IBM Assessment: Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A multinational enterprise is experiencing inconsistent performance in their hybrid cloud deployment where on-premises workloads need to burst to IBM Cloud during peak periods. Network latency measurements show 150ms average RTT, and data transfer costs are exceeding budget by 300%. The application architecture uses synchronous database calls between tiers. What is the MOST effective architectural remediation strategy?

An organization is designing a disaster recovery strategy for mission-critical workloads on IBM Cloud. They require RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of 1 hour across geographically distributed regions. The primary workload involves stateful applications with 50TB of data that changes at 2GB/hour, plus a transactional database. Compliance requires that DR tests must not impact production. Which DR architecture BEST meets these requirements?

A financial services client is implementing a multi-tenant SaaS platform on IBM Cloud requiring strict data isolation, individual tenant performance guarantees, and the ability to scale tenant resources independently. They project 500 tenants with highly variable workload patterns (10x variance between peak and off-peak). Regulatory requirements mandate that tenant data cannot share physical compute resources. What architecture provides the OPTIMAL balance of isolation, cost efficiency, and operational manageability?

During a cloud migration assessment, you discover an application with 12 interconnected microservices experiencing cascading failures. Service A calls Services B, C, and D synchronously; when Service D experiences 3-second latency spikes (normal response: 100ms), the entire application becomes unresponsive and takes 15 minutes to recover. Thread pool exhaustion is observed in Service A. What combination of resilience patterns would MOST effectively prevent cascading failures?

An enterprise is consolidating 250 legacy applications to IBM Cloud. Performance analysis reveals that 60% of applications have unpredictable I/O patterns with random reads, 25% are batch processing with sequential writes, and 15% are database workloads requiring consistent low-latency. Storage costs must be optimized while meeting performance SLAs. What storage strategy provides the BEST cost-performance optimization?

A retail company's IBM Cloud infrastructure experiences a critical issue where their containerized application pods are being evicted during flash sales events despite CPU and memory metrics showing only 60% utilization. Investigation shows that pods are marked as 'Failed' with reason 'Evicted'. The cluster has multiple node pools with different instance types. What is the MOST likely root cause and appropriate solution?

An organization needs to implement a security architecture for sensitive workloads on IBM Cloud that requires encryption in-transit, at-rest, and in-use, with customer-managed key lifecycle including rotation every 90 days. The solution must support regulatory audit requirements demonstrating that IBM cannot access the keys or data. Which architecture BEST satisfies these requirements?

A global manufacturing company is implementing an edge computing strategy with 500 factory locations connecting to IBM Cloud. Each location generates 10GB/hour of IoT sensor data that must be processed locally with <50ms latency for safety systems, while aggregate analytics run centrally. Network connectivity is unreliable (80% uptime). What architecture pattern BEST addresses these requirements?

After migrating to IBM Cloud, an application experiences severe performance degradation during nightly batch jobs. Analysis shows: CPU utilization peaks at 95%, I/O wait time increases from 2% to 45%, network throughput is nominal, and the application uses 40% of allocated memory. The batch job processes data from a shared storage volume used by 8 other applications. What is the PRIMARY bottleneck and most effective optimization?

An enterprise is designing a cloud-native application on IBM Cloud that must achieve 99.99% availability (52 minutes downtime/year). The application spans 3 availability zones with database replication. During architecture review, you identify that planned maintenance windows for security patches require 2 hours monthly (24 hours/year). What architectural strategy MUST be implemented to meet the availability SLA?