DevOps & Release Engineering Topics
CI/CD pipeline design, build automation, deployment strategies, release management, artifact repositories, version control integration, and continuous delivery practices. Covers infrastructure automation for delivery workflows, release gates and approvals, multi-service orchestration, rollback strategies, and GitOps approaches. Distinct from Cloud & Infrastructure by focusing specifically on delivery automation and release processes rather than infrastructure platforms.
Versioning and Compatibility Management
Covers strategies and practices for managing software and platform evolution while minimizing disruption to users and dependent teams. Core areas include versioning strategies such as semantic versioning and other scheme trade offs; artifact management including use of artifact repositories like Docker Registry, Artifactory, and Nexus, artifact promotion through environments, and integration with version control and build pipelines; handling backward compatibility and breaking changes through deprecation policies, migration paths, compatibility tests, feature flags, and support for multiple concurrent versions; release and upgrade processes including testing and validation, rollout and rollback procedures, and coordination and communication across teams; metrics and success criteria for migrations and upgrades; and tooling and automation for continuous integration and continuous delivery, dependency management, and governance of published artifacts and interfaces.
Software Development Lifecycle and Tradeoffs
Covers fundamental software development lifecycle concepts and the technical tradeoffs made during product development. Topics include the lifecycle phases of requirements gathering and analysis, design, implementation and development, testing, deployment, and maintenance, and awareness of different lifecycle models such as waterfall, agile and scrum, and iterative development. Also covers practical engineering techniques and tradeoffs such as feature flags, split testing, blue green deployments, canary releases, technical debt, and how decisions affect velocity quality and maintainability. Emphasis is on understanding how individual engineering work fits into the broader process and how to reason about tradeoffs between speed cost scalability and code quality.