300-910 Implementing DevOps Solutions and Practices Using Cisco Platforms (DEVOPS) Practice Questions
Prepare for 300-910 with more than an answer.
- Exam fee
- $300 USD
- Level
- Specialist
- Valid for
- 3 years
Domains covered on the exam 6
- CI/CD Pipeline20%
- Packaging and Delivery of Applications15%
- Automating Infrastructure20%
- Cloud and Multicloud15%
- Logging, Monitoring, and Metrics20%
- Security10%
- 1
A large enterprise is adopting NetDevOps practices to manage its global network. They have hundreds of network engineers with varying levels of automation expertise. The goal is to create a centralized system for running Ansible playbooks that provides role-based access control (RBAC), a graphical user interface for non-experts, and a centralized audit log of all changes. Which tool would be most appropriate to meet these requirements?
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Correct answer: C
AWX (the open-source upstream project for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform) is specifically designed to address these enterprise needs. It provides a web-based UI for managing inventories, credentials, and job templates, which simplifies execution for less experienced users. Crucially, it offers robust RBAC to control who can run which automation jobs, and it maintains a detailed, centralized audit trail of all playbook runs, which is essential for compliance and troubleshooting in a large organization.
- 2
A DevOps team is deploying a stateless application to a Kubernetes cluster. To improve performance and reduce costs, they need to ensure that pods can be scheduled on nodes with available resources anywhere in the cluster, without being tied to specific storage volumes. Which of the following Kubernetes features are essential for achieving this flexible, stateless deployment? (Select THREE).
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Correct answer: A, B, D
- 3
A DevOps engineer is troubleshooting a failed application deployment on Kubernetes. The
kubectl get podscommand shows a pod is in aCrashLoopBackOffstate. What is the most effectivekubectlcommand to run next to investigate the root cause of the pod failure?Show answer details
Correct answer: B
A
CrashLoopBackOffstatus means the container inside the pod is starting and then exiting with an error code repeatedly. The most direct way to see why the container is failing is to inspect its standard output and standard error streams. Thekubectl logscommand retrieves these logs, which typically contain the application's error messages or stack traces that reveal the root cause.kubectl describeis useful for viewing events and configuration, but the logs are primary for application-level errors. - 4
Case Study:
A retail company, 'StyleSphere', is modernizing its e-commerce platform. They have broken down their monolithic application into several microservices, including 'product-catalog', 'user-accounts', and 'shopping-cart'. The entire infrastructure is managed as code using Terraform and deployed to a Kubernetes cluster. All code and Terraform configurations are stored in GitHub.
The platform team has designed a CI/CD pipeline in Jenkins to automate deployments. A key business requirement is to minimize the risk of deploying faulty updates to all users at once. They want to release new features to a small subset of live traffic (approximately 5% of users) for a period of observation before proceeding with a full rollout. If monitoring dashboards show an increase in error rates or latency for the new version, the team must be able to quickly and automatically revert the change.
The current pipeline automates the build, containerization, and unit testing of each microservice. The final stage of the pipeline needs to be designed to handle the deployment to the Kubernetes production cluster according to the business requirements. The team is using a service mesh to manage traffic routing within the cluster.
Which release deployment strategy should the StyleSphere team implement in the final stage of their Jenkins pipeline?
Show answer details
Correct answer: C
The requirements explicitly call for releasing to a small subset of live traffic (5%) for observation before a full rollout. This is the definition of a Canary Release. This strategy allows the team to test the new version with real user traffic while minimizing the blast radius of any potential issues. The use of a service mesh is ideal for implementing this, as it can precisely control the percentage of traffic routed to the new (canary) version versus the old (stable) version. It also facilitates quick rollbacks by simply shifting traffic back to the stable version.
- 5
Case Study:
An e-commerce company, 'UrbanCart', is experiencing intermittent checkout failures during peak shopping events. Their platform consists of multiple Java-based microservices (Orders, Payments, Inventory, Shipping) deployed on-premises. The operations team uses AppDynamics for application performance monitoring. During a recent flash sale, the average response time for the 'Place Order' business transaction spiked dramatically, leading to customer complaints and lost revenue.
