Continuous Integration and Delivery Pipelines Questions
Design and implement continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines that reliably build, test, validate, and deploy applications and infrastructure. Topics include pipeline as code practices, defining stages and triggers for builds and tests, automated testing strategies across unit, integration, smoke, and end to end tests, gating and environment promotion, branching and release strategies, artifact management and versioning, and deployment patterns such as rolling updates, blue green deployments, and canary releases. Candidates should be able to design rollback and recovery procedures, integrate infrastructure provisioning into pipelines, select and configure pipeline tooling such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure Pipelines, or cloud vendor pipeline services, and reason about observability and reporting for pipeline health and test execution. Practical considerations include environment parity, pipeline security, secrets handling, pipeline as code best practices, and trade offs between speed and safety.
MediumSystem Design
37 practiced
Design an artifact promotion workflow to move immutable artifacts from dev → staging → prod without rebuilding. Describe artifact tagging or repository layout, permission model, pipeline triggers for promotion, audit trail and provenance recording, and how to prevent accidental overwrites.
EasyTechnical
37 practiced
Explain the differences between unit, integration, smoke, and end-to-end (E2E) tests. For each type state where in the CI/CD pipeline you would run it (e.g., pre-merge, merge-to-main, pre-deploy, nightly) and justify your placement with respect to execution time, flakiness, and confidence provided to SREs and developers.
HardTechnical
29 practiced
Propose a comprehensive strategy to secure the software supply chain in CI/CD: reproducible builds, SBOM generation, artifact signing & attestation, vulnerability gating, provenance tracking for dependencies, and a response playbook for compromised upstream packages. Recommend concrete tooling and where policies should be enforced.
HardTechnical
40 practiced
Your CI/CD control plane (central controllers and configuration) has suffered catastrophic data loss and is unavailable. As the SRE on-call, describe the immediate incident response to restore minimal CI functionality, options to fail over builds or use alternate systems, the full restoration strategy leveraging pipeline-as-code, and long-term mitigations to prevent recurrence.
MediumTechnical
42 practiced
Define a pipeline flow that includes automated checks plus human approval gates for production deployments. Detail who can approve, the approval SLA, how approvals are recorded for audit, and concrete ways to implement these gates in Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
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