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.
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.
Scripting and Automation
Practical skills in authoring and maintaining automation scripts to manage cloud resources and routine operations. Candidates should be able to write and explain scripts in PowerShell, Python, and Bash to provision infrastructure, configure systems, implement runbook steps, automate maintenance tasks, and orchestrate simple deployments. Emphasize clean code practices such as modular functions, input validation, error handling, idempotency, logging, and safe handling of credentials. Be prepared to discuss how scripts integrate with command line interfaces and software development kits and how they are incorporated into continuous integration and continuous delivery workflows.
System Integration and Configuration Management
Holistic approach to integrating components, managing dependencies, and handling configuration and deployment complexity across environments. Topics include dependency and compatibility management, designing integration tests and contracts, coordinating deployment sequencing, environment specific configuration and secrets management, use of infrastructure as code and configuration management systems, and deployment strategies such as blue green and canary with rollback plans. Candidates should be able to reason about versioning, backward compatibility, release coordination, and operational practices that reduce integration risk and configuration drift.
Deployment and Release Management
Practices and strategies for deploying infrastructure and application changes safely and predictably. Candidates should be familiar with deployment patterns such as blue green deployment, canary deployment, and rolling updates, techniques for achieving zero downtime deployments, and rollback strategies. The topic covers automation using continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines, infrastructure as code, schema migration approaches, feature flagging, release gating, and the monitoring and observability needed to validate upgrades and recover from failures. Interviewers may explore planning for upgrades, handling database changes, managing configuration and secrets, and minimizing customer impact during deployments.
Configuration and Operational Concerns
Considerations for configuration management and operational readiness of systems. Topics include managing environment specific settings and secrets, configuration as code, feature flagging strategies, deployment and rollback patterns such as canary or blue green, integration with continuous delivery pipelines, safe change management, operational runbooks, automated health checks, and how configuration choices affect reliability and security in production.
System Upgrades Migrations and Change Management
This topic assesses the candidate's capability to plan and execute major infrastructure changes with minimal disruption. It includes inventory and impact analysis, compatibility and regression testing, database schema and data migration strategies, rollout strategies such as blue green and canary deployments, rollback and contingency planning, automation and runbook development, stakeholder coordination and communication, maintenance windows and scheduling, verification and validation after cutover, and post migration remediation and learning.