IBM A1000-086 Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A financial services company is deploying a multi-region IBM Cloud application that must maintain data residency compliance in EU and US regions while ensuring sub-50ms latency for read operations. The application experiences unpredictable traffic spikes during market opening hours in different time zones. Which architectural approach best satisfies these requirements while optimizing costs?

Your IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster is experiencing intermittent pod evictions during peak load despite having adequate CPU and memory limits configured. Analysis shows that pods are being evicted with 'DiskPressure' taints, but the persistent volumes show only 40% utilization. What is the MOST likely root cause and solution?

An enterprise is migrating a legacy three-tier application to IBM Cloud. The application uses a licensed commercial database that charges per core. Security policies require all traffic to remain on private networks, and the application must integrate with on-premises Active Directory for authentication. Database licensing costs must be minimized while maintaining high availability. Which combination of services best meets these requirements?

A DevOps team is troubleshooting an IBM Cloud Functions application where some invocations are failing with timeout errors after exactly 60 seconds, despite the function being configured with a 5-minute timeout. The function processes data from IBM Cloud Object Storage and writes results to IBM Cloudant. Monitoring shows the actual processing completes in 90 seconds. What is the root cause and correct solution?

Your organization has deployed workloads across multiple IBM Cloud accounts for different business units. You need to implement centralized security monitoring, ensure consistent compliance policies, audit resource provisioning across all accounts, and generate consolidated billing reports while maintaining account isolation. Which IBM Cloud capabilities should you implement?

An application running on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is experiencing memory leaks that cause pods to be OOMKilled after several hours of operation. The development team needs to identify which component is leaking memory. You have access to IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig. Which troubleshooting approach will most effectively identify the memory leak source?

A company is designing a disaster recovery strategy for their IBM Cloud VPC-based infrastructure spanning multiple availability zones in a single region. Their RTO is 1 hour and RPO is 15 minutes. The application includes stateful services with data stored in IBM Cloud Block Storage and IBM Cloud Databases for PostgreSQL. Which DR architecture provides the most cost-effective solution while meeting the recovery objectives?

Your IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster uses IBM Cloud Container Registry for images. After implementing image vulnerability scanning, you discover critical vulnerabilities in base images of production workloads. Security policies now require blocking deployment of images with critical vulnerabilities. However, some legacy applications cannot be immediately updated. Which approach balances security requirements with operational continuity?

A microservices application on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service experiences cascading failures where the failure of one service causes timeouts and resource exhaustion across multiple dependent services. The application uses synchronous REST APIs between services. Which architectural pattern and IBM Cloud capabilities should be implemented to improve resilience?

An organization using IBM Cloud requires that all API calls to IBM Cloud services be logged with user identity information for compliance auditing. They have users authenticating via IBM Cloud IAM, service IDs for automation, and federated users from corporate Active Directory. Some compliance violations are being missed because certain API calls are not captured. What is the most comprehensive solution to ensure complete audit coverage?