supports these requirements in Cloud Pak for Data?

A solution requires separate environments (dev/test/prod) for model development with strict promotion controls. The team wants reproducibility and minimal configuration drift when promoting an AI workflow. What is the recommended approach?

A customer plans a highly available Cloud Pak for Data architecture. They require that platform state and critical services can tolerate node failures, and they want a storage design that supports resilient recovery. Which design choice is most critical to meeting this requirement?

An installation uses a private container registry. The cluster nodes can reach the registry, but Cloud Pak for Data pods fail with ImagePullBackOff, and the events show 'unauthorized: authentication required'. Which action most directly resolves the issue?

A solution architect is designing IBM Cloud Pak for Data (CP4D) for multiple internal teams on the same OpenShift cluster. The business requires strong isolation of workloads, separate quotas, and the ability to delegate administration to each team while still sharing the platform. Which approach best meets this requirement?

After a CP4D deployment, users report that they can log in to the platform but cannot create projects or provision services due to authorization errors. The cluster administrator confirms that the platform pods are healthy. What is the most likely cause?

A customer wants to ensure that CP4D user authentication is integrated with the corporate directory and that access can be controlled using existing enterprise groups. Which integration is the best practice to meet this requirement?

A data governance team needs business glossary terms to be automatically suggested and applied when data assets are ingested into the catalog. They also want ongoing monitoring of data quality with rule-based checks. Which combination of capabilities best addresses this?

A company wants analysts to query data across multiple databases without copying it into a data lake. The solution must enforce source-level access controls and present a unified logical view for reporting tools. Which CP4D capability best fits?

A CP4D deployment uses an external object storage endpoint for project data and asset storage. Uploads intermittently fail, and logs show TLS handshake errors when connecting to the object storage service. What is the most appropriate remediation?

A regulated enterprise requires that only approved container images can run on the OpenShift cluster hosting CP4D. They also want to ensure that CP4D services cannot be deployed if they require unapproved images. Which control is most aligned with this requirement?

A data scientist built a model in Watson Studio and wants to deploy it for online scoring with consistent, repeatable environments across dev/test/prod. The organization also wants built-in monitoring for drift and performance. Which approach is best?

A customer needs to publish curated datasets to multiple lines of business while ensuring that sensitive columns (e.g., SSN) are dynamically masked based on the consumer's role. They want the policy to be enforced consistently across SQL access. Which CP4D-oriented design is most appropriate?

A team reports that scheduled DataStage jobs run successfully when executed manually but fail when triggered by a schedule, citing permission denied errors accessing project assets. What is the most likely explanation?

An organization wants a repeatable way to promote IBM Cloud Pak for Data configurations (e.g., projects, services, and platform settings) from development to production with minimal drift. Which approach best aligns with recommended practices?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment must ensure that only a dedicated group can access sensitive data assets while allowing broad discovery of non-sensitive assets. Which governance capability best supports this requirement?

A solution architect needs to confirm that a Cloud Pak for Data service is reachable from client applications in a secure manner without exposing internal cluster networking. Which is the recommended OpenShift-native method?

During a Cloud Pak for Data installation, the control plane is healthy but one data service remains in a pending state. The pods show they cannot mount persistent volumes due to permission errors on the storage backend. What is the most likely root cause?

A customer wants to implement a governed data lakehouse approach where curated data products are discoverable, certified, and reusable across business units. Which combination best supports this goal in Cloud Pak for Data?

A team is operationalizing machine learning models and needs to ensure that model deployments can be promoted through environments with approval gates and an auditable history of changes. Which design best meets these requirements?

After enabling governance enforcement, users report that they can still see sensitive columns in query results from a curated dataset that should be masked. The dataset is accessed through a published data asset. What is the most effective first troubleshooting step?

A regulated enterprise requires strict tenant isolation between two lines of business sharing the same OpenShift cluster. They want separate Cloud Pak for Data instances with independent administrators, governance, and resource controls. Which architecture best satisfies this requirement?

A Cloud Pak for Data environment must meet disaster recovery requirements. The business needs the ability to recover platform state (configuration, metadata, and critical service state) after a cluster outage. Which strategy is most appropriate?

A customer integrates external data sources and wants to ensure end-to-end lineage from source tables through transformations to analytics dashboards. They notice lineage stops at intermediate datasets created by ETL jobs. What is the best architectural improvement?

A solution architect is designing a Cloud Pak for Data deployment where data scientists must not have cluster-admin privileges but still need to deploy models to an online endpoint. Which approach best meets least-privilege requirements?

A Cloud Pak for Data platform administrator wants to isolate multiple teams so that workloads, quotas, and access are separated while still sharing the same OpenShift cluster. Which design is most appropriate?

After enabling TLS at the OpenShift ingress, users report intermittent login failures to Cloud Pak for Data and browser warnings about certificate trust. Which action is the most appropriate first step?

A data governance team wants business users to find datasets using consistent terminology and to understand how terms relate (e.g., Customer vs. Account). Which Cloud Pak for Data capability should be implemented?

A customer requires that all data accessed by Cloud Pak for Data services be encrypted in transit and that service-to-service communication within the cluster also uses encryption. Which design choice best supports this requirement?

A team is onboarding a new data source and needs to ensure that only approved users can access sensitive columns while still allowing broader access to non-sensitive columns in the same dataset. What is the best governance approach in Cloud Pak for Data?

During installation, the platform operator reports that some pods remain in Pending state due to insufficient resources in the target nodes. The cluster has capacity overall, but those pods cannot be scheduled. Which is the most likely cause?

A data science team needs to operationalize a model with an approval gate, capture model metadata, and promote the model between environments. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability is most appropriate?

A regulated enterprise requires provable end-to-end lineage from source tables through transformations to curated datasets consumed in analytics. They also want lineage to update as pipelines change. Which approach best satisfies this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A solution architect must design a highly available Cloud Pak for Data deployment. A key requirement is that platform services remain available during a single node failure, and stateful components must avoid single points of failure. Which design principle best addresses this?

An architect needs to allow business analysts to quickly discover datasets and understand usage restrictions before using them in projects. Which capability best supports this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

After deploying Cloud Pak for Data on OpenShift, the administrator wants to validate that the platform is healthy before onboarding users. Which action is the most appropriate initial verification step?

A team needs to enforce consistent business definitions (for example, what qualifies as a "Customer") across multiple analytics projects. Which Cloud Pak for Data feature is designed for this purpose?

A regulated enterprise requires that workloads in Cloud Pak for Data cannot start unless their container images come from an approved internal registry and are cryptographically verified. Which OpenShift capability is most aligned with this requirement?

Data engineers need to ingest data nightly from an object storage landing zone, apply transformations, and write curated data into a warehouse while maintaining job scheduling and operational monitoring. Which service in Cloud Pak for Data is best suited?

A solution requires running notebooks and model training that access sensitive data. The security team requires that user authentication integrates with corporate identity, and access to data is based on group membership. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A data steward wants to prevent personally identifiable information (PII) from being exposed to most users, while allowing a small privacy team to access full values for approved purposes. Which governance approach is most appropriate in Cloud Pak for Data?

A team wants to deploy a trained model to be consumed by an application with low-latency REST calls and also support periodic batch scoring for large files. Which Cloud Pak for Data component provides both serving patterns?

During installation, the platform operator reports that Cloud Pak for Data services fail to start because persistent volumes cannot be provisioned dynamically. The OpenShift cluster uses multiple storage backends. What is the most likely root cause?

A global enterprise is designing for high availability and must survive an outage of an entire OpenShift cluster in one location. They want minimal data loss and the ability to resume Cloud Pak for Data operations in another location. Which architecture best addresses this requirement?