Training, exams and certification
Training, exams and certification
Forty questions in sixty minutes, open book, sixty-five per cent to pass. An open-book paper with no prerequisites and no mandatory course — which makes it the easiest exam here to sit, and an easy one to underestimate.
The DevOps Foundation certificate covers the vocabulary, principles and practices of DevOps across the whole delivery chain.
| Questions | 40, multiple choice |
|---|---|
| Duration | 60 minutes |
| Pass mark | 65% — 26 correct answers out of 40 |
| Materials | Open book — the official training materials may be referenced |
| Prerequisites | None |
| Accredited training | Not required |
| Languages | Eight — English, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish |
| Renewal | Every three years, with 60 CPD points |
Sixty minutes across forty questions is ninety seconds each. That is the same ratio as ITIL 5 Foundation — except ITIL Foundation is closed book and this one is not.
An open book with ninety seconds a question is a trap dressed as a gift. There is time for perhaps four or five genuine lookups across the whole paper. Plan for that number and it helps; treat the materials as a substitute for knowing the content and you will not finish.
Fourteen wrong answers is the margin. Sixty-five per cent sits between ITIL’s sixty-five and PRINCE2’s sixty at Foundation level, so it is unremarkable — but it is stricter than the fifty per cent of the ISO/IEC 27001 Foundation paper.
“DevOps Foundation” sounds like a tooling certificate. It is not. The published coverage runs:
Two of those areas catch people out. Business frameworks asks how DevOps sits alongside ITSM and Agile, which engineers often have opinions about and rarely have definitions for. And culture is examined as content, not as atmosphere — there are named organisational models with named properties.
No prerequisites, no mandatory training, no experience requirement. You can buy an exam voucher with a Learning Resource Kit and sit the paper. Nothing is withheld pending proof of a course.
That is the opposite of the ITIL 5 scheme, where every module above Foundation holds your result until an accredited course is evidenced. Whether the openness is a strength depends on what you want the certificate to say — it certifies that you know the syllabus, and makes no claim about what you have shipped.
Budget four lookups, not forty. Know the material; use the book to settle doubts, not to learn.
Learn the named models. The Three Ways, the Theory of Constraints, the organisational models — the exam tests names and properties, not vibes.
Do not skip the framework overlaps. Agile, ITSM and value stream management are examined alongside the engineering practices.
No. There are no prerequisites and accredited training is not required.
Twenty-six correct answers out of forty. The published figure is 65%.
Yes. The official training materials may be referenced during the exam.
Eight: Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish.
It needs renewing every three years, with 60 CPD points.
Only partly. Automation and toolchains are one area of six; culture, business frameworks and metrics are examined too.
Sources. Every figure on this page comes from PeopleCert’s own published certification pages, checked in September 2026.
GoToCertify will offer the official exam voucher and Learning Resource Kit for the DevOps certifications, with the interactive course alongside it.
Not on sale on GoToCertify yet — we are setting it up. In the meantime the exam facts above are free to use.
