CompTIA’s AutoOps+ exam goes live as AT0-001 V1 in June 2026, and the beta window for AT1-001 closed on January 30 of this year. After 20 years sitting in classrooms with IT operations people, I can tell you why this credential matters in a way that a lot of the marketing copy misses. It’s the first CompTIA exam built from the ground up to validate automation work as a stand-alone discipline rather than tucking those skills into the back half of Cloud+ or Linux+. If your day job already involves writing pipeline code, building Ansible roles, or maintaining Jenkins or GitHub Actions workflows, this is the exam that finally puts a name on what you do.
AutoOps+ is the second release in CompTIA’s new Expansion Series. The first was SecAI+, which went live earlier this year. The Expansion Series sits alongside the foundational stack of A+, Network+, Security+, Linux+, Cloud+, and Server+ instead of replacing anything inside it. Think of these expansion credentials as the specialized layer you add once you have a solid IT operations base and want to validate skills the core stack only touches lightly. The automation half of modern IT operations is what AutoOps+ targets, while broader sysadmin coverage stays with Linux+, Cloud+, and Server+.
AutoOps+ AT0-001 V1 covers four domains: Automation Coding Concepts (31%), System Configuration (25%), Continuous Integration (24%), and Continuous Delivery (20%). The exam includes both multiple-choice questions and performance-based items, and CompTIA recommends two to three years of core IT operations experience before sitting for it.
What AutoOps+ Actually Tests
When students hear “automation” they often think Bash scripts and scheduled jobs. AutoOps+ tests something broader. The exam objectives document released by CompTIA describes four capability areas that the credential validates: writing and versioning code for automation, configuring systems at scale through infrastructure as code, building and troubleshooting CI pipelines, and applying continuous delivery techniques while following security best practices.
That scope reflects what automation actually looks like in production environments today. The administrator who used to log into 40 servers and run the same patch command on each is now writing a playbook that does it for 4,000 servers and reports back through a pipeline. The exam blueprint follows that work. You’ll see questions on push versus pull provisioning, secrets rotation, artifact registries, hooks and triggers, deployment strategies like blue-green and canary releases, and the difference between service-level objectives and service-level agreements when measuring delivery quality.
Who AutoOps+ Is Built For
CompTIA’s recommended experience profile is specific: two to three years in a core IT operations role such as a network, cloud, or systems administrator. The recommended prior certifications are Network+, Linux+, Cloud+, and Server+, or equivalent experience. AutoOps+ assumes you already understand how operating systems, networks, and cloud platforms work. It then tests whether you can automate the work of operating them.
The target job roles include automation engineer, cloud operations specialist, systems administrator moving toward DevOps work, IT support engineer expanding into infrastructure automation, and DevOps analyst. If you sit in any of those seats today, the exam objectives will read like a job description rather than an abstract study guide. That’s by design. The CompTIA item writers for AT0-001 pulled task themes directly from the work happening inside enterprise operations teams during 2024 and 2025.
Who shouldn’t pursue AutoOps+? Two groups come to mind from the students I’ve worked with. Anyone with less than a year of hands-on systems work will struggle, because the exam assumes you know what an init system, a YAML file, and an HTTP 401 response are without explanation. Pure application developers who don’t touch infrastructure are the other group. AutoOps+ measures operations skills applied through code, not application coding. If you write features for a SaaS product but never touch the deployment pipeline or the underlying compute, this credential isn’t aimed at you.
One nuance worth flagging for anyone reading the CompTIA recommended experience list. You don’t need all four prerequisite certs to sit the exam. CompTIA recommends them as background knowledge, not as gatekeeping requirements. I’ve worked with several admins who held Network+ and Linux+ but skipped Cloud+ and Server+ because their job role already covered that ground. They were still well prepared for the AutoOps+ blueprint.
The Four Domains in Detail
The domain weights on AT0-001 V1 tell you where to spend study time. Automation Coding Concepts gets the largest share at 31 percent, with System Configuration close behind. Together, those two domains make up 56 percent of the exam, which is significant. Continuous Integration sits at 24 percent and Continuous Delivery at 20 percent.
