IBM Assessment: Platform Associate Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

An enterprise is experiencing intermittent performance degradation in their IBM platform deployment. Analysis shows that during peak loads, the message broker exhibits high CPU utilization while the application servers show normal resource usage. The architecture uses a clustered configuration with three nodes, and messages are persisted to a shared storage system. Database query logs show no bottlenecks. What is the MOST likely root cause and appropriate remediation strategy?

A financial services organization requires zero-downtime deployments for their IBM platform with strict transaction consistency guarantees. They use a multi-region active-passive configuration with synchronous replication. During a deployment rehearsal, the failover process took 8 minutes, exceeding their 2-minute RTO requirement. Post-analysis revealed that connection pool reinitialization and cache warming were the primary delays. What architectural modification would BEST address this requirement?

An organization's IBM platform experiences a cascading failure where a single microservice timeout causes system-wide degradation. The platform uses synchronous REST calls between 15 microservices, with each service having a 30-second timeout. During an incident, a database lock in Service A caused Services B, C, and D (which call Service A) to accumulate blocked threads, eventually exhausting their thread pools and causing them to fail. What combination of architectural patterns would provide the MOST effective resilience?

A global organization needs to implement data residency requirements where customer data must remain within specific geographic regions while maintaining a unified platform experience. The IBM platform currently uses a single centralized database with read replicas in three regions. Regulatory compliance requires that EU customer data never leaves EU data centers, including for backup and disaster recovery. Which architectural approach would BEST satisfy these requirements while maintaining operational efficiency?

During a security audit, it was discovered that certificate rotation in the IBM platform's SSL/TLS infrastructure caused a 15-minute service disruption. Investigation revealed that application pods needed to restart to load new certificates, and the deployment used a standard rolling update strategy. The platform has 100 microservices across 500 pods with strict uptime requirements. What solution would enable zero-downtime certificate rotation?

A platform deployment experiences memory leaks that manifest only under specific load patterns involving concurrent batch processing and real-time transactions. Heap dumps show increasing retained objects in a custom caching layer, but only when batch jobs run simultaneously with peak transaction volumes. Standard garbage collection tuning has not resolved the issue. What systematic approach would BEST identify and resolve this complex memory leak?

An organization is migrating their IBM platform from on-premises to a hybrid cloud model where sensitive workloads must remain on-premises while scalable workloads run in the cloud. The architecture requires consistent service discovery, configuration management, and observability across both environments. Network connectivity between environments has 50ms latency and occasional packet loss. Which architectural approach would provide the MOST robust hybrid deployment?

Performance monitoring shows that 5% of API requests experience latency exceeding 10 seconds, while 95% complete in under 500ms. Distributed tracing reveals that these slow requests correlate with database connection pool exhaustion, but only during specific query patterns involving multiple JOIN operations on large tables. Connection pool metrics show the pool is sized correctly for average load. What is the MOST effective solution to resolve this performance outlier issue?

A multi-tenant IBM platform deployment needs to implement resource isolation where a single tenant's traffic spike or resource consumption cannot impact other tenants' performance. The platform currently uses a shared Kubernetes cluster with namespace-based tenant separation. During testing, a tenant's memory leak caused node resource exhaustion affecting other tenants. What combination of mechanisms would provide the STRONGEST tenant isolation guarantees?

After a platform upgrade, intermittent data inconsistencies appear where transaction updates are occasionally lost despite no errors being logged. The platform uses distributed transactions across three microservices with a two-phase commit protocol. Analysis shows the inconsistencies occur only during network partition scenarios lasting less than 5 seconds. All services report successful commits, but some data changes are missing post-recovery. What is the MOST likely cause and appropriate remediation?