Continuous Delivery Architecture study guide
Continuous Delivery Architecture · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Continuous Delivery Architecture credential is aimed at engineers who design and operate the systems that move code from commit to production: pipeline architects, senior DevOps engineers, build-and-release leads, and platform engineers. It tests architecture judgment rather than tool trivia. The Continuous Delivery Architecture study guide has 8 sections and about 3,307 words.
01Continuous Delivery Foundations and Value Streams
Continuous Delivery (CD) keeps software in a deployable state at all times, so any commit that passes the pipeline can reach production on demand. The exam tests whether you can separate CD from continuous deployment, read a value stream map, and reason correctly about the four DORA metrics.
462 words, about 2 min02Build and Dependency Management
This domain tests whether you can produce one reproducible artifact from a known commit and control exactly what goes into it. The recurring exam theme is provenance: can you prove the binary you deploy is the binary you tested?
421 words, about 2 min03Deployment Pipeline Design and Orchestration
This domain covers how the pipeline itself is structured: stage ordering, parallelism, gates, pipeline-as-code, and traceability. The exam asks you to reason about feedback latency and where verification belongs, not to memorise a specific CI product's syntax.
410 words, about 2 min04Automated Testing Strategy in the Pipeline
The exam tests whether you can choose the right test level for each risk and keep the suite deterministic. Strategy questions usually present a slow, flaky suite and ask what to change.
414 words, about 2 min05Environment Provisioning and Infrastructure as Code
This domain tests whether environments are defined as versioned, reviewable code rather than as accumulated console history. Expect questions about state handling, drift, immutability and environment parity.
402 words, about 2 min06Release and Deployment Patterns
This domain tests pattern selection and, more importantly, whether you notice the compatibility constraints that decide if a pattern works. Expect a scenario asking which rollout can be reversed safely.
412 words, about 2 min07Configuration, Secrets, and Data Migration
This domain tests two coupled ideas: runtime configuration must live outside the artifact, and schema change must be decoupled from code change so both old and new versions can run at once. Externalise configuration so one artifact runs in every environment (twelve-factor style).
375 words, about 2 min08Observability, Feedback, and Governance
This domain links what the system tells you after deployment to how the organisation governs change. The exam tests signal selection, SLO arithmetic, and whether governance is automated or ceremonial.
411 words, about 2 min