CDOS study guide
CDOS · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Certified DevOps Specialist (CDOS) is a vendor-neutral credential aimed at engineers who build, ship, and operate software across the full delivery lifecycle. It suits developers moving toward platform or reliability work, systems administrators adopting automation, and release or operations staff who now own pipelines and infrastructure code. The CDOS study guide has 9 sections and about 3,003 words.
01DevOps Foundations and Culture
DevOps Foundations and Culture tests whether you can explain DevOps as a socio-technical operating model rather than a toolchain. Expect CALMS (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing), the Three Ways (flow, feedback, continual learning), DORA's four key metrics, Conway's Law, and blameless learning.
338 words, about 2 min02Source Code Management and Version Control
Source Code Management and Version Control tests Git mechanics and the branching and review policies that make delivery safe: the commit graph, merge versus rebase, trunk-based development, release tagging, monorepo versus polyrepo, and keeping secrets out of history. Git stores snapshots: a commit points to a tree of blobs and parent commits.
349 words, about 2 min03Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery tests pipeline design: build once and deploy many, artifact promotion, test stages, quality gates, ephemeral runners, and separating deployment from release. CI means integrating to trunk frequently and proving each change with an automated build and fast tests.
334 words, about 2 min04Configuration Management and Infrastructure as Code
Configuration Management and Infrastructure as Code tests declarative provisioning, idempotency, state management, drift, modules, and immutable infrastructure. Expect Terraform concepts and configuration-management tools such as Ansible.
332 words, about 2 min05Containers and Orchestration
Containers and Orchestration tests image construction and Kubernetes operations: layers, multi-stage builds, immutable tags, probes, resource management, and deployment strategies. Images are built from layers.
324 words, about 2 min06Cloud Platforms and Provisioning
Cloud Platforms and Provisioning tests provider-agnostic cloud literacy: service models, regions and availability zones, identity and access, network segmentation, landing zones, tagging, and cost-aware design. IaaS gives virtual machines and networks; PaaS manages the runtime; FaaS runs event-driven functions.
324 words, about 2 min07Monitoring, Logging, and Observability
Monitoring, Logging, and Observability tests the three pillars of metrics, logs, and traces; SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets; golden signals; alert design; structured logging; and distributed tracing. Metrics are cheap aggregates for trends and alerting; logs carry discrete event detail; traces show request paths across services.
336 words, about 2 min08Security and Compliance in DevOps (DevSecOps)
Security and Compliance in DevOps tests shift-left security, automated controls, supply-chain integrity, and compliance as code across the pipeline. Shift left means integrating security checks into design, code review, build, and deploy, not adding a security gate at the end.
340 words, about 2 min09Release, Deployment, and Incident Management
Release, Deployment, and Incident Management tests safe change strategies and incident response: deployment versus release, blue-green, canary, rolling updates, rollback, severity, on-call, and blameless postmortems. Deployment puts code into an environment; release exposes it to users.
326 words, about 2 min