Automation Coding Concepts (31%)
This is the largest domain, which surprises some students. They expect a configuration management exam to weight configuration heaviest. But CompTIA’s reasoning is sound. Without solid coding fundamentals, the rest of the exam material falls apart. You need to read a Python or PowerShell snippet and predict what it returns, spot a syntax error in a YAML file, and know what a git rebase does and when not to do one.
Topics tested here include variables, conditionals, loops, functions, lists, dictionaries, exception handling, and string manipulation. You’ll also see questions on Git fundamentals, branching strategies, pull request workflows, REST API verbs and status codes, and JSON and YAML parsing. The exam is language-agnostic in concept but the example snippets I’ve seen lean toward Python and Bash with some PowerShell coverage.
Lab work for this domain should focus on writing small, working scripts rather than memorizing syntax tables. Build something that calls a cloud API, handles the response, retries on failure, and logs the outcome. That single exercise touches half a dozen exam objectives at once.
System Configuration (25%)
System Configuration is where infrastructure as code shows up on the exam. You’ll see questions on the difference between push provisioning (where a control node pushes changes to managed systems, the Ansible model) and pull provisioning (where managed nodes pull configurations from a central source, the Puppet or Chef model). Idempotency, drift detection, declarative versus imperative configuration, and managing state files for tools like Terraform all show up as well.
The exam doesn’t tie itself to one specific tool. Rather than writing a 40-line Ansible playbook from scratch, you’ll be asked to read one and identify what it does, spot what’s broken, or predict the result of running it. The same applies to Terraform plans and Puppet manifests. Tool literacy across the major options carries more weight than deep expertise in any single one.
Continuous Integration (24%)
CI questions focus on automated pipelines that build code, run tests against it, and package the output for deployment. CompTIA explicitly names Jenkins and GitHub Actions in the exam objectives, so students should at least be familiar with both. The blueprint also covers GitLab CI workflows by extension, since the concepts transfer cleanly across CI platforms.
Expect questions on pipeline structure including stages and jobs, triggers based on commits or pull requests, webhook configuration, artifact storage and versioning, dependency caching, and parallel execution. Secrets management is heavily tested. You should know how to store credentials in a secrets vault, inject them into pipeline runs at build time, and rotate them on a schedule. Hardcoded passwords in pipeline YAML are a common wrong-answer trap on the exam.
Continuous Delivery (20%)
CD is the smallest domain by weight but it covers the highest-stakes material. Deployment strategies make up most of the questions here. You’ll need to compare blue-green deployments (where you run two identical production environments and switch traffic between them) against canary deployments (where you route a small percentage of traffic to a new version before scaling up) and rolling deployments (where instances are updated in batches). Each strategy has specific use cases and rollback implications that the exam tests.
The service-level material in this domain is where ops-leaning candidates have an edge over dev-leaning candidates. SLOs (service-level objectives) are internal targets. SLAs (service-level agreements) are external commitments backed by penalties. MTTR (mean time to recovery) measures how fast you recover from incidents. The exam will test whether you can pick the right metric for a given scenario and explain what feedback loops connect monitoring data back to pipeline decisions.
Exam Format and Performance-Based Questions
AT0-001 V1 uses CompTIA’s standard exam format with both multiple-choice questions and performance-based items. The official exam objectives document released in 2025 lists the question count as a target value that CompTIA traditionally publishes closer to launch, but the structure follows the same pattern as other Plus-series exams. Expect a mix of standard multiple-choice, multiple-response, and a smaller number of performance-based scenarios where you interact with simulated tools rather than picking from answer options.
The PBQs are where AutoOps+ gets interesting for instructors. CompTIA’s PBQ engine has matured significantly over the past few exam cycles, and for an automation-focused exam, you can expect scenarios that ask you to read or fix a YAML file, drag pipeline stages into the correct sequence, or identify which configuration would produce a given deployment outcome. These items take longer than multiple-choice questions and they count for more points. Students who race through MCQs and then hurry through PBQs at the end usually leave points on the table.