Upon initial investigation, the team observes high CPU utilization on the Payments service, but the root cause is unclear. The transaction snapshots for the slow 'Place Order' requests show significant time spent in a method call from the Orders service to the Payments service. However, the Payments service itself does not show a corresponding long-running internal method. The team needs to pinpoint the exact source of the latency.
Which AppDynamics feature should the team use to trace the full execution path of the slow transactions and identify the specific code-level issue causing the bottleneck?
graph TD User -->|Place Order| A[Orders Service] A --> B{Payments Service} A --> C[Inventory Service] A --> D[Shipping Service] B --> E((External Payment Gateway))Show answer details
Correct answer: C
The scenario describes a classic distributed application problem where latency in one service impacts another. Transaction Snapshots are the primary tool in AppDynamics for this type of analysis. They capture the end-to-end execution flow of a specific transaction instance. By examining the call graph within the snapshot, the team can see every method call, its duration, and its context across service boundaries. This allows them to drill down past the initial observation (slow call to Payments service) and identify the specific, problematic line of code, database query, or external call within the Payments service that is the true root cause of the delay.
- 6
A financial services company is containerizing a legacy Java application using Docker. The security team mandates that the final container image must not include the JDK, build tools like Maven, or any intermediate build artifacts. Furthermore, the image size must be minimized. Which Dockerfile feature is most effective for meeting these requirements?
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Correct answer: B
A multi-stage build is the ideal solution. It allows you to use one stage with a full JDK and Maven to compile the application and build the JAR file, and a second, final stage that starts from a minimal JRE base image and copies only the compiled application artifact. This ensures no build tools or intermediate files are present in the final image, directly addressing both security and size requirements.
- 7
A DevOps team is responsible for a multi-cloud deployment of a critical application running on Kubernetes clusters in both AWS (EKS) and Azure (AKS). They need a secure method to store database credentials that can be accessed by pods in either cluster without hardcoding them into container images or deployment manifests. Which approach provides the most secure, cloud-agnostic, and centrally manageable solution?
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Correct answer: C
HashiCorp Vault is a dedicated secrets management tool designed to be cloud-agnostic. By deploying a central Vault cluster, you create a single source of truth for secrets. The Vault Agent Injector can be deployed to both Kubernetes clusters, allowing pods to authenticate using their Kubernetes Service Account and receive secrets dynamically via a sidecar container. This approach is highly secure, centralized, and avoids vendor lock-in, making it the best choice for a multi-cloud scenario.
- 8
During a security review of a CI/CD pipeline, it was discovered that developers are building container images on their local machines and pushing them directly to the production container registry. This practice introduces significant security risks. Which TWO of the following methods should be implemented in the CI/CD pipeline to mitigate these risks and enforce a secure software supply chain? (Select TWO).
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Correct answer: A, B
- 9
A platform engineering team wants to provide application developers with a standardized, repeatable way to deploy their applications to Kubernetes. They decide to use 'golden images' for their base containers. True or False: In this context, a 'golden image' refers to a pre-configured virtual machine template stored in vSphere.
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Correct answer: B
This statement is false. While 'golden image' can refer to a VM template in a traditional infrastructure context, in the context of containerized application deployment for Kubernetes, it refers to a standardized, pre-configured base container image. This base image would be stored in a container registry (like Docker Hub or ECR) and would include common dependencies, security configurations, and monitoring agents required by the organization.
- 10
A NetDevOps team is building a CI/CD pipeline to manage Cisco IOS XE router configurations using Terraform. A crucial requirement is to verify the intended operational state before applying any changes. The pipeline needs a step that generates an execution plan, showing what actions Terraform will take to modify the infrastructure, without actually performing them. Which Terraform command should be used for this pre-check validation step?
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Correct answer: C
The
terraform plancommand is used specifically to create an execution plan. It compares the desired state defined in the Terraform configuration files with the actual state of the remote infrastructure and outputs the set of changes that will be made. This 'dry run' capability is essential for pre-check validation in a CI/CD pipeline, allowing for review and approval before any changes are applied withterraform apply.
