DevOps Engineering study guide
DevOps Engineering · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
DevOps Engineering is a professional credential aimed at engineers who build, ship, and operate software systems end to end. It suits CI/CD engineers, platform and SRE practitioners, cloud engineers, and developers who increasingly own production outcomes. The DevOps Engineering study guide has 8 sections and about 3,445 words.
01Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) Pipelines
This domain tests pipeline design: how a commit becomes one immutable artifact, how that artifact is verified by automated gates, and how it is promoted through environments. Expect questions on pipeline-as-code structure, artifact handling, deployment strategies, and DORA delivery metrics.
423 words, about 2 min02Infrastructure as Code and Configuration Management
This domain tests how you declare, review, and reconcile infrastructure: the Terraform/OpenTofu plan-apply lifecycle and state model, and idempotent configuration management with Ansible, Chef, Puppet or Salt. Provisioning tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) manage resource lifecycles declaratively, tracking real IDs in state.
451 words, about 2 min03Cloud Platforms, Containers, and Orchestration
This domain covers running workloads: cloud identity and network boundaries, container image construction, and the Kubernetes controls that decide whether a rollout is safe. Shared responsibility: the provider secures physical and managed layers; you secure identity, configuration, data and network paths.
407 words, about 2 min04Monitoring, Observability, and Site Reliability Engineering
This domain tests whether you can instrument a system, alert on what users feel, and reason quantitatively about reliability: metrics, logs and traces, the SLI–SLO–error budget model, and incident practice. Three signals: metrics (cheap to aggregate, cardinality-sensitive), logs (rich detail, expensive at volume), traces (request-scoped causality, sampled).
392 words, about 2 min05DevSecOps, Security, and Compliance Automation
This domain tests how security evidence is generated automatically and enforced as code: scan types and their limits, supply-chain integrity, pipeline identity, and converting controls into auditable repeatable checks instead of review meetings. Scan types are not interchangeable.
454 words, about 2 min06Version Control, Branching, and Release Engineering
This domain tests Git mechanics and the release process built on them: what a commit actually is, which integration strategy keeps the mainline releasable, and how versions, tags and hotfixes are produced. Git's model: a commit is a snapshot of a tree plus parent pointers; a branch is a movable ref; a merge creates a commit with two parents; rebase replays commits onto a new base and rewrites their hashes.
441 words, about 2 min07Scripting, Automation, and Tooling
This domain tests whether your automation fails loudly, safely and repeatably: shell semantics under set -e , exit codes in pipelines, retry behaviour against APIs, and portable tooling choices that hold up in CI. Bash header: set -euo pipefail plus IFS=$' ' .
428 words, about 2 min08Collaboration, Agile Practices, and DevOps Culture
This domain tests the human system around delivery: how decisions are made, how teams are structured, and which measures actually predict performance. Questions are scenario-based - choose the practice that shortens feedback loops and pushes decision authority to the people doing the work.
449 words, about 2 min