DevOps Tools Engineer Version 2.0: Major Changes in a Major Release

In November 2025, LPI launched version 2.0 of the DevOps Tools Engineer exam. This new version is a major release, which leads to significant changes, including the introduction of new topics while other topics were moved to other exams in the LPI program. Today, I would like to share some insights regarding the new exam content.

Since the launch of version 1.0 of our certificate in the rather early days of the DevOps movement, the fields of system administration and software development changed significantly. Best practices evolved, some technologies became de facto standards for supporting DevOps, while others shifted into the typical administration toolbox.

A prominent example is Ansible. Back in 2018, it was an important “DevOps tool”. Over the years, it became a major tool for most system administration tasks. Similarly, creating virtual machine images and managing traditional virtualization turned out to be a common operation procedure and less a developer’s daily duty.

At the same time, containers became the de facto standard for packaging and deploying modern applications. Today, containers, along with their entire ecosystem of tools, are the main technology used by both developers and operators to foster joint responsibility for developing and delivering software products.

LPI implemented this evolution in various changes to its certification track:

• Ansible will be part of the next version of LPIC-2 and hence was removed from version 2.0 of the DevOps Tools Engineer exam.
• Vagrant, Packer, and cloud-init have already been moved to the new LPIC-305 exam, which focuses entirely on virtualization and containerization.
• Version 2.0 of the DevOps Tools Engineer exam has a strong focus on containers. It includes dedicated topics on both application containers with Docker and/or Podman, and Kubernetes orchestration.

We have also adjusted the specificity of some tools and topics. In some topics, a lot of different tools are commonly used. CI/CD is, for example, implemented not just with Jenkins, but also with GitLab CI, Travis CI, and numerous other tools, especially in cloud services. In such cases, the new version of the exam no longer picks one specific tool as an example. Instead, these topics are now covered on a more conceptual level.

On the other hand, in other fields specific tools became dominant. Git became the major source code management system, Prometheus is commonly used for monitoring, and Kubernetes is the major container orchestrator. Where such a de facto standard has come into existence, the new exam version covers this tool in detail.

In short, the new exam version puts container technologies at its core, along with all relevant aspects in the ecosystem, starting from modern software architectures and source code management all the way up to security and observability. Since the new version focuses on fewer tools, it allows better preparation for job roles related to DevOps, and allows for faster exam preparation and targeted training.

There are, of course, numerous ways to support and implement DevOps. The content of our exam covers a well-established and stable open source stack. It includes all major competencies required to work in teams that are responsible for development and operations of software applications.

Finally, I would like to stress a special highlight of the new exam. Along with the exam, we have released comprehensive Learning Materials. They not only help for preparing and training for the exam, but also as a vehicle to build up foundational knowledge, even independently of the actual certification. I would like to encourage anyone who is new to the field to visit learning.lpi.org and check out the new Learning Materials.