DevOps Foundation study guide
DevOps Foundation · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The DevOps Foundation certificate is an entry-level credential for anyone who needs a shared, practical vocabulary for DevOps - developers, operations and support staff, testers, project and product managers, and business stakeholders working in or alongside a delivery team. It is a foundations-level exam rather than a hands-on engineering test: it checks whether you understand why DevOps exists and how its principles connect, not whether you can build a pipeline unaided. The DevOps Foundation study guide has 6 sections and about 2,266 words.
01DevOps Introduction and Purpose
DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that combines people, process and technology so an organisation can shorten the time between committing a change and running it safely in production, while improving quality and reliability. It emerged because Development and Operations had conflicting incentives: Dev optimised for change, Ops optimised for stability.
378 words, about 2 min02Culture and Behavior
Tools cannot fix a broken relationship between teams. Culture is the shared set of behaviours, assumptions and incentives that determine how work actually flows.
350 words, about 2 min03DevOps Practices: Flow, Lean, Agile and Continuous Delivery
Flow is the smooth, uninterrupted movement of work from idea to customer. Lean thinking, adapted from manufacturing, supplies the tools: identify value, map the value stream, remove waste (waiting, handoffs, rework, partially done work, excess approvals), limit work in progress, pull work rather than push it, and improve continuously (kaizen).
367 words, about 2 min04Automation and Technology
Automation is one pillar of DevOps, not the whole of it. Its purpose is to make the right thing the easy thing: repeatable, fast and low-risk.
373 words, about 2 min05Measurement, Metrics and Reporting
Measurement exists to support decisions, expose bottlenecks and verify improvement. Metrics used to rank or punish individuals get gamed and destroyed - Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
420 words, about 2 min06Sharing, Feedback and Continuous Improvement
Sharing, feedback and continuous improvement are the learning half of DevOps. The second way amplifies feedback from right to left - from production, customers and monitoring back to development - so problems are found and fixed quickly.
378 words, about 2 min