DevOps Course Exam

The final exam for the DevOps course is designed to evaluate your understanding of core concepts, tooling, and philosophies covered throughout the semester.

Exam Schedule & Registration

The exams will be held on the following dates. Registration via the Study Information System (SIS) is mandatory.

• Early Beta Exam: 30.12.2025 | 14:00 - 16:00 | Room 2005 (Requires manual registration via lecturer)
• Regular Exam 1: 08.01.2026 | 10:15 - 12:00
• Regular Exam 2: 16.01.2026 | 10:15 - 12:00
• Regular Exam 3: 21.01.2026 | 14:15 - 16:00
• Regular Exam 4: 28.01.2026 | 16:15 - 18:00
• Regular Exam 5: 30.01.2026 | 10:15 - 12:00
• Resit Exam: 05.02.2026 | 10:15 - 12:00

Eligibility & Grading

• Important: The exam is not mandatory - if you're satisfied with the grade you get with points from checkpoint, feel free to skip it.
• Prerequisite: You must have earned at least 40 points (out of 80 possible + bonus points) from the checkpoints to be eligible to take the exam.
• Passing Grade: A total of 51 points is required to pass the course.
• Exam Value: The exam is worth a maximum of 30 points.
• Retakes: If your total score falls below 51 points (but you were eligible for the exam), you have the right to a retake.

Exam Format & Rules

• Format: In-class, digital exam using university computers.
• Duration: 90 minutes.
• Allowed Materials:
  • Official course materials (lectures, lab guides).
  • Your own course GitLab repositories.
  • Sensible amount of personal notes written by you, either by hand or printed out.
  • We reserve the right to take a look at your personal notes.
• Forbidden Materials:
  • Chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.).
  • Communication with other students.
  • Google Search / Stack Overflow / other internet.
• Finishing the exam:
  • Use the submit button of the exam page, and you're free to leave.
  • Grading will happen later, manually.

Question Categories

The exam consists of 6 freeform questions, each worth 5 points. Answers should be detailed (approx. 100-150 words), thought-through, and grounded in DevOps best practices.

The questions are distributed across three main categories:

Applied DevOps Scenarios (2 ± 1 Questions)

You will be placed in a hypothetical role (e.g., SRE at a startup) and asked to solve a process or tooling problem.

• Example: "You’re employed to help with a sparkling water company’s website. Developers currently write code directly into production servers using `nano`. Why is this problematic, and what are your first steps to fix it?"
• Key Concepts: CI/CD pipelines, Version Control, Immutable Infrastructure, Security.

DevOps Concepts (2 ± 1 Questions)

Explaining the theoretical foundations of the course.

• Example: "Explain the 'Cattle vs. Pets' analogy. How does this mindset influence modern practices like autoscaling?"
• Key Concepts: Idempotency, GitOps, Shift Left, Observability (Metrics/Logs/Traces), CI/CD pipelines, Version Control, Immutable Infrastructure, Security.

Retrospective & Analysis (2 ± 1 Questions)

Reflecting on your teamwork and technical choices during the semester.

• Example: "What was the technical stack you used for your Reddit-like application? Now, at the end of the course, what would you change, if anything? Why?"
• Key Concepts: Tool selection (Helm vs Kustomize), Architecture decisions, teamwork, lessons learned.

Feedback

We will be using a Google feedback form to collect feedback from the students to improve the course. Please fill it out as soon as possible.

You can stay anonymous if you wish, but we ask to be as honest as needed with the feedback. We will use the feedback only for course improvement purposes.

Feedback form here: https://forms.gle/4rDbgEXSryyfm2JV6