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50 CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery & Deployment) basics interview questions

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Fundamental CI/CD Basics

  1. What is CI/CD? (Continuous Integration, Delivery, Deployment)
  2. What are benefits of CI/CD?
  3. Explain Continuous Integration (CI).
  4. Explain Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment.
  5. What’s a CI/CD pipeline?
  6. How do version control systems (like Git) integrate into CI/CD?
  7. What is a build server?
  8. What are common CI/CD tools? (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI)
  9. How does automated testing fit into CI/CD?
  10. What are build artifacts?
  11. What is the role of version control in CI/CD?
  12. What constitutes a successful CI pipeline?
  13. What is trunk-based development?
  14. What are some CI/CD metrics (e.g., MTTR, change failure rate)?
  15. What is pipeline monitoring?

Tools, Configs & Implementation

  1. What is a Jenkins pipeline?
  2. What is a .gitlab-ci.yml file?
  3. Explain stages and jobs in GitLab CI/CD.
  4. How do you configure environment variables in CI/CD tools?
  5. What is a GitLab Runner?
  6. How do you create a basic pipeline in Jenkins?
  7. Explain caching in CI/CD.
  8. What is artifact management?
  9. How do you define conditional steps/execution in a CI workflow?
  10. What deployment tools integrate with CI/CD? (e.g., Terraform, Helm)

Deployment Strategies

  1. What is blue-green deployment?
  2. What is canary deployment?
  3. What is rolling deployment?
  4. What is feature flag deployment? (Often asked)
  5. How would you automate rollback?

Security & Best Practices

  1. How do you manage secrets in pipelines?
  2. What are CI/CD security best practices?
  3. How do you ensure compliance/audit trails? (Common in MNCs)
  4. Why should testing be automated in CI?
  5. How do you reduce flaky tests in CI?

Testing & Quality

  1. What types of tests are run in CI/CD? (Unit, Integration, E2E)
  2. How do you measure test coverage?
  3. What do you do when tests fail in the pipeline? (Situational)
  4. What’s the role of code quality analysis tools in CI/CD? (Best practice)
  5. When should manual approval gates be used?

Scenario & Behavioral

  1. Describe setting up a CI/CD pipeline from scratch.
  2. How would you migrate an existing project into CI/CD?
  3. How would you troubleshoot a broken deployment? (Very commonly asked)
  4. What issues have you faced with CI pipelines? (Experience-based)
  5. How do you ensure high availability in CI/CD tools?
  6. What KPIs do you track to optimize CI/CD performance?
  7. How do you handle database migrations in CI/CD?
  8. What’s your experience with cloud CI/CD (AWS / Azure / GCP)? (Often asked)
  9. How do microservices affect CI/CD design?
  10. What CI/CD challenges occur with monorepos?
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