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.
Continuous Integration and Delivery Pipelines
Design and implement continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines that reliably build, test, validate, and deploy applications and infrastructure. Topics include pipeline as code practices, defining stages and triggers for builds and tests, automated testing strategies across unit, integration, smoke, and end to end tests, gating and environment promotion, branching and release strategies, artifact management and versioning, and deployment patterns such as rolling updates, blue green deployments, and canary releases. Candidates should be able to design rollback and recovery procedures, integrate infrastructure provisioning into pipelines, select and configure pipeline tooling such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure Pipelines, or cloud vendor pipeline services, and reason about observability and reporting for pipeline health and test execution. Practical considerations include environment parity, pipeline security, secrets handling, pipeline as code best practices, and trade offs between speed and safety.
Enterprise Continuous Integration and Delivery Architecture
Design robust continuous integration and continuous delivery architectures at enterprise scale. This covers source control strategies such as trunk based development and feature branching, build parallelization, distributed caching and artifact caching, artifact retention and provenance, and orchestration of pipelines across many teams or large repositories. Candidates should address scaling of runners and agents, queuing and throttling, resource allocation for parallel and distributed execution, pipeline optimization techniques, monitoring of pipeline health metrics such as build times and failure rates, and operational practices to maintain efficiency and reliability for large numbers of concurrent builds. Security and compliance at scale include secrets and credentials management, signing and provenance of artifacts, approval workflows and audit trails, as well as cross team workflows and governance and trade offs between speed safety and complexity.
Deployment and Release Strategies
Covers end to end practices, automation, and architectural choices for delivering software safely and frequently. Candidates should understand and be able to compare deployment and upgrade approaches such as blue green deployment, canary releases, rolling updates, recreate deployments, shadow traffic and shadow deployments, and database migration techniques that avoid downtime. This topic includes progressive delivery and feature management practices such as feature flagging, staged rollouts by user cohort or region, staged traffic ramp up, and progressive delivery platforms. Candidates should be able to explain safety controls and verification gates including health checks, automated validation gates, smoke testing and staging verification, automated rollback criteria, and emergency rollback procedures. They should understand zero downtime patterns, rollback complexity and mechanisms, capacity and resource requirements, latency and consistency trade offs, and techniques to reduce blast radius and deployment risk. The topic also covers release engineering and operational practices such as release orchestration across environments, deployment automation and pipelines, continuous integration and continuous delivery practices, approvals and release management processes, incident response and communication during releases, chaos testing to validate resilience, and observability and monitoring to detect regressions and measure release health. Candidates should be able to describe metrics to measure deployment velocity and reliability such as deployment frequency, mean time to recovery, and change failure rate, and explain how to design frameworks, automation, and operational processes to enable frequent safe deployments at scale.
Automation and Scripting
Covers practical and architectural skills for writing production safe automation and operational scripts as well as building reusable automation systems. Topics include designing idempotent automation, safe retries, robust error handling, structured logging and observability, argument parsing and command line interface design, configuration management, and secure credential handling. Emphasis on testing and validation of scripts and automation code, packaging, documentation, deployment, and maintainability so automation can be operated by other team members. Includes integration with schedulers such as cron and systemd timers, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, orchestration and configuration management systems, and common operational patterns such as log processing, backups, polling, multi step orchestration, provisioning, configuration changes, and routine maintenance. Also assesses language selection and trade offs among Python, Go, Bash and other tooling, concurrency and performance considerations, and at senior levels the design and architecture of reusable automation frameworks and strategies for scaling automation to reduce toil.
Devops Career and Motivation
Evaluate a candidate's personal journey into Devops and platform engineering, including how their role responsibilities evolved, notable projects and initiatives, and the concrete outcomes they delivered. Candidates should describe the tooling and practices they have used such as containerization technologies, orchestration platforms, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, infrastructure as code frameworks, monitoring and observability systems, automated deployment strategies, and release management. Expect explanations of the rationale and trade offs behind tooling choices, examples of improvements to delivery velocity, reliability, and operational efficiency, and descriptions of cross functional collaboration with development, operations, security, and product teams. Candidates should also explain their motivation for working in Devops, key learning experiences and transitions from prior roles, their personal definition of Devops and approach to automation and reliability, and how these interests map to their short and long term career goals and contributions they plan to make to platform and engineering organizations.
Continuous Integration and Delivery Pipeline Testing
Designing and operating automated test execution within continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. Candidates should demonstrate practical experience integrating unit tests, integration tests, end to end tests, and smoke tests into pipeline stages and selecting which tests run at various points in the pipeline. Key areas include test triggers and scheduling, selective and incremental test execution based on code changes, test parallelization and sharding to reduce wall clock time, test prioritization and risk based selection, management of compute resources for test runners, artifact and log handling, failure detection and triage, automatic reruns and quarantine strategies for flaky tests, and reporting and dashboards for visibility. Candidates should also be able to discuss gating deployments based on quality gates, feedback loops to developers, trade offs between test coverage and pipeline execution time, strategies for improving test reliability and mitigating flakiness, scaling test infrastructure with ephemeral runners and autoscaling, cost optimization for test execution, environment and test data provisioning strategies, and how testing supports shift left practices and faster safe delivery. Practical familiarity with pipeline tooling such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab continuous integration, or cloud pipeline services and their features for parallel execution, artifact management, and gating is expected.
Devops Fundamentals and Culture
Covers foundational DevOps concepts, goals, and cultural principles. Candidates should demonstrate understanding of what DevOps is and why it matters, how it differs from traditional operations models, and core cultural practices such as cross functional collaboration, shared responsibility, blameless postmortems, and continuous improvement. Operational and technical practices include continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines, infrastructure as code and configuration management, automated testing and deployment, monitoring and observability, release strategies such as canary and blue green deployments, feature flagging, and rollback planning. Emphasize the role of automation and repeatability, how feedback loops and metrics inform decisions, and the trade offs between delivery velocity, reliability, security, and maintainability when applying DevOps practices in different organizational contexts.
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.
CI/CD Pipeline Concepts and Workflow
Conceptual understanding of how CI/CD pipelines work: continuous integration (running tests automatically on code commits), continuous deployment/delivery (automatically deploying to environments), pipeline stages (build, test, deploy), and tools that orchestrate these processes. Understand the benefits of CI/CD: faster feedback, reduced manual errors, faster release cycles.