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.
Release Engineering and Change Management
Design and operate deployment and release processes that minimize user impact while enabling rapid change. Topics include deployment strategies such as blue green, canary, and rolling updates, feature flagging and progressive delivery, rollback and remediation strategies, database schema migration techniques that avoid downtime, release gating, approval workflows and auditability, disaster recovery and rollback planning, and instrumentation for release observability and post deployment validation. Candidates should also understand change management practices, incident response during releases, minimizing change windows, and cross team coordination between engineering, product, and operations to manage release risk and stakeholder communication.
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.
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.
Software Installation and Deployment
Covers the end to end practices for installing, configuring, deploying, and maintaining application software across environments. Topics include installation procedures for complex applications, dependency management, package management, configuration file handling and templating, applying patches and updates, version control for releases, rolling and blue green deployments, deployment verification and testing, troubleshooting installation and runtime failures, compatibility and architecture considerations, and use of configuration management and deployment automation tools. Also includes best practices for managing software lifecycles, handling conflicts and version skew, and ensuring repeatable, auditable deployments across multiple operating systems and stacks.
Configuration Drift Detection and Remediation
Detecting when actual infrastructure differs from desired state, identifying drift causes, and remediating automatically or manually. Continuous compliance checking and maintaining infrastructure consistency.
Patching and Updates at Scale
Addresses strategies and operational practices for deploying patches and updates across large, heterogeneous infrastructure. Topics include orchestration and scheduling of batched or rolling updates, canary deployments and progressive rollouts, minimizing downtime through rolling and blue green approaches, dependency and configuration management across services, handling failed updates and automated rollback, coordination across regions and availability zones, monitoring and health checks during rollouts, capacity planning for update windows, and use of orchestration tools and platforms to achieve consistency and scale.
Python Scripting for Infrastructure Automation
Applied Python skills for building reusable, production grade automation for infrastructure and operations. Topics include designing modular automation code and libraries, using relevant third party libraries for systems administration and remote management, invoking and controlling subprocesses, interacting with application programming interfaces and cloud platform endpoints, robust error handling and structured logging, automated testing of scripts and modules, packaging and distributing tools for reuse, secure credential management, integration with configuration management and orchestration tooling, and designing multi step workflows and idempotent operations. Candidates should demonstrate experience with writing maintainable automation, reasoning about failure modes, and selecting appropriate abstractions and libraries for operational tasks.
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.