Pipeline Integration and Infrastructure Automation Questions

Integrate pipelines with container orchestration and infrastructure automation to enable repeatable and reliable deployments. Topics include pipeline triggers and hooks, container image build and registry strategies, environment promotion and image tagging strategies, integrating infrastructure as code into pipeline workflows, interacting with orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes for deploying services, and managing multiple environments and pipeline dependencies. Also cover secrets and configuration management in pipelines, deployment automation patterns, health checks and rollout validation, and operational practices such as deployment observability and collaboration between developers and platform teams.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

You must implement an approach to use Terraform within a GitOps-style workflow. Propose an architecture that reconciles Terraform's imperative plan/apply lifecycle with GitOps declarative desired state, describing how pipelines or controllers should trigger terraform runs, how remote state is organized across environments and accounts, how secrets are handled, and how drift detection and remediation should be implemented at scale.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

You need to integrate Terraform into a CI/CD pipeline. Describe a recommended pipeline layout including a 'plan' stage that produces human-readable diffs and artifacts, a peer review gate for plans targeting sensitive resources, and a controlled 'apply' stage executed either by an automation account or via a privileged runner. Explain how remote state, state locking, and sensitive provider credentials should be handled.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Describe Docker multi-stage builds and explain why they are beneficial in CI/CD pipelines. Give a short example scenario where separating build and runtime stages reduces image size and attack surface. Also mention how build cache behavior affects CI performance and how to leverage cache effectively across distributed runners.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Design a scalable, multi-tenant CI/CD platform for an enterprise managing 1000 microservices and 500 concurrent builds, deploying with GitOps to multiple Kubernetes clusters and using Terraform for infrastructure. Describe control plane and worker plane responsibilities, tenant isolation and quotas, runner scaling, artifact storage and replication, RBAC and identity model, secrets handling across clusters, monitoring, and a pragmatic migration plan from ad-hoc pipelines.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

You investigate an incident where an image was promoted to production without running integration tests due to a race condition between dependent pipeline jobs. Perform a root cause analysis outline, propose immediate mitigations to stop further unsafe promotions, and design long-term architectural changes to avoid similar race conditions, including approaches for artifact immutability, pipeline dependency management, and orchestration guarantees.

Unlock Full Question Bank

Get access to hundreds of Pipeline Integration and Infrastructure Automation interview questions and detailed answers.

Join thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.