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.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Propose SLOs and an error-budget policy that connect deployment frequency to user-facing reliability. Explain how the pipeline should react when error budget is exhausted (e.g., stricter gates, temporary deployment freeze), and whether these controls should be automated or human-driven.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Describe how to integrate Terraform into CI/CD: run terraform fmt, validate, and plan in pull requests; store plan artifacts for review; require human approval or an automated gating process for terraform apply to production; and use remote state backends. Discuss drift detection and remediation approaches.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Design a cache key strategy for CI dependency caches (npm, pip, maven) that reduces cache misses for small code changes while ensuring invalidation when dependencies change. Explain how to use lockfile checksums, restore keys, and partial-match strategies across branches and services.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
How would you implement code review and change control for pipeline definitions (Jenkinsfiles, GitHub Actions workflows, GitLab CI YAML) to prevent regressions and enforce organizational policies? Include automated linting, policy checks, required reviewers, and a mechanism for emergency changes.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
An attacker exfiltrated a secret via a compromised third-party GitHub Action used in CI runs. Describe detection, containment, remediation (credential rotation, revoking tokens, rebuilding runners), stakeholder communication, and long-term prevention (pinning actions, vetting, network isolation, and supply-chain controls).
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