LPI DevOps Tools Engineer study guide
LPI DevOps Tools Engineer · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Linux Professional Institute DevOps Tools Engineer is a vendor-neutral certification awarded after passing Exam 701, exam code 701-200, whose objectives are published as version 2.0.0. LPI describes it as a required exam for the certification and states there is no requirement to possess any other certification, though it recommends holders maintain at least one active certification in system administration or software development at a level equivalent to LPIC-1. The stated candidate is a professional software developer or system administrator producing IT solutions that need a robust, efficient path from source materials to a deployed or distributable product or service, with particular focus on open source technology. The exam covers basic skills in using tools commonly used to implement DevOps, organized into four objective groups: Software Engineering (modern software development, standard components and platforms, source code management with Git, CI/CD, software composition and licensing), Application Container (Docker and Podman management, Compose orchestration, image building with Dockerfiles and Containerfiles), Kubernetes (architecture and kubectl usage, basic operations such as Pods, Deployments, Services, Ingress and PersistentVolumeClaims, Helm package management), and Security and Observability (cloud native security, Prometheus monitoring and PromQL, log management, OpenTelemetry tracing). The LPI DevOps Tools Engineer study guide has 4 sections and about 1,413 words.
01Software Engineering
Software Engineering on the LPI DevOps Tools Engineer exam covers how source code becomes a tested, versioned artifact: Git history and branching, code review, automated tests in a CI pipeline, and reproducible builds. Commit small and often; a commit should be one logical change that builds and passes tests on its own.
364 words, about 2 min02Application Container
Application Container covers building, shipping, and running OCI images: Dockerfile authoring, layer caching, registries, volumes, and runtime behavior. The exam expects reasoning about image size, reproducibility, and signal handling - not just running docker build .
351 words, about 2 min03Kubernetes
Kubernetes on this exam means the API objects and controller behavior you use daily: Pods, Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps and Secrets, probes, resource management, and rollout mechanics. Apply manifests declaratively with kubectl apply -f .
333 words, about 2 min04Security and Observability
Security and Observability covers protecting the pipeline and cluster, and knowing what the system is doing: TLS, RBAC, secret handling, image supply chain, plus metrics, logs, traces, and alerting. Encrypt in transit everywhere: Ingress TLS, API server TLS, and mTLS between services (a service mesh automates certificate rotation).
365 words, about 2 min