ca-fdops study guide
ca-fdops · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Certified Foundational DevOps (CA-FDOps) credential is an entry-level certification for people who want to demonstrate that they understand how modern software teams build, ship, and operate systems. It suits career changers moving into platform or operations work, junior engineers joining teams that already practise continuous delivery, and adjacent roles such as QA, support, or project coordination who need a shared vocabulary with engineering. The ca-fdops study guide has 9 sections and about 2,645 words.
01DevOps Culture, Principles, and Practices
DevOps is a sociotechnical movement, not a toolset. Candidates must be able to explain the CALMS framing (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing), the Three Ways (flow, feedback, continual learning), and the tension between silos and cross-functional teams.
337 words, about 2 min02Version Control and Collaborative Workflows
Candidates should be fluent in Git's object model at a conceptual level: commits are immutable snapshots linked to parents, branches are movable pointers, and HEAD tracks the current reference. Understand merge vs.
315 words, about 2 min03Continuous Integration and Build Automation
Continuous integration means every change integrates to trunk frequently and triggers an automated build and test pipeline. Candidates must understand pipeline stages (checkout, dependency resolution, compile, unit test, static analysis, package, publish artifact), build reproducibility (pinned dependencies, lockfiles, deterministic toolchains), and artifact immutability -build once, promote the same artifact through environments.
299 words, about 1 min04Continuous Delivery and Release Management
Continuous delivery keeps software in a always-releasable state; continuous deployment goes further and releases automatically. Candidates must know deployment strategies : rolling, blue-green (two environments, instant switch and rollback), and canary (small traffic slice, progressive expansion).
283 words, about 1 min05Infrastructure as Code and Configuration Management
IaC treats infrastructure definitions as versioned code. Distinguish declarative (Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes manifests-describe desired end state) from imperative (scripts-describe steps).
279 words, about 1 min06Containers and Orchestration Fundamentals
Containers package an application with its dependencies, sharing the host kernel via namespaces (isolation) and cgroups (resource limits). containers (class vs.
271 words, about 1 min07Cloud and Platform Fundamentals for DevOps
Candidates should understand core cloud service models- IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, FaaS -and the shared responsibility model : the provider secures the cloud, the customer secures what runs in it. Know regions and availability zones for fault isolation, elasticity and autoscaling , managed vs.
275 words, about 1 min08Observability, Monitoring, and Incident Response
Monitoring asks known questions; observability lets you ask new ones. Know the three pillars : metrics (aggregated numbers, cheap, good for alerting), logs (discrete events, rich detail, costly at volume), and traces (request flow across services, span timing).
287 words, about 1 min09DevSecOps and Security Fundamentals
DevSecOps shifts security left: controls are automated inside the pipeline rather than bolted on before release. Know SAST (static source analysis), DAST (running-app testing), SCA (dependency and license scanning), secret scanning , container image scanning , and IaC scanning .
299 words, about 1 min