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
You need to release a change that spans three dependent services. How would you orchestrate CI/CD pipelines to build, test, and deploy these services safely while minimizing user impact? Describe artifact promotion, contract/compatibility testing, release ordering, and strategies to roll back partially applied changes.
MediumSystem Design
0 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.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
At scale, your GitOps controllers (e.g., ArgoCD) frequently fall behind and cause reconciliation errors and drift due to rapid changes. Diagnose likely root causes and propose mitigations such as batching changes, rate-limiting controllers, horizontal scaling, repository layout changes, and controller configuration tuning to improve resilience.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Describe how to integrate HashiCorp Vault into a CI/CD pipeline to provide ephemeral credentials during deployment. Include authentication methods (AppRole, Kubernetes auth), token TTL handling, secrets retrieval patterns (build-time vs runtime), and how to reduce the risk of secrets leaking into logs or artifacts.
HardTechnical
0 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.
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