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100+ Free Continuous Delivery Architecture Practice Questions

Pass your DevOps Institute Continuous Delivery Architecture (CDA) exam on the first try — instant access, no signup required.

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What is the primary purpose of a 'fast feedback' design principle in deployment pipelines?

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2026 Statistics

Key Facts: Continuous Delivery Architecture Exam

40

Questions

DevOps Institute CDA

90 min

Exam Time

DevOps Institute CDA

65%

Passing Score

26/40

Multiple choice

Question Type

DevOps Institute

Lifetime

Validity (verify with PeopleCert)

DevOps Institute / PeopleCert

PeopleCert

Exam Provider

Online proctored

CDA is a 40-question multiple-choice exam with a 90-minute time limit and a 65% (26/40) passing score, delivered through PeopleCert. The DevOps Institute targets the credential at engineers, architects, QA, security, and operations practitioners who own end-to-end CI/CD pipelines. DevOps Foundation is strongly recommended as a prerequisite. Public sources currently describe CDA as lifetime-valid, though candidates should verify renewal expectations directly with PeopleCert before scheduling.

Sample Continuous Delivery Architecture Practice Questions

Try these sample questions to test your Continuous Delivery Architecture exam readiness. Each question includes a detailed explanation. Start the interactive quiz above for the full 100+ question experience with AI tutoring.

1Which statement best describes Continuous Delivery (CD)?
A.Every commit that passes all automated checks is automatically released to production with no human involvement
B.The discipline of keeping software in a releasable state at all times so it can be deployed to production on demand
C.A long-running release branch that is merged to main once per quarter
D.Manual QA sign-off before any code is allowed to ship
Explanation: Continuous Delivery means the system is always in a releasable state so a release decision can be made at any time. The release itself can still be a controlled, business-decision step.
2How does Continuous Deployment differ from Continuous Delivery?
A.Continuous Deployment requires manual approval before each release; Continuous Delivery does not
B.Continuous Deployment automatically pushes every passing build to production; Continuous Delivery keeps it deployable but the release step can be manual
C.They are the same thing with different vendor names
D.Continuous Delivery only applies to mobile apps; Continuous Deployment applies to web apps
Explanation: In Continuous Deployment, every commit that passes the pipeline goes to production automatically. In Continuous Delivery, the pipeline produces a release candidate that is always deployable, but the actual production release can be a business decision.
3Which is a primary purpose of Continuous Integration (CI)?
A.To replace unit tests with integration tests
B.To merge developer changes frequently and verify them with automated builds and tests so integration problems surface early
C.To eliminate the need for source control branching policies
D.To deploy code to production on every commit
Explanation: CI keeps a shared mainline healthy by integrating changes frequently and validating them through automated builds and tests, exposing integration defects within minutes rather than weeks.
4Which deployment strategy routes a small percentage of production traffic to a new version first, expands gradually, and rolls back automatically if error budgets degrade?
A.Big-bang release
B.Blue-green deployment
C.Canary deployment
D.Recreate strategy
Explanation: A canary deployment exposes the new version to a small slice of users (often 1-5%), monitors health and SLOs, and progressively shifts more traffic. Automatic rollback can be tied to error-budget burn or SLO breach.
5In a blue-green deployment, what is the role of the 'green' environment after the cutover?
A.It is destroyed immediately to save cost
B.It serves all production traffic while 'blue' is kept idle as a fallback for fast rollback
C.It runs the previous release as the source of truth
D.It serves only internal staging traffic
Explanation: After cutover the green (new) environment receives production traffic while the blue (previous) environment is held warm. If a regression appears, traffic is routed back to blue for an instant rollback.
6Which branching model is most commonly recommended for high-throughput Continuous Delivery?
A.GitFlow with long-lived develop and release branches
B.Trunk-based development with short-lived feature branches
C.Branch-per-environment (dev/test/staging/prod branches)
D.Permanent release branches kept for years for hotfixes
Explanation: Trunk-based development - integrating work to main at least daily via short-lived branches - is the model the DORA research consistently links to elite delivery performance and is the model CD architectures favor.
7What is a feature flag (feature toggle) primarily used for in CD?
A.Encrypting secrets at runtime
B.Decoupling deployment of code from the release of functionality so unfinished or risky features can be hidden, exposed, or rolled back without redeploying
C.Compressing artifact binaries
D.Replacing version control branching with file-system snapshots
Explanation: A feature flag is a runtime switch (often configured per user/segment/percentage) that decouples deploy from release. It lets teams ship dark, ramp exposure, A/B test, and kill-switch issues without a rollback deploy.
8Which of these is a popular hosted feature-flagging platform?
A.LaunchDarkly
B.Pulumi
C.Trivy
D.Cosign
Explanation: LaunchDarkly is a widely used hosted feature-flag platform; Unleash and Flagsmith are common open-source alternatives.
9What does 'dark launching' mean?
A.Releasing only on weekends to limit user impact
B.Deploying new code to production but keeping it hidden from users (often serving traffic in shadow) to validate behavior before exposure
C.Releasing without telling the security team
D.Pushing a release without any monitoring
Explanation: A dark launch ships code to production silently - frequently behind a feature flag or as shadow traffic - so that performance, capacity, and correctness can be validated under real conditions before users see it.
10Which of the four DORA metrics measures the time from a code change being committed to it running successfully in production?
A.Mean time to recovery (MTTR)
B.Change failure rate
C.Lead time for changes
D.Deployment frequency
Explanation: Lead time for changes measures elapsed time between commit and successful production deployment, indicating pipeline efficiency and batch size.

