Deployment Risk Management & Rollback Strategy Questions
Discuss strategies for managing deployment risk: canary deployments (detect issues in subset), feature flags (quick disable without rollback), smoke testing post-deployment. Understand rollback procedures: full rollback (restore previous version), partial rollback (revert specific services). Know how to handle complications like database schema changes that can't simply rollback.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Given Prometheus metrics for request latency and error rate for both baseline and canary services, write concise Python pseudocode for a CI/CD hook that evaluates whether to accept the canary. Use configurable windows and failure thresholds (e.g., >20% latency increase AND error-rate delta >0.5%). Explain assumptions about sampling and minimum sample sizes.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain safe database migration patterns when changes cannot be rolled back (for example, removing columns or changing data types). Describe the phased "expand-then-contract" approach, how to multiplex reads/writes, and what checks and monitoring an SRE should require before cutting over.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You're on-call: a new deployment made via GitOps one hour ago has caused a spike in p99 latency for the payments service. Walk through immediate actions you take (tactical mitigation), communications you make, and how you decide whether to revert the Git commit vs apply a hotfix. Include short-term and medium-term follow-ups.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
During an enterprise-wide deploy a shared library change caused multiple services to fail. Reverting the shared library requires coordinated rollbacks in dozens of repos. Walk through triage, dependency analysis, and a step-by-step plan to restore service quickly while avoiding data loss and minimizing blast radius.
EasyBehavioral
0 practiced
Tell me about a time you had to trigger a production rollback. Use the STAR structure: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Be specific about how you detected the problem, how you executed the rollback, what safety checks you used, and what you changed afterward to prevent recurrence.
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