CNPA Dumps with Practice Exam Questions Answers

Modern platform engineering requires security and compliance to be integral parts of the delivery process, not afterthoughts. CI/CD pipelines are the foundation for delivering platform software rapidly and reliably, and integrating SBOM generation and automated vulnerability scanning directly within pipelines ensures that risks are identified early in the lifecycle.

Option B is correct because it reflects recommended practices from cloud native platform engineering standards: SBOMs provide a transparent inventory of all software components, including dependencies, which is crucial for vulnerability management, license compliance, and supply chain security. By automating these steps in CI/CD, teams can maintain both velocity and security without manual overhead.

Option A downplays the relevance of SBOMs for platform software, which is inaccurate because platform components (like Kubernetes operators, ingress controllers, or logging agents) are equally susceptible to vulnerabilities. Option C dismisses automation in favor of periodic audits, which contradicts the shift-left security principle. Option D misunderstands CI/CD’s purpose: security must be integrated, not separated.

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are complementary practices. Option A is correct: CI is a prerequisite for CD. CI focuses on automating code integration by building, testing, and validating changes, ensuring code quality and early detection of defects. CD builds upon CI by automating the process of releasing validated builds into staging and production environments, making delivery repeatable and reliable.

Option B incorrectly treats them as entirely separate. Option C reverses the relationship, as CD cannot exist without CI pipelines. Option D is inaccurate because CI and CD are not interchangeable—they represent distinct stages in the software delivery lifecycle.

Together, CI/CD accelerates software delivery, reduces risk, and improves quality. In platform engineering, CI/CD pipelines are critical enablers of developer productivity and efficient operations.

Simplifying developer access to platform services is a central goal of internal developer platforms (IDPs). Option D is correct because a service catalog with abstracted APIs and automated registration provides a unified interface for developers to consume services without dealing with low-level infrastructure details. This approach combines service discovery with abstraction, offering golden paths and self-service capabilities.

Option A burdens developers with hardcoded dependencies, reducing flexibility and portability. Option B relies on manual documentation, which is error-prone and not dynamic. Option C increases cognitive load by requiring developers to interact directly with Kubernetes APIs, which goes against platform engineering’s goal of reducing complexity.

A service catalog enables developers to provision databases, messaging queues, or APIs with minimal input, while the platform automates backend provisioning and wiring. It also improves consistency, compliance, and observability by embedding platform-wide policies into the service provisioning workflows. This results in a seamless developer experience that accelerates delivery while maintaining governance.

Helm provides native support for managing versioned releases, allowing easy rollback in case of issues. Option A is correct because the helm rollback command reverts the deployment to a previously known stable release without requiring a redeployment from scratch. This ensures fast recovery and minimizes downtime after a faulty upgrade.

Option B (helm upgrade --force) attempts to reapply an upgrade but does not restore the previous version. Option C (helm template) only renders Kubernetes manifests from charts and does not affect running releases. Option D (helm uninstall) removes the release entirely, which is not suitable for quick recovery.

Rollback functionality is essential in platform engineering for resilience and rapid mitigation of production issues. By using helm rollback, teams align with best practices for safe, controlled release management in Kubernetes environments.

In a GitOps-driven multi-cluster environment, centralized configuration management ensures that platform teams can maintain consistency, governance, and security across multiple clusters, all while leveraging Git as the single source of truth. Option B is correct because centralization allows teams to enforce policies, apply configurations, and audit changes across environments in a traceable and reproducible way. This supports compliance, as every change is version-controlled, peer-reviewed, and automatically reconciled by tools like Argo CD or Flux.

Option A is misleading—centralized management does not mean clusters must have identical configurations; it enables consistent patterns while still allowing environment-specific overlays or customizations (e.g., dev vs. prod). Option C is incorrect because GitOps tools remain essential for continuous reconciliation between desired and actual state. Option D is also incorrect because centralized management does not remove flexibility—it supports parameterization and customization per cluster.

By combining centralization with declarative configuration and GitOps automation, organizations gain operational efficiency, faster recovery from drift, and improved auditability in multi-cluster scenarios.