A startup manages its AWS infrastructure through a set of shell scripts that are stored on a shared drive. After a recent outage, the team discovered that a developer manually changed a security group in the AWS console, and that change was not reflected in the scripts. The team wants to prevent this from happening again. Which approach should they adopt?

Replace the shell scripts with declarative infrastructure-as-code templates stored in Git and enforce that all changes are made through the templates.

Disable the AWS console for all IAM users and require that all changes be made via the CLI.

Store the shell scripts in a Git repository and require all changes to go through pull requests.

Create a new IAM role that allows full access to the security group and assign it to the developer.

A team wants to build a DevOps toolchain that supports continuous integration, infrastructure as code, and monitoring. They have a limited budget and want to minimize the number of tools to learn and maintain. Which toolchain would be most cohesive and cost-effective?

Use GitHub for version control, Travis CI for CI, Terraform for IaC, and Grafana for monitoring.

Use a single tool like Ansible to handle version control, CI/CD, infrastructure, and monitoring.

Use GitLab for version control and CI/CD, Terraform for infrastructure as code, and Prometheus for monitoring.

Use Jenkins for CI, Ansible for infrastructure as code, and Nagios for monitoring.

A team of five developers works on a shared codebase. They want to ensure that every change is automatically built and tested before it is merged into the main branch. Which workflow should they implement?

Set up a CI server that builds and tests every pull request before it can be merged.

Require developers to run the build and tests locally before pushing to the main branch.

Use a version control system that automatically merges all changes without testing.

Schedule a nightly build that compiles the main branch and reports any errors.

Where in the DevOps pipeline are end-to-end tests typically run?

Later in the pipeline, after unit and integration tests pass

In the early stages of the pipeline to catch syntax errors

Only in production environments

After every code commit, before unit tests

An organization wants to release new versions of its web application to production frequently, but a human must approve each production deployment. The team wants to automate everything up to that approval while keeping the production release manual. Which approach should they implement?

Manual deployment to production using a runbook, with no automated pipeline.

Automated deployment to production on a fixed schedule, such as every Friday after the weekly change review.

Continuous deployment, where every change that passes automated tests is automatically deployed to production.

Continuous delivery, where the software is always in a releasable state and the deployment to production is triggered manually after approval.

GIAC Cloud Security Automation

Domain 1Objective 1

Understanding the DevOps Workflow GCSA Practice Questions (Page 3)

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 11–15

11application · medium
A startup manages its AWS infrastructure through a set of shell scripts that are stored on a shared drive. After a recent outage, the team discovered that a developer manually changed a security group in the AWS console, and that change was not reflected in the scripts. The team wants to prevent this from happening again. Which approach should they adopt?
Select an answer first
12expert · hard
A team wants to build a DevOps toolchain that supports continuous integration, infrastructure as code, and monitoring. They have a limited budget and want to minimize the number of tools to learn and maintain. Which toolchain would be most cohesive and cost-effective?
Select an answer first
13application · medium
A team of five developers works on a shared codebase. They want to ensure that every change is automatically built and tested before it is merged into the main branch. Which workflow should they implement?
Select an answer first
14foundation · easy
Where in the DevOps pipeline are end-to-end tests typically run?
Select an answer first
15application · medium
An organization wants to release new versions of its web application to production frequently, but a human must approve each production deployment. The team wants to automate everything up to that approval while keeping the production release manual. Which approach should they implement?
Select an answer first

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