About the Continuous Delivery Architecture Exam

DevOps Institute Continuous Delivery Architecture (CDA) is an intermediate-level certification for practitioners who design and operate continuous delivery pipelines and DevOps toolchains. It covers CD concepts, design principles, microservices and containers, continuous integration, continuous testing, deployment and release strategies (blue-green, canary, feature flags, GitOps), continuous monitoring, infrastructure and toolchains, and pipeline security.

Assessment

40 multiple-choice questions delivered through PeopleCert online proctoring or accredited training-partner channels

Time Limit

90 minutes

Passing Score

65% (26/40)

Exam Fee

Voucher pricing varies by accredited training partner (DevOps Institute / PeopleCert)

Continuous Delivery Architecture Exam Content Outline

10%

CD Concepts and Architecting for Continuous Delivery

CI, CD, and continuous deployment definitions; relationships between CD, DevOps, Lean, and Agile; and design principles that make an architecture continuously deliverable.

10%

Culture and the CD Architect Role

Generative culture, shared ownership across Dev, QA, Sec, and Ops, the architect's role in enabling flow, and Team Topologies patterns including platform teams and paved roads.

10%

Design Practices, Microservices, and Containers

Loosely coupled architecture, microservices trade-offs, the Strangler Fig pattern, immutable infrastructure, containers, event-driven design, and schema registries.

15%

Continuous Integration and Branching Strategies

CI principles, trunk-based development versus GitFlow, short-lived branches, pipeline as code, fast feedback in the commit stage, and provider-side contract verification.

10%

Continuous Testing in CD Pipelines

Test pyramid, contract testing with Pact, performance testing with k6 or Gatling, shift-left and shift-right, automated canary analysis, and chaos engineering.

15%

Continuous Delivery, Deployment, and Release Strategies

Blue-green, canary with linear and exponential ramps, rolling, recreate, A/B testing, dark launching, shadow traffic, feature flags (LaunchDarkly, Unleash, Flagsmith), Argo Rollouts, and progressive delivery.

10%

Continuous Monitoring, Observability, and Feedback

Logs, metrics, distributed traces, OpenTelemetry, SLOs and error budgets, synthetic monitoring, RUM, and observability as an active control on releases.

10%

Infrastructure, Toolchains, and GitOps

Pipeline tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Spinnaker, Tekton), IaC (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible), GitOps with Argo CD and Flux, Helm, Kustomize, and artifact repositories.

10%

Security Assurance and Pipeline Security

Secrets management, OIDC short-lived credentials, SBOMs, SLSA, Sigstore Cosign signing, in-toto attestations, OPA Gatekeeper, and policy as code.

How to Pass the Continuous Delivery Architecture Exam

What You Need to Know

  • Passing score: 65% (26/40)
  • Assessment: 40 multiple-choice questions delivered through PeopleCert online proctoring or accredited training-partner channels
  • Time limit: 90 minutes
  • Exam fee: Voucher pricing varies by accredited training partner

Keys to Passing

  • Complete 500+ practice questions
  • Score 80%+ consistently before scheduling
  • Focus on highest-weighted sections
  • Use our AI tutor for tough concepts

Continuous Delivery Architecture Study Tips from Top Performers

1Memorize the differences between continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment because the exam repeatedly tests this vocabulary distinction.
2Master deployment-strategy trade-offs: blue-green for fast rollback, canary (linear and exponential) for progressive exposure, rolling for stateless K8s defaults, A/B for outcome comparison, and dark launching for shadow validation.
3Tie every feature-flag question back to decoupling deploy from release, kill-switching, and progressive ramp; recognize LaunchDarkly, Unleash, and Flagsmith as common platforms.
4Practice the four DORA metrics in scenarios: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service (MTTR), and how progressive delivery improves all four.
5Know the GitOps four principles (declarative, versioned and immutable, pulled automatically, continuously reconciled) and the Argo CD vs Flux landscape.
6Connect supply-chain answers to SLSA levels, in-toto provenance, Sigstore Cosign signing, SBOMs (SPDX, CycloneDX), and OIDC short-lived credentials in CI runners.
7Understand the expand-and-contract (parallel change) pattern for zero-downtime database schema migrations, plus running migrations as Kubernetes Jobs decoupled from app deploys.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the CDA exam format in 2026?

The DevOps Institute CDA exam is 40 multiple-choice questions with a 90-minute time limit and a 65% passing score, which means 26 correct answers out of 40. It is delivered through PeopleCert online proctoring or through accredited DevOps Institute training-partner channels.

How much does the CDA exam cost?

DevOps Institute and PeopleCert do not publish a single public list price for CDA. Voucher pricing typically depends on the accredited training partner, the region, and whether the voucher is bundled with a training course or a Take2 re-sit option.

Which areas does the CDA certification cover?

The DevOps Institute CDA syllabus covers CD concepts, the CD architect role and culture, design practices including microservices and containers, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous delivery and deployment strategies, continuous monitoring, infrastructure and toolchains, and security assurance.

How long should I study for CDA?

Most engineers with DevOps Foundation and hands-on CI/CD experience can prepare in about 30-50 focused hours. Spend the most time on deployment strategies, GitOps, IaC, and pipeline security because those areas drive the majority of scenario questions.

Are there prerequisites for CDA?

DevOps Institute strongly recommends DevOps Foundation before attempting CDA. There is no enforced prerequisite at exam registration, but the CDA exam assumes working familiarity with DevOps culture, CI/CD pipelines, and modern automation tooling.

How long is the CDA certification valid?

Public DevOps Institute and training-partner sources describe CDA as a lifetime credential. PeopleCert is rolling out renewal pathways across DevOps Institute certifications, so candidates should confirm current renewal rules with PeopleCert before scheduling.

Who should take the CDA exam?

CDA is designed for engineers, architects, QA, security, and operations professionals who design or operate end-to-end DevOps deployment pipelines and toolchains supporting continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous testing, and potentially continuous deployment.