What is the role of configuration management in a CI/CD pipeline?

To manually approve every deployment

To ensure that deployed environments are configured consistently and automatically

To store build artifacts in a version control system

To replace the need for automated testing

What is a best practice for managing secrets in configuration management?

Hardcoding secrets in configuration files

Storing secrets in version control for easy access

Sharing secrets via email to team members

Storing secrets in a dedicated secret management service

How does integrating configuration management into CI/CD improve deployment consistency?

By skipping configuration steps in production to save time

By applying the same configuration code to every environment

By allowing each developer to manually configure their own environment

By using different configuration tools for each environment

A company uses Chef to manage its servers. They have a compliance requirement to detect and report any configuration drift, but they do not want to automatically remediate it because some servers require manual approval. Which Chef feature should they use?

Use a custom script that checks for drift and sends an email

Use Chef's converge mode to apply the desired state and report any changes

Use Chef's audit mode with Inspec to detect drift and report it, without applying changes

Use Chef's reporting feature to see what changes were made during the last run

A large enterprise uses Ansible to manage thousands of servers. They have a compliance requirement to detect and remediate drift within 30 minutes. Currently, they run Ansible playbooks manually once a day. They want to automate this without overloading the control node. Which approach is the most effective?

Increase the frequency of the existing manual runs to every 30 minutes

Use Ansible Tower/AWX to create a job template and schedule it to run every 30 minutes with a rolling update across servers

Use a monitoring tool to detect drift and then manually run the playbook

Run the playbook on all servers simultaneously every 30 minutes using a cron job

GIAC Cloud Security Automation

Domain 1Objective 4

Utilizing Configuration Management GCSA Practice Questions (Page 9)

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 45 practice questions to prepare you well beyond it. (estimate)

45questions here

9free pages

8concepts

Questions 41–45

41foundation · easy
What is the role of configuration management in a CI/CD pipeline?
Select an answer first
42foundation · easy
What is a best practice for managing secrets in configuration management?
Select an answer first
43foundation · easy
How does integrating configuration management into CI/CD improve deployment consistency?
Select an answer first
44expert · hard
A company uses Chef to manage its servers. They have a compliance requirement to detect and report any configuration drift, but they do not want to automatically remediate it because some servers require manual approval. Which Chef feature should they use?
Select an answer first
45expert · hard
A large enterprise uses Ansible to manage thousands of servers. They have a compliance requirement to detect and remediate drift within 30 minutes. Currently, they run Ansible playbooks manually once a day. They want to automate this without overloading the control node. Which approach is the most effective?
Select an answer first

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