What is a key characteristic of a microservices architecture?

The application is built as a single, monolithic unit

The application is composed of small, independently deployable services

All services share the same database schema

The application requires a single large server

What is the primary role of a version control system in a DevOps workflow?

To monitor application performance in real time

To track and manage changes to code and configuration files

To deploy applications to production automatically

To store compiled binaries of the application

A team has a CI pipeline that runs unit tests and integration tests. The integration tests take 30 minutes and often fail due to flaky network calls to external APIs. Developers are frustrated because they have to wait a long time for feedback. Which approach would best improve the speed and reliability of the pipeline?

Move integration tests to a separate pipeline stage that runs only after unit tests pass, and use mocks or a test double for external APIs in the integration tests.

Run integration tests in parallel with unit tests to reduce the total pipeline time.

Increase the timeout for integration tests to reduce the number of failures.

Remove integration tests from the pipeline and rely only on unit tests.

Which practice is directly used to collect feedback in a DevOps workflow?

Writing code in a functional programming language

Monitoring application metrics and logs

Creating a virtual private cloud

What is infrastructure as code (IaC)?

Managing infrastructure through versioned, declarative definitions

Storing infrastructure credentials in source control

Using a graphical interface to provision cloud resources

Writing scripts to manually configure servers

GIAC Cloud Security Automation

Domain 1Objective 1

Understanding the DevOps Workflow GCSA Practice Questions (Page 1)

Part of the DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure domain, which makes up ~24% of our current practice bank. GIAC (SANS) does not publish an official question count, but from its 120-minute exam (~50–80 total, ~12–19 in this domain), expect 3–5 from this objective — we provide 52 practice questions to prepare you well beyond it. (estimate)

52questions here

11free pages

10concepts

Questions 1–5

1foundation · easy
What is a key characteristic of a microservices architecture?
Select an answer first
2foundation · easy
What is the primary role of a version control system in a DevOps workflow?
Select an answer first
3expert · hard
A team has a CI pipeline that runs unit tests and integration tests. The integration tests take 30 minutes and often fail due to flaky network calls to external APIs. Developers are frustrated because they have to wait a long time for feedback. Which approach would best improve the speed and reliability of the pipeline?
Select an answer first
4foundation · easy
Which practice is directly used to collect feedback in a DevOps workflow?
Select an answer first
5foundation · easy
What is infrastructure as code (IaC)?
Select an answer first

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