GitLab Certified CI/CD Associate Exam
Thinking about becoming a GitLab Certified Professional? To become certified, you must pass an online hands-on certification exam offered worldwide. Review the exam details below.
Estimated Effort: 60 minutes
Exam Format: Multiple choice questions and hands on project submission
Pricing: $150 USD per exam registration
Overview
Individuals who earn GitLab Certified CI/CD Associate certification are able to perform the following tasks.
- Explain what GitLab CI/CD is and why teams use it
- Identify the key components needed for a CI/CD pipeline
- Explain GitLabs’ CI/CD functions
- Verify a new feature
- Scope and persist variables at various levels
- Scaffold out the basics of a test, build, review, and deploy pipeline using feature/topic branching as the review mechanism
- Apply the GitLab release and deployment workflow
- Use artifacts and dependency caching
- Build and deploy images to the GitLab registry
Target Candidate Description
The target candidates are development teams, quality assurance teams, and release engineers.
Recommended Prerequisite Knowledge
The target candidate should have knowledge of the topics covered in the GitLab with Git Essentials course or equivalent experience with Git and GitLab. This course is not appropriate for students with no Git or GitLab knowledge
Self-Paced Course
We recommend you complete the GitLab CI/CD self-paced course prior to taking the exam.
Topics Covered
Below is a list of GitLab features, tools, technologies, and concepts that could appear on the exam. This list is non-exhaustive and is subject to change but meant to give you the general scope of topics on the exam. These features appear in no particular order.
- CI/CD
- Continuous Integration (CI)
- Continuous Delivery (CD)
- Continuous Deployment (CD)
- .gitlab-ci.yml file
- GitLab Runners
- Shared Runners
- Specific Runners
- Group Runners
- Pipelines
- Basic Pipeline
- Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) Pipeline
- Parent-Child Pipelines
- Child Pipelines
- Multi-Project Pipelines
- GitLab Pipeline Graph
- Environments
- Rules
- Cache & Artifacts
- Tags
- Jobs and Scripts
- Order of jobs in a pipeline
- Severity
- Syntax for grouping jobs
- Services and Variables
- Job Keywords
- Dependencies
- Needs
- Parallel
- Trigger
- Common and Uncommon Executors Used at GitLab
- Shell
- Docker
- Docker Machine
- Kubernetes
- Virtual Box
- Parallels
- SSH
- GitLab Security Scanning
- GitLab SAST Scanning
- Secret Detection
- IaC Scanning
- Dependency Scanning
- License Scanning
- Coverage-guided Fuzz Testing
- Container Scanning
- API Security
- DAST
- Operational Container Scanning
Written Assessment
To earn a technical certification, candidates must pass a written assessment made up of two types of questions:
- Multiple choice: Has one correct answer, chosen from a list.
- Multiple response: Has two or more correct answers
Hands-on Lab Assessment
To complete their technical certification, candidates must also submit a hands-on lab through a dedicated GitLab Demo Cloud to demonstrate their ability to create a project and build on it.
Scoring
The written exam consists of 15 questions and a score of 80% is required to pass. Candidates will be notified of their score immediately after completing the exam and are allowed to retake the exam an infinite number of times.
Once the candidate has completed the Hands-on-Exam, a GitLab team member will review and grade the project in the Demo Cloud using the project link that the candidate provided. The candidate will receive their certification results within 7 business days.
FAQ
If you have questions about the exam registration, logistics, or policies, see the GitLab Certifications section of our FAQ page or reach out to us at levelup@gitlab.com.
Purchasing Policies
The following policies apply to individual exam purchases:
- All GitLab certification exam purchases are final. Purchases may not be refunded or exchanged.
- The cost is $150 USD per exam registration.
The following policies apply to bulk exam purchases, or the purchase of certification exam vouchers:
- All GitLab certification exam voucher purchases are final. Exam voucher purchases may not be refunded or exchanged.
- All exam vouchers expire 12 months from the date of purchase. You must register for the exam prior to the voucher expiration date. Exam voucher expiration dates cannot be extended.
During the Exam
Test takers must abide by the following exam rules:
- Test takers must be alone in a quiet environment with a clear desk for the duration of the exam.
- Once started, exams must be completed in one session. Progress will not be saved if the test taker closes the browser window and incomplete exams will not be reviewed for certification.
- Use of any reference materials, resources, and/or other software is not allowed for the duration of the exam.