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.
Test Environment and Data Management
Practices and strategies for provisioning, configuring, operating, and maintaining test environments and the test data they rely on to enable reliable, repeatable, and scalable testing across development and delivery pipelines. Topics include environment tiering and parity with production; reproducible declarative provisioning using infrastructure as code; containerization and virtualization; ephemeral, persistent, feature, and shared environment patterns; orchestration and dependency management for services, networks, and databases; configuration and secret management; dependency and version control; and techniques to prevent environment drift. For test data the scope includes synthetic data generation, anonymization and data masking, database snapshots and seeding, data isolation and cleanup for parallel runs, handling stateful systems, data versioning and migration, and strategies to scale test data. Also covers service virtualization and test doubles for unavailable dependencies, automation of environment lifecycle including creation and teardown, resource allocation and cost management for ephemeral resources, observability and logging for troubleshooting environment related failures, access controls and data privacy, integration with continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, and coordination with platform and operations teams.
Test Execution and Orchestration
Designing and operating architectures and tooling to coordinate running automated tests across many machines, containers, or nodes. Topics include strategies for distributing and sharding test workloads, scheduling and prioritization, and balancing parallelism with reproducibility. Candidates should know how to manage test dependencies and execution ordering, worker node lifecycle and isolation, environment provisioning and cleanup, artifact and test data management, caching and reuse, and result aggregation and reporting. Important operational concerns include dynamic provisioning and autoscaling, resource allocation and cost optimization through pooling, load balancing, fault tolerance, retry and flaky test mitigation strategies, idempotency and deterministic outcomes, monitoring, logging, metrics, and observability, security and access controls, and integration with continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. Evaluation may cover designing orchestration APIs, trade offs between throughput, stability, and reproducibility, container orchestration for test runners, scaling to thousands or millions of executions, and selecting or building tools to meet performance, reliability, and scalability requirements.
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.
Operational Automation and Orchestration
Covers automation and orchestration practices for software delivery pipelines and operational maintenance, including test orchestration, pipeline automation, and automated patch management. Topics include designing test pipelines that trigger on code changes, coordinating staged test suites from smoke to integration to acceptance, handling test dependencies and gates, conditional test execution based on change impact, and integrating test orchestration with deployment pipelines. For patch management, topics include automated detection of available patches, risk based prioritization, testing and staging patches, safe deployment strategies with minimal downtime, rollback plans, handling operating system and application layer patches, dependency management, emergency patch procedures, compliance considerations, and integration with configuration management and deployment orchestration tools. Emphasis is on reliability, risk management, observability, and the tradeoffs between speed and stability.
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.
Continuous Integration and Test Infrastructure at Scale
Designing, implementing, and operating continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines and the large scale test infrastructure that they run on. Candidates should understand pipeline orchestration tools, build and runner architectures, ephemeral test environment provisioning, containerization and orchestration platforms, infrastructure as code practices, parallel and distributed test execution strategies, test data and fixture management, artifact and dependency management, flaky test detection and mitigation, test result aggregation and reporting, observability and monitoring of test health, environment lifecycle and cost optimization techniques, and approaches to scale pipelines across many teams and services.