My standing advice for any CompTIA exam with PBQs is to do them first. The Pearson VUE testing engine lets you flag and skip questions. Walk into the exam, skip past the multiple-choice section, complete the PBQs while you’re still fresh, then come back and work through the MCQs. This pacing strategy has helped students in the bootcamp room for years across Security+, CySA+, and now SecAI+ as well.
Where AutoOps+ Fits in a CompTIA Career Stack
AutoOps+ doesn’t replace anything on the existing CompTIA roadmap. It adds a specialized credential that sits next to your operations foundation. Most students I work with already hold Network+, Security+, and either Linux+, Cloud+, or Server+. AutoOps+ is the natural next step for that profile when the job role shifts toward automation work. The same way SecAI+ specializes Security+ into the AI security domain, AutoOps+ specializes the operations stack into the automation domain. Our earlier write-up on the SecAI+ beta exam covers the parallel Expansion Series experience for security professionals.
For students still mapping out a longer certification path, AutoOps+ works as a mid-career specialization rather than a first credential. A practical path looks like: A+ or Network+ to cover the foundation, Linux+ or Cloud+ to build operating system and platform depth, Security+ to validate the security baseline that all IT pros now need, and then AutoOps+ once you have hands-on automation work to draw on. That sequence mirrors the way most enterprise IT operations careers actually progress. The CompTIA stackable certifications guide shows how Expansion Series credentials interact with the older stackable framework.
One question I get often is whether AutoOps+ replaces or competes with vendor automation certs like the Red Hat Certified Engineer or AWS DevOps Engineer credentials. The answer is no. AutoOps+ is vendor-neutral, which is its strength and its limitation. It validates concepts that apply across tools and platforms. Vendor certs validate deep expertise in a specific ecosystem. Most senior automation engineers eventually hold one of each, and they complement rather than overlap.
Pacing note for DoD readers: AutoOps+ has not been mapped to DoD 8140 work roles as of the May 2026 publication date, and CompTIA has not yet announced an ANAB ISO 17024 accreditation timeline for the new credential. Both items will likely follow the launch by a year or more based on the SecurityX and Cloud+ accreditation timelines. If you need a DoD-approved automation credential right now, this isn’t it. Watch the DCWF baseline table at the DoD Cyber Exchange for updates once accreditation lands.
How to Prepare for AT0-001 V1
Preparation for AutoOps+ looks different from preparation for older CompTIA exams because the material rewards hands-on practice more than rote memorization. I’ve watched students try to study this kind of content purely from books and slide decks. They fail PBQs. The exam is built around scenarios where you have to read or modify code, and that skill only develops through writing and breaking actual pipelines.
A study plan I’d recommend to most candidates with the assumed two to three years of ops experience: spend the first three weeks on the Coding domain, building small Python and Bash scripts that interact with REST APIs, practicing Git operations, and getting comfortable reading code in YAML and JSON. The next two weeks belong to System Configuration, building a real Ansible setup against a small lab and walking through a Terraform plan and apply cycle. Allocate two weeks to CI by setting up a working pipeline in both Jenkins and GitHub Actions for a sample repository. The last two weeks cover CD concepts, deployment strategies, and SLO metrics, plus full-length practice exams under timed conditions. That’s nine weeks of focused study, which lines up with what most working ops pros can actually sustain alongside a full-time job. Students who try to compress this into three or four weeks usually retake the exam. Pacing matters more than total study hours, because the PBQ material rewards deliberate practice over cramming.
For students who lack one of the prerequisite areas, add two to three weeks of foundation work in that area before starting the AutoOps+ blueprint. Trying to learn Linux fundamentals and Ansible playbooks at the same time slows both efforts down. Build the foundation first, then layer automation on top of it.
A lab exercise I run with students at the start of every automation-focused class: build a small repository with a working application, a Dockerfile, a pipeline definition for either Jenkins or GitHub Actions that lints, tests, builds, and publishes an artifact, and a simple deployment script that handles rollback. If you can build and explain that single lab end to end, you’ve touched objectives from all four AutoOps+ domains in a single project. That’s the level of integration the exam expects you to demonstrate on PBQs.
What This Means for IT Operations Hiring
CompTIA built AutoOps+ in response to a hiring problem that operations managers have been telling them about for the past several years. Job descriptions for sysadmin and ops engineer roles increasingly require automation skills, but there has been no good vendor-neutral way to validate those skills on a resume. Vendor certs from HashiCorp, Red Hat, or AWS work for candidates already inside those ecosystems, but they don’t translate cleanly when the hiring company uses a different toolset.
The expectation in the certification industry is that AutoOps+ will gain traction in two specific hiring contexts. Federal contractors and DoD-adjacent shops that already use CompTIA as their baseline reference are the obvious early adopters. Once accreditation lands, AutoOps+ becomes the natural validation credential for automation work in those environments. The other context is enterprise IT shops running mixed environments where no single vendor cert covers everything. A vendor-neutral automation credential simplifies the hiring filter for those teams.
For candidates considering whether to pursue AutoOps+ in 2026 or wait, my honest read is that early adopters benefit. The first cohort of certified holders has scarcity value while the exam is new, and the renewal cycle on CompTIA exams runs three years, so certifying now gives you the full window before any V2 update lands.
Frequently Asked Questions About AutoOps+
When does CompTIA AutoOps+ launch?
CompTIA AutoOps+ V1 launches in June 2026 with the exam code AT0-001. The beta exam (AT1-001) ran through January 30, 2026. Beta candidates who passed will receive their results once the live exam launches.
What are the AutoOps+ exam domains and weights?
AT0-001 V1 has four domains: Automation Coding Concepts at 31 percent, System Configuration at 25 percent, Continuous Integration at 24 percent, and Continuous Delivery at 20 percent. The first two domains together account for 56 percent of the exam.
What experience does CompTIA recommend before taking AutoOps+?
CompTIA recommends two to three years of experience in a core IT operations role such as network, cloud, or systems administration. Recommended prior certifications include Network+, Linux+, Cloud+, and Server+, but none of those are formal prerequisites for sitting the exam.
Does AutoOps+ test specific automation tools?
The exam is largely vendor-neutral, but CompTIA explicitly names Jenkins and GitHub Actions in the CI domain objectives. Configuration management questions reference push and pull models that map to tools like Ansible, Puppet, and Chef. Infrastructure as code questions cover concepts that apply to Terraform and similar tools without requiring deep expertise in any one platform.
Is AutoOps+ approved under DoD 8140?
Not as of May 2026. AutoOps+ has not yet been mapped to DoD 8140 work roles, and CompTIA has not announced an ANAB ISO 17024 accreditation timeline for the credential. Both items will likely follow the launch by a year or more based on accreditation patterns from previous CompTIA releases.
How does AutoOps+ compare to vendor DevOps certifications?
AutoOps+ is vendor-neutral and validates concepts that apply across automation tools and cloud platforms. Vendor credentials like AWS Certified DevOps Engineer or Red Hat Certified Engineer go deeper into specific ecosystems. The two types serve different hiring filters and pair well together rather than competing for the same shelf space on a resume.
How long does AutoOps+ certification last?
AutoOps+ follows the standard CompTIA renewal cycle of three years from the date you earn the certification. You can renew through the Continuing Education program by accumulating qualifying training, work experience, or higher-level certifications during that window.
Director, Educational Services | Training Camp
Mark Sabo is the Director of Educational Services at Training Camp, where he oversees the training team, course design, and certification program development. He holds a B.S. in Information Sciences and Technology from Penn State University and more than 50 industry certifications. Mark joined Training Camp in 2005, became a Technical Trainer in 2007, and assumed his current leadership role in 2015. His specialty is practice exam development and exam preparation strategy, built from years of teaching students in the classroom and studying how certification exams are constructed. His writing focuses on the technical details that matter most to professionals preparing for high stakes exams.