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

A solution architect is designing an IBM Cloud Pak for Data deployment on Red Hat OpenShift and wants to minimize operational overhead for platform components while still enabling multiple services to be installed. Which approach is recommended?

A team needs to create repeatable, environment-specific configurations (dev/test/prod) for Cloud Pak for Data projects without duplicating assets. Which capability best supports this requirement?

A data engineer needs to move and transform data from multiple enterprise sources into curated datasets for analytics using Cloud Pak for Data. Which service is primarily used for ETL/ELT-style data integration flows?

An organization needs to restrict which users can access specific data assets and wants policies that can be centrally managed and enforced across projects. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best addresses this need?

A company wants a single, searchable place where business users can discover trusted datasets, see lineage, and request access. Data must be governed and curated before it is widely shared. What is the best architecture pattern in Cloud Pak for Data?

A data scientist trains a model in a Cloud Pak for Data project and needs to deploy it for real-time scoring with controlled promotion from test to production. Which approach is most appropriate?

A pipeline built in a data integration service is failing intermittently due to temporary network issues to an external source. The architect wants a design that improves reliability without manual restarts. What is the best practice?

A customer requires that user authentication for Cloud Pak for Data integrates with an enterprise identity provider and supports single sign-on. Which is the most appropriate integration approach?

After enabling data masking policies, users still see unmasked sensitive fields when accessing a dataset through a new analytics tool connection. The dataset was published in a governed catalog. What is the most likely cause?

An architect must design Cloud Pak for Data for high availability and wants to reduce the blast radius of maintenance while ensuring stateful services can recover. Which design choice best aligns with OpenShift and Cloud Pak for Data best practices?

A solution architect is designing an IBM Cloud Pak for Data environment where multiple teams must share a single OpenShift cluster. The teams require strict separation of compute and storage resources, and administrators want to prevent one team from consuming resources that impact others. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A data engineering team needs to ingest files from an SFTP server on a schedule, perform light transformations, and load the results into a governed analytics environment in Cloud Pak for Data. Which service is most appropriate for building and scheduling this pipeline with minimal coding?

A business analyst wants to create interactive dashboards from curated datasets in Cloud Pak for Data without writing code. Which service best fits this need?

An organization uses Watson Knowledge Catalog (WKC) and wants to ensure only approved, sensitive data assets can be discovered and used across projects. They also need enforcement at query time so that users see masked values when policy requires it. Which combination best addresses both discovery control and runtime enforcement?

A team is using Data Virtualization (DV) to provide a single SQL access layer across multiple source systems. Performance is inconsistent, and administrators suspect DV is pushing down queries inefficiently and moving too much data. What is the best next step to troubleshoot and optimize pushdown behavior?

A data science team needs to deploy a trained model as an online REST endpoint and later roll back quickly if a new version performs poorly. Which approach best supports controlled deployment and rollback in Cloud Pak for Data?

A company needs to provide self-service access to curated datasets while maintaining a clear approval workflow and ownership. Data stewards must review assets before they become discoverable to the broader organization. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best enables this workflow?

An architect is designing high availability for Cloud Pak for Data services on OpenShift. The customer wants resilience to a single node failure and expects services to continue running without manual intervention. Which design choice is most aligned with this requirement?

A regulated enterprise requires end-to-end lineage from ingested raw data through transformations to curated analytical tables and dashboards. The architect must recommend a design that captures lineage across integration jobs and cataloged assets. Which approach best satisfies the requirement?

An organization wants to standardize how models are evaluated for fairness and to continuously monitor deployed models for drift and performance degradation. They also need to produce evidence for auditors showing ongoing monitoring and alerts. Which service best fulfills these needs in Cloud Pak for Data?

A solution architect must design Cloud Pak for Data so that workloads can be scheduled onto nodes with GPUs, while other services run only on standard worker nodes. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A team needs to ingest changed data from an on-premises DB2 database into Cloud Pak for Data with minimal impact on the source system and near real-time updates. Which integration approach is most appropriate?

A data governance lead wants business users to easily find and understand data assets, including definitions, ownership, and related terms, from within Cloud Pak for Data. Which capability best addresses this requirement?

A regulated enterprise requires that all platform audit events from Cloud Pak for Data be retained centrally and correlated with other security logs. What is the recommended design approach?

A project needs to train models in Watson Machine Learning using large datasets stored in an external S3-compatible object store. The security team requires that credentials are not embedded in notebooks and are rotated regularly. Which design best meets this requirement?

A solution architect must choose a pattern for integrating multiple operational sources into analytics-ready datasets in Cloud Pak for Data. The requirement is to standardize, cleanse, and publish curated datasets while maintaining lineage and reusability across many teams. Which approach is most appropriate?

Users report that a Cloud Pak for Data service is intermittently failing during peak hours. Cluster metrics show memory pressure on worker nodes and frequent pod evictions. What is the most appropriate first action for the solution architect?

A financial services company needs to allow data scientists to experiment freely, but must ensure that only approved, governed datasets can be used for model training in production pipelines. Which design best enforces this requirement?

A team deploys a model for online scoring. After moving from test to production, the model returns significantly different predictions for the same input data. The training notebook and scoring endpoint both run in Cloud Pak for Data. What is the most likely architectural cause?

A multi-tenant Cloud Pak for Data platform must ensure that one tenant cannot consume excessive compute resources and degrade other tenants’ workloads. Which combination of controls best addresses this at the platform level?

A project team needs to connect Cloud Pak for Data to an on-premises Db2 database that is only reachable through the corporate network. They want a secure approach without exposing the database to the internet. Which design best meets this requirement?

A data engineer publishes a new data connection in Cloud Pak for Data and expects other projects to use it. However, other team members cannot see the connection asset. What is the most likely cause?

A security architect wants to ensure that data masking rules and access policies are consistently applied when analysts use data from multiple sources in Cloud Pak for Data. Which capability is primarily used to define and enforce these governance policies?

A team wants a repeatable way to deploy the same Cloud Pak for Data platform configuration across development and production clusters. Which approach is most appropriate?

A solution must standardize the meaning of key business terms (for example, 'Active Customer') and ensure datasets are tagged consistently so analysts can find trusted data quickly. Which combination best supports this goal?

A pipeline in Cloud Pak for Data reads from object storage and writes curated data to a governed catalog. The pipeline succeeds, but the resulting dataset is not discoverable by other teams. Which action is most likely required to make the curated dataset discoverable enterprise-wide?

A data scientist needs to deploy an ML model for real-time inference and ensure clients can authenticate securely and be rate-limited. Which deployment pattern is most appropriate in Cloud Pak for Data?

An organization wants data consumers to see masked values for sensitive columns unless they have a specific clearance level. They already maintain user groups in an enterprise directory. What is the best approach?

A regulated enterprise must prove lineage from source systems through transformations to analytics outputs, including which job created each dataset and when. Which design most directly supports end-to-end lineage and auditability in Cloud Pak for Data?

After an identity provider change, users can log in to Cloud Pak for Data but cannot access any previously authorized catalogs or projects. The platform admin confirms the groups still exist in the directory. What is the most likely cause and fix?

A project team wants to quickly analyze a CSV file and publish the results for others to explore in Cloud Pak for Data. Which service is the most appropriate for creating interactive dashboards with minimal setup?

An architect needs to ensure that new users can authenticate to Cloud Pak for Data using the company’s existing corporate credentials, with centralized password policy and account lifecycle management. What is the recommended integration approach?

A team has built a DataStage flow that extracts from an operational database and writes curated data to an analytics table nightly. They want to rerun a failed job without manually redoing all upstream steps. What feature should be used to improve recoverability and operational control?

A regulated customer wants to enforce that all datasets published to the catalog must have a business term assigned and a data owner identified before they can be shared. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best addresses this requirement?

A solution architect must design a multi-team Cloud Pak for Data environment where data scientists can work independently, but shared assets (approved datasets and models) must be centrally managed and reused. Which approach best supports this operating model?

A data engineer reports that a source system is intermittently slow, causing ETL jobs to exceed the allowed batch window. The business can tolerate data being a few hours behind, but they need consistent completion times. Which integration design is most appropriate?

A team deployed a model to an online endpoint and notices that predictions are returning, but they cannot explain why the model is making certain decisions for compliance review. What should the architect recommend to address explainability requirements?

A customer wants to enforce least privilege: developers can create pipelines and notebooks, but only a release team can deploy models to production endpoints. Which design best meets this requirement?

A client requires end-to-end lineage for a governed dataset: from original source tables through transformation jobs to the curated asset in the catalog, including the ability to perform impact analysis. Which approach best supports this requirement?

After a cluster upgrade and certificate rotation, multiple services in Cloud Pak for Data can no longer connect to an external data source over TLS, even though network connectivity is fine. The error indicates an untrusted certificate chain. What is the most likely root cause and best corrective action?