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CI/CD Interview Questions

Pipeline design and speed, testing strategy, artifacts and supply chain, deployment strategies from rolling to canary, secrets and CI security, and the observability that makes rollback fast.

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0 / 100 answered
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2 Easy67 Medium31 Hard

Showing 1–20 of 100

#1What is continuous integration, and what does it actually require?

Medium
Fundamentals

#2What is the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment?

Medium
Fundamentals

#3What makes a CI pipeline trustworthy?

Medium
Fundamentals

#4What should run on every commit versus on merge to main?

Medium
Fundamentals

#5Why does pipeline speed matter so much?

Medium
Fundamentals

#6What is a build artifact and why does immutability matter?

Medium
Fundamentals

#7What does a reproducible build mean and why is it hard?

Hard
Fundamentals

#8What belongs in version control and what does not?

Easy
Fundamentals

#9What is the difference between a pipeline stage, a job, and a step?

Easy
Fundamentals

#10What is the difference between a self-hosted and a managed CI runner?

Medium
Fundamentals

#11How do you handle a monorepo in CI?

Hard
Fundamentals

#12What is a merge queue and what problem does it solve?

Hard
Fundamentals

#13How would you structure a pipeline for a typical backend service?

Medium
Pipeline Design

#14How do you make a pipeline faster?

Medium
Pipeline Design

#15How does caching work in CI and what are the pitfalls?

Medium
Pipeline Design

#16What is the difference between a matrix build and parallel jobs?

Medium
Pipeline Design

#17How should pipelines handle database migrations?

Hard
Pipeline Design

#18What is pipeline as code and why does it matter?

Medium
Pipeline Design

#19How do you handle environment-specific configuration?

Medium
Pipeline Design

#20What is a deployment gate and when is a manual approval useful?

Medium
Pipeline Design

Showing 1–20 of 100

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All 100 CI/CD questions at a glance
  1. What is continuous integration, and what does it actually require?(Medium)
  2. What is the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment?(Medium)
  3. What makes a CI pipeline trustworthy?(Medium)
  4. What should run on every commit versus on merge to main?(Medium)
  5. Why does pipeline speed matter so much?(Medium)
  6. What is a build artifact and why does immutability matter?(Medium)
  7. What does a reproducible build mean and why is it hard?(Hard)
  8. What belongs in version control and what does not?(Easy)
  9. What is the difference between a pipeline stage, a job, and a step?(Easy)
  10. What is the difference between a self-hosted and a managed CI runner?(Medium)
  11. How do you handle a monorepo in CI?(Hard)
  12. What is a merge queue and what problem does it solve?(Hard)
  13. How would you structure a pipeline for a typical backend service?(Medium)
  14. How do you make a pipeline faster?(Medium)
  15. How does caching work in CI and what are the pitfalls?(Medium)
  16. What is the difference between a matrix build and parallel jobs?(Medium)
  17. How should pipelines handle database migrations?(Hard)
  18. What is pipeline as code and why does it matter?(Medium)
  19. How do you handle environment-specific configuration?(Medium)
  20. What is a deployment gate and when is a manual approval useful?(Medium)
  21. How do you structure pipelines for multiple environments?(Medium)
  22. What should happen when the pipeline fails on main?(Medium)
  23. How do you version and tag releases in a pipeline?(Medium)
  24. What is GitOps?(Hard)
  25. How do you test the pipeline itself?(Medium)
  26. How do you handle a pipeline that needs to deploy several services together?(Hard)
  27. What is a flaky test and why is it worse than a failing one?(Medium)
  28. How should tests be split across a pipeline?(Medium)
  29. How do you run integration tests that need a database?(Medium)
  30. What is code coverage good for and how is it misused?(Medium)
  31. How do you handle tests that need external services?(Medium)
  32. What are contract tests and when do you need them?(Hard)
  33. How do you keep end-to-end tests useful rather than a burden?(Medium)
  34. What is the difference between smoke tests and full test suites in deployment?(Medium)
  35. How do you test infrastructure as code?(Hard)
  36. How do you deal with a slow test suite you inherited?(Medium)
  37. What is shift-left testing?(Medium)
  38. How do you prevent a pipeline check from becoming a rubber stamp?(Medium)
  39. How do you test a change that only manifests under load?(Hard)
  40. What is the role of static analysis and linting in CI?(Medium)
  41. How do you write an efficient Dockerfile for CI?(Medium)
  42. What is a multi-stage Docker build and why use one?(Medium)
  43. How do you handle build secrets without baking them into an image?(Hard)
  44. How should you tag container images?(Medium)
  45. What is an artifact repository and why do you need one?(Medium)
  46. Why do dependency lock files matter for CI?(Medium)
  47. What is an SBOM and why does it matter?(Hard)
  48. How do you handle a dependency with a known vulnerability?(Medium)
  49. What is the difference between a build and a release?(Medium)
  50. How do you manage versioning for a library versus a service?(Medium)
  51. What is supply chain security in a CI context?(Hard)
  52. Why should you pin CI actions and base images by digest?(Hard)
  53. What is a rolling deployment and what can go wrong?(Medium)
  54. What is blue-green deployment?(Medium)
  55. What is a canary deployment and how do you decide whether to proceed?(Hard)
  56. How do feature flags change deployment?(Medium)
  57. What is a shadow or dark launