GitOps Certified Associate (CGOA)
Validate foundational understanding of GitOps principles, declarative infrastructure management, continuous reconciliation, automated deployment workflows, and GitOps security and compliance standards.
Official Exam Specification & Quick Facts
Question Difficulty Breakdown
Exam Guidelines & Simulation Rules
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
The CGOA is a multiple-choice certification from the CNCF and Linux Foundation validating foundational knowledge of GitOps principles, terminology, workflows, and cloud-native practices.
The CGOA is a 90-minute multiple-choice examination consisting of 60 questions administered online with remote proctoring.
A passing scaled score of 75% is required. Scoring results are provided immediately upon exam completion.
Defined by the OpenGitOps CNCF working group: (1) Declarative (desired state expressed declaratively), (2) Versioned and Immutable (state stored in Git/version control), (3) Pulled Automatically (software agents pull desired state), and (4) Continuously Reconciled (software agents continuously observe and apply differences).
Push-based uses external CI runners that possess cluster admin credentials to push changes. Pull-based runs agents inside the cluster that pull declarations from Git, keeping credentials securely inside the cluster.
In GitOps, the live system is continuously compared against Git. If someone manually changes a resource via kubectl, the GitOps controller detects the drift and automatically overwrites it with the state in Git.
They manage configuration DRYness and environment variants. Kustomize uses base and overlay directories without templating engines. Helm uses parameterized templates and values.yaml files.
Secrets cannot be stored in plaintext in Git. GitOps utilizes encryption-at-rest solutions like Sealed Secrets, Mozilla SOPS, or External Secrets Operator synchronizing from Vault or cloud KMS.
A Monorepo houses configurations for all environments and applications in one repository, simplifying global changes. A Polyrepo isolates environments or microservices into separate repositories, providing strict RBAC boundaries.
Every change to production requires a Git commit or pull request, providing an immutable audit trail of who made changes, who reviewed and approved them, when they occurred, and why.
Argo CD and Flux are the two leading CNCF graduated GitOps controllers implementing automated pull-based reconciliation.
DevOps engineers, cloud architects, release managers, software developers, and platform engineers adopting declarative GitOps delivery pipelines.