Ship safely, repeatedly
CI/CD Interview Questions
Pipelines, deployment strategies, testing gates, secrets and release engineering for teams that deploy often.
40 questions10 easy22 medium8 hard0/40 learned
01What is CI/CD and what problem does it solve?Easyci/cd · automation · delivery02What does continuous integration actually require?Easycontinuous integration · trunk · automated tests03What is the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment?Mediumcontinuous delivery · continuous deployment · release04What are the typical stages of a CI/CD pipeline?Easypipeline · stages · automation05What is a build artifact and why should you build once?Mediumartifacts · immutability · reproducibility06How do you choose a version control branching strategy?Mediumbranching · git · release management07What is trunk-based development and how does it work in practice?Mediumtrunk-based · branching · integration08How do feature flags change the deployment model?Mediumfeature flags · release · rollback09What tests should run in CI?Easytesting · ci · feedback10What is the test pyramid and is it still useful?Mediumtest pyramid · testing · strategy11How does build caching speed up CI and what can go wrong?Mediumcaching · performance · builds12How do you parallelize a pipeline without making it fragile?Mediumparallelism · jobs · ci performance13What environment strategy should a delivery pipeline use?Mediumenvironments · promotion · configuration14How should staging differ from production?Easystaging · production · parity15What deployment strategies are available and how do you choose?Mediumdeployment · release · risk16How does blue-green deployment work?Mediumblue-green · deployment · traffic17How do canary deployments reduce risk?Mediumcanary · deployment · observability18How do rolling deployments work and what should you watch?Mediumrolling deployment · kubernetes · availability19What is your rollback strategy for a bad deployment?Mediumrollback · incident · recovery20How do you deploy database migrations without downtime?Harddatabase migrations · zero downtime · schema21How should CI/CD pipelines handle secrets?Mediumsecrets · security · credentials22When should you use environment variables versus config files?Easyconfiguration · environment variables · twelve-factor23How do you secure a CI/CD pipeline from untrusted code?Hardpipeline security · least privilege · ci24What does supply-chain security mean for CI/CD?Hardsupply chain · sbom · provenance25Why use an artifact repository instead of copying files between jobs?Mediumartifact repository · registry · retention26How do you build container images safely in a pipeline?Mediumcontainers · docker · image security27How do you run infrastructure as code from CI?Mediuminfrastructure as code · terraform · ci28How do GitHub Actions workflows work?Easygithub actions · workflows · ci29How does GitLab CI structure a pipeline?Mediumgitlab ci · pipeline · dag30How do you structure a Jenkins pipeline safely?Mediumjenkins · jenkinsfile · agents31What are deployment gates and when should they block a release?Harddeployment gates · slo · policy32How should production approvals work?Easyapprovals · governance · release33How do you monitor a deployment in progress?Mediummonitoring · deployment · observability34What is your process for responding to a deployment incident?Hardincident response · rollback · postmortem35What checks should run after deployment?Mediumpost-deploy · verification · slo36Which CI/CD metrics actually matter?Harddora · metrics · delivery performance37How do you speed up a slow pipeline?Hardperformance · critical path · ci38How do you run CI efficiently in a monorepo?Hardmonorepo · affected builds · remote cache39What are common CI/CD mistakes?Easyanti-patterns · ci/cd · reliability40What are CI/CD best practices?Easybest practices · ci/cd · delivery
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