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.
Configuration Management and Operational Rigor
Practices and processes for managing system and network configurations with operational discipline. Topics include version control for configurations, secure configuration backups, automated testing of configuration changes, rollback and recovery mechanisms, detecting and remediating configuration drift, documentation and runbook development, change windows and impact assessment, stakeholder communication for changes, and balancing operational rigor with deployment velocity. Interviewers may probe tooling, automation strategies, validation and testing approaches, and how the candidate ensures repeatability, auditability, and safe change promotion across environments.
Infrastructure Documentation and Change Management
Maintaining accurate infrastructure documentation: architecture diagrams, runbooks, playbooks, configuration baselines. Change management processes: planning, testing, communicating, rolling back if needed. Version control for configuration files and scripts. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concepts. Communication during outages and changes. Post-change validation.
Network Change Management and Testing
Processes and best practices for safely planning, testing, and executing network changes. Coverage includes change control and approvals, pre change validation and automated tests, staging and canary rollouts, rollback and remediation strategies, configuration management and automation, integration and interoperability testing, smoke tests and post deployment verification, monitoring and alerting to detect regressions, and stakeholder coordination including maintenance windows and communication plans.
Operational Excellence and Evolution Strategy
Practices for evolving infrastructure safely and running networks with operational excellence. Covers phased evolution plans, backward compatibility strategies, deprecation and migration planning, zero downtime deployment techniques including canary and blue green approaches, observability and runbook design, automation to reduce manual toil, change windows and communication plans, testing and rollback strategies, post incident reviews, and aligning monitoring and capacity planning with operational goals. This topic tests a candidate ability to plan long lived infrastructure changes that minimize risk while enabling ongoing innovation.
Operational Excellence and Change Management
Focus on operational discipline and processes that enable safe, repeatable, and observable changes to network systems. Topics include change approval and scheduling, staging and test strategies such as canary and phased rollouts, rollback and remediation planning, configuration and version control for network state, automation and testing of operational workflows, runbooks and knowledge capture, monitoring and alerting tied to service level objectives, incident handoffs, and metrics for tracking toil and operational effectiveness. Candidates should be able to justify process choices by risk profile and organizational constraints, design measurable automation and testing to reduce mean time to repair and to prevent regressions, and describe cultural practices for continuous improvement.