DAC DevOps & Continuous Delivery 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: In Disciplined Agile DevOps, what is the purpose of 'infrastructure as code' (IaC)?
- To replace cloud providers with on-premise servers
- To manage and provision infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files rather than manual processes (Correct answer)
- To document server configurations in spreadsheets for the ops team
- To enforce a single programming language across all infrastructure tools
Correct answer: To manage and provision infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files rather than manual processes
IaC treats infrastructure configuration as versioned, testable code, enabling consistent and repeatable environment provisioning.
Question 2: Which DevOps practice involves automatically rebuilding and testing all affected components when a shared library is updated?
- Blue-green deployment
- Continuous Integration with dependency scanning (Correct answer)
- Canary releasing
- Environment parity
Correct answer: Continuous Integration with dependency scanning
CI pipelines that trigger on upstream dependency changes ensure that library updates don't silently break consuming services.
Question 3: What is 'mean time to recovery' (MTTR) measuring in a DevOps context?
- Average time to deploy a new feature to production
- Average time to restore service after a production incident (Correct answer)
- Time between successive deployments to production
- Time required to run the full automated test suite
Correct answer: Average time to restore service after a production incident
MTTR measures organizational resilience by tracking how quickly teams can restore normal service after a failure.
Question 4: A DA coach is helping a team adopt DevOps. Which mindset shift is most fundamental?
- Developers should never access production systems
- Breaking down the wall between development and operations to share responsibility for the full delivery lifecycle (Correct answer)
- Operations teams should own all deployment decisions
- Speed of delivery should always take priority over system stability
Correct answer: Breaking down the wall between development and operations to share responsibility for the full delivery lifecycle
DevOps fundamentally requires dissolving the Dev/Ops silo so both sides share ownership of outcomes from code to production.
Question 5: In a blue-green deployment strategy, what role do the two environments play?
- Blue handles read traffic; green handles write traffic
- One environment runs the current production version while the other hosts the new release, with traffic switched over instantly (Correct answer)
- Blue is for development; green is for staging only
- Both environments run simultaneously to share the production load
Correct answer: One environment runs the current production version while the other hosts the new release, with traffic switched over instantly
Blue-green deployments maintain two identical environments so traffic can be routed to the new version instantly with easy rollback.
Question 6: What is the primary benefit of 'trunk-based development' in a Continuous Delivery context?
- It allows each developer to maintain their own isolated branch indefinitely
- It reduces merge conflicts and integration pain by keeping changes small and integrated frequently to a single mainline (Correct answer)
- It eliminates the need for automated testing since merges are small
- It replaces the deployment pipeline with manual release processes
Correct answer: It reduces merge conflicts and integration pain by keeping changes small and integrated frequently to a single mainline
Trunk-based development minimizes long-lived branches, reducing integration debt and making Continuous Integration practical.
Question 7: Which monitoring practice aligns best with a DevOps observability strategy?
- Checking server logs manually after a customer reports an issue
- Collecting metrics, logs, and traces proactively to detect anomalies before users are impacted (Correct answer)
- Monitoring only CPU and memory usage on production servers
- Delegating all monitoring responsibility to an external NOC team
Correct answer: Collecting metrics, logs, and traces proactively to detect anomalies before users are impacted
Observability through metrics, logs, and distributed traces enables proactive detection and rapid diagnosis of production issues.
DAC DevOps & Continuous Delivery 3
In Disciplined Agile DevOps, what is the purpose of 'infrastructure as code' (IaC)?