Operational Automation and Orchestration Questions

Covers automation and orchestration practices for software delivery pipelines and operational maintenance, including test orchestration, pipeline automation, and automated patch management. Topics include designing test pipelines that trigger on code changes, coordinating staged test suites from smoke to integration to acceptance, handling test dependencies and gates, conditional test execution based on change impact, and integrating test orchestration with deployment pipelines. For patch management, topics include automated detection of available patches, risk based prioritization, testing and staging patches, safe deployment strategies with minimal downtime, rollback plans, handling operating system and application layer patches, dependency management, emergency patch procedures, compliance considerations, and integration with configuration management and deployment orchestration tools. Emphasis is on reliability, risk management, observability, and the tradeoffs between speed and stability.