IBM A1000-123 Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A financial services company is deploying a multi-tier application across IBM Cloud regions. They require data sovereignty compliance where customer data must never leave the EU region, but need to serve global users with minimal latency. The application uses IBM Cloud Object Storage, Kubernetes Service, and Databases for PostgreSQL. Which architectural approach best meets these requirements while maintaining performance?

During a production incident, an IBM Kubernetes Service (IKS) cluster experiences intermittent pod failures with 'ImagePullBackOff' errors only during peak traffic hours. The images are stored in IBM Cloud Container Registry in the same region. CPU and memory utilization are at 60%. Network policies are configured, and the registry is accessible. What is the MOST likely root cause and solution?

A company using IBM Cloud is subject to PCI DSS Level 1 compliance requirements. They are deploying a payment processing application using Virtual Servers, Cloud Object Storage for tokenized data, and Databases for MySQL. During an audit, it was identified that administrative access logs must be immutable and retained for 7 years with cryptographic proof of integrity. Which combination of services and configurations meets this requirement?

An enterprise has deployed a microservices application on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service with 50+ services. They are experiencing performance degradation traced to database connection pool exhaustion on their IBM Cloud Databases for PostgreSQL instance during specific transaction patterns. The database shows only 40% CPU and 50% memory utilization, but connection count reaches maximum (200 connections). What is the optimal solution?

A company is implementing a hybrid cloud architecture using IBM Cloud Satellite with on-premises OpenShift clusters. They need to ensure that workloads can failover between IBM Cloud and Satellite locations while maintaining consistent identity and access management, secrets management, and network policies. What architecture provides the most seamless integration?

A development team deployed a containerized application to IBM Code Engine that processes uploaded files from Cloud Object Storage. The application randomly fails with exit code 137 after processing large files (>500MB), but succeeds with smaller files. Code Engine logs show no application errors before termination. Memory limits are set to 4Gi and CPU to 2vCPU. What is the root cause and solution?

A security team has implemented IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center with a custom profile for their organization. During a compliance scan, 200 resources show as 'Unable to perform' status. Investigation reveals these resources are in resource groups where the Security and Compliance Center service ID has 'Viewer' role. However, changing to 'Administrator' role raises concerns about excessive privileges. What is the most secure approach to resolve this?

An application running on IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC experiences sporadic latency spikes every 24 hours. IBM Cloud Monitoring shows CPU credits depleting to zero during these periods on the burst-performance instances. The application has steady baseline load with occasional processing jobs. The team wants to optimize costs while eliminating performance issues. What strategy should they implement?

A company must implement end-to-end encryption for data stored in IBM Cloud Object Storage, with the requirement that IBM cannot access encryption keys under any circumstances, including for operational support. The solution must also support automatic key rotation and maintain compliance audit trails. Which configuration meets these requirements?

An IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster running a machine learning workload shows increasing pod evictions with 'The node was low on resource: ephemeral-storage' messages, despite adequate persistent volumes attached. Analysis shows model training generates large temporary files in /tmp during processing. Cluster nodes are 16vCPU/64GB with 100GB boot disks. What is the most effective solution?