A software company wants to automate the deployment of a web application to a cloud environment. The team needs to ensure that every code change is built, tested, and deployed to a staging environment before being promoted to production. Which practice best supports this workflow?

Set up a CI/CD pipeline that automatically builds, tests, and deploys to staging, with a manual approval step before production.

Have developers manually build and test the application locally, then deploy directly to production.

Use a script that deploys the latest code to production every hour.

Deploy all code changes to production first, then run tests to identify issues.

A company is adopting Infrastructure as Code for their AWS environment. They want to implement best practices for managing Terraform configurations. Which practice is most important to ensure that changes are auditable and reversible?

Run `terraform apply` directly from a developer's laptop.

Commit Terraform configuration files to a Git repository.

Store Terraform state files in a remote backend with versioning enabled.

Use Terraform workspaces to separate environments.

A team is using AWS CloudFormation to manage a production environment. They want to make a change to an EC2 instance's instance type. The team is concerned about downtime and wants to minimize it. What is the best approach?

Update the CloudFormation stack with a change set that modifies the instance type, and review the change set before executing it.

Directly modify the EC2 instance using the AWS Management Console.

Delete the entire stack and recreate it with the new instance type.

Create a new stack with the new instance type and then delete the old stack.

An organization uses Google Cloud and wants to automate the deployment of a set of VM instances, a load balancer, and a firewall rule. The team wants to define the entire environment in a declarative configuration file that can be versioned and reused. Which tool should they use?

Azure Resource Manager templates

Google Cloud Deployment Manager

A set of gcloud CLI commands in a shell script

A company uses Ansible to manage configuration on a fleet of Linux servers in the cloud. The security team wants to ensure that all servers have the same hardening settings, such as disabled root SSH login and specific firewall rules. What is the best way to achieve this?

Use a custom shell script that is copied to each server and run once.

Create an Ansible playbook that applies the hardening settings and run it against all servers.

Create a golden image with the settings and use it for new servers only.

Manually configure each server using a checklist to ensure consistency.

GIAC Cloud Security Essentials

Domain 5Objective 3

Cloud Automation GCLD Practice Questions (Page 5)

Part of the Data Protection and Automation domain, which makes up ~23% of our current practice bank. GIAC (SANS) does not publish an official question count, but from its 120-minute exam (~50–80 total, ~12–18 in this domain), expect 4–6 from this objective — we provide 45 practice questions to prepare you well beyond it. (estimate)

45questions here

9free pages

7concepts

Questions 21–25

21application · medium
A software company wants to automate the deployment of a web application to a cloud environment. The team needs to ensure that every code change is built, tested, and deployed to a staging environment before being promoted to production. Which practice best supports this workflow?
Select an answer first
22application · medium
A company is adopting Infrastructure as Code for their AWS environment. They want to implement best practices for managing Terraform configurations. Which practice is most important to ensure that changes are auditable and reversible?
Select an answer first
23expert · hard
A team is using AWS CloudFormation to manage a production environment. They want to make a change to an EC2 instance's instance type. The team is concerned about downtime and wants to minimize it. What is the best approach?
Select an answer first
24application · medium
An organization uses Google Cloud and wants to automate the deployment of a set of VM instances, a load balancer, and a firewall rule. The team wants to define the entire environment in a declarative configuration file that can be versioned and reused. Which tool should they use?
Select an answer first
25application · medium
A company uses Ansible to manage configuration on a fleet of Linux servers in the cloud. The security team wants to ensure that all servers have the same hardening settings, such as disabled root SSH login and specific firewall rules. What is the best way to achieve this?
Select an answer first

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