CDM DevOps Principles & Culture 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which DevOps practice involves automatically validating code quality, security, and tests on every commit?
- Continuous inspection
- Continuous integration (CI) (Correct answer)
- Continuous deployment
- Continuous monitoring
Correct answer: Continuous integration (CI)
CI automatically builds and validates every commit against a shared mainline, catching integration issues early.
Question 2: The concept of 'immutable infrastructure' means that servers are never modified after deployment; instead they are replaced. What DevOps benefit does this primarily provide?
- Lower cloud costs
- Consistent, reproducible environments that eliminate configuration drift (Correct answer)
- Faster developer onboarding
- Simplified load balancing
Correct answer: Consistent, reproducible environments that eliminate configuration drift
Immutable infrastructure eliminates configuration drift by replacing servers rather than patching them, ensuring environments stay consistent.
Question 3: In a DevOps culture, who is ultimately responsible for the quality and reliability of a software service?
- The QA team exclusively
- The operations team exclusively
- The entire cross-functional team collectively (Correct answer)
- The product manager
Correct answer: The entire cross-functional team collectively
DevOps promotes shared ownership, where the entire team — developers, ops, QA, and security — is collectively responsible for quality.
Question 4: Which statement best describes the relationship between Agile and DevOps?
- DevOps replaces Agile practices
- DevOps extends Agile principles beyond development into operations and delivery (Correct answer)
- Agile and DevOps are competing methodologies
- DevOps is a subset of Scrum
Correct answer: DevOps extends Agile principles beyond development into operations and delivery
DevOps extends Agile's iterative, collaborative principles to cover the full software delivery lifecycle including operations.
Question 5: What does 'observability' mean in a DevOps context?
- The ability to monitor CPU and memory metrics only
- The ability to understand a system's internal state from its external outputs (Correct answer)
- Automated incident response without human intervention
- Security scanning of application logs
Correct answer: The ability to understand a system's internal state from its external outputs
Observability encompasses logs, metrics, and traces to allow teams to understand and debug complex system behavior from external signals.
Question 6: A 'runbook' in DevOps operations primarily serves which purpose?
- Documenting sprint velocity for management
- Providing step-by-step operational procedures for common tasks and incidents (Correct answer)
- Tracking feature requests from customers
- Recording code review comments
Correct answer: Providing step-by-step operational procedures for common tasks and incidents
Runbooks codify operational knowledge into repeatable, automatable procedures for routine tasks and incident response.
Question 7: Which approach does DevOps culture recommend when an incident occurs and a team member makes a mistake that causes an outage?
- Disciplinary action to deter future mistakes
- Blameless analysis focused on systemic and process improvements (Correct answer)
- Public disclosure of the responsible engineer
- Immediate reassignment to non-critical work
Correct answer: Blameless analysis focused on systemic and process improvements
Blameless culture recognizes that humans operate within systems, and improving the system is more effective than punishing individuals.
CDM DevOps Principles & Culture 5
Which DevOps practice involves automatically validating code quality, security, and tests on every commit?