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IBM Certified Solution Architect - Cloud Architect - Practice Questions

15 questions for this exam, weighted toward architecture design principles (25%), then infrastructure architecture and application and data architecture (20% each), security architecture (15%), and HA/DR and performance.

Cert page: exams/ibm/cloud-solution-architect/

Question 1

Scenario: A requirement states "the system must be highly available." What should the architect do first?

A. Deploy across three zones B. Quantify it: define the availability target, RTO, and RPO, and identify what the business loses per hour of downtime C. Add redundancy everywhere D. Buy the largest instances

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** "Highly available" is not a design input until it is a number, because the cost difference between 99.9% and 99.99% is large and the business may not want to pay it. RTO and RPO then drive the specific mechanisms: replication, backup frequency, and failover automation.

Question 2

Scenario: An application must be portable across IBM Cloud, another public cloud, and on-premises.

A. Use IBM-specific PaaS everywhere B. Containerize on Red Hat OpenShift, keeping cloud-specific dependencies behind abstractions C. Rewrite per environment D. Virtual machines with manual configuration

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** A consistent platform is what makes portability real rather than theoretical. Be honest about the cost: portability means avoiding the managed services that would otherwise reduce your operational burden, so it should be justified by an actual requirement.

Question 3

Scenario: A monolith is being decomposed. What should drive the service boundaries?

A. Team size B. Business capabilities and data ownership, so each service owns its data and changes independently C. Code file count D. Technology preference

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** Boundaries that cut across a business capability produce services that must be deployed together, which is a distributed monolith: all the operational cost of microservices with none of the independence. Shared databases are the usual symptom.

Question 4

Scenario: Two services must remain consistent across a business transaction without distributed transactions.

A. Two-phase commit B. The saga pattern, with local transactions and compensating actions, accepting eventual consistency C. A shared database D. Manual reconciliation

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** Two-phase commit couples availability across services: if one participant is down, nothing commits. Sagas trade atomicity for availability, which requires designing the compensating action and accepting a window where the system is inconsistent.

Question 5

Scenario: An architecture must tolerate a regional outage with an RPO under 15 minutes.

A. Backups to the same region B. Cross-region asynchronous replication with a documented, rehearsed failover procedure C. Multi-zone within one region D. A larger instance

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** Multi-zone protects against a data center, not a region. Asynchronous cross-region replication meets a 15-minute RPO comfortably, and the part that determines whether it works is rehearsal: an untested failover reliably fails on a dependency nobody remembered.

Question 6

Scenario: A design uses a message queue between services.

A. It adds no benefit B. It decouples producers from consumers in time and rate, absorbing bursts and letting the consumer fail without losing work C. It guarantees ordering globally D. It removes the need for error handling

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** Buffering and decoupling are the benefits. The costs are real too: eventual consistency, harder end-to-end tracing, and the need to handle duplicate delivery, since most systems guarantee at-least-once rather than exactly-once.

Question 7

Scenario: Data residency requires that customer data never leaves a specific country.

A. Encrypt it B. Select regions in that country, restrict replication and backup targets, and verify that managed services and support access honor the boundary C. Use a global CDN D. Document the intent

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** The parts that leak are the ones you did not choose explicitly: backup destinations, disaster recovery replicas, telemetry, and provider support access. Verifying each is what turns a residency claim into something defensible in an audit.

Question 8

Scenario: A security architecture must limit lateral movement after a compromise.

A. A perimeter firewall B. Network segmentation, per-service identity with least privilege, and controls that assume the perimeter has already been breached C. Strong passwords D. Antivirus

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** A perimeter defends the outside only, so once one workload is compromised a flat network gives the attacker everything. Segmentation plus workload identity means each additional step requires defeating another control, which is the assume-breach posture.

Question 9

Scenario: An architecture decision must be recorded for future teams.

A. A verbal agreement B. An architecture decision record capturing the context, the options considered, the decision, and its consequences C. A diagram alone D. Code comments

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** A diagram shows what was built but not why, so the next team cannot tell which constraints still apply. Recording the rejected options is the part that prevents relitigating the same debate two years later.

Question 10

Scenario: Performance requirements must be validated before go-live.

A. Assume it will scale B. Load test against the defined targets, including a soak test and a test at expected peak plus headroom, then fix what the results reveal C. Test in production D. Measure only average response time

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** Averages hide the tail users experience, so measure percentiles. Soak testing catches leaks and resource exhaustion that a short burst test misses, which is the class of problem that appears three days after launch.

Question 11

Scenario: Cost must be considered in the architecture, not after it.

A. Optimize later B. Model the cost of each design option, including data transfer and operational effort, and treat it as a design constraint alongside performance and availability C. Cost is a finance problem D. Choose the cheapest option always

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** Architecture decisions set the cost floor: choosing an architecture with heavy cross-zone data transfer or per-request pricing at scale locks in a bill that no later tuning removes. Operational effort belongs in the model because staff time is a real cost.

Question 12

Scenario: A stateless application tier is preferred. Why?

A. It is simpler to write B. Any instance can serve any request, so scaling, replacement, and failure recovery are trivial; state lives in a data store or cache C. It needs no database D. It is always faster

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** Statelessness is what makes horizontal scaling and instance replacement safe. Session affinity is the compromise that reintroduces the problem, which is why sessions usually move to a shared cache instead.

Question 13

Scenario: An integration must connect to an on-premises system from cloud.

A. Expose the on-premises system publicly B. Private connectivity (Direct Link or VPN) plus a defined integration pattern such as an API gateway or a secure connector C. Poll over the internet D. Copy data nightly by hand

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** Private connectivity plus a controlled integration point limits exposure to one interface rather than a whole system. Direct Link provides dedicated, predictable bandwidth where a VPN over the internet does not.

Question 14

Scenario: An architecture review asks about observability.

A. Logs are enough B. Design for metrics, logs, and traces from the start, with correlation identifiers propagated across services, plus SLIs and SLOs for the user-facing behavior C. Add monitoring after launch D. Rely on the provider's dashboards

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** Trace propagation must be built into the services, so retrofitting it means touching everything. Defining SLIs from the user's perspective rather than from infrastructure metrics is what makes alerts correspond to real problems.

Question 15

Scenario: A stakeholder asks for a technology the architect believes is wrong for the requirement.

A. Comply silently B. State the trade-offs with evidence, propose an alternative, and if the decision stands, record it as an ADR with the accepted risks C. Refuse D. Build it differently without saying so

Answer **Correct: B** **Why:** The architect's job is to make consequences visible, not to win. Recording the decision with its accepted risks means the organization owns the choice knowingly, which is also what protects the team when the risk materializes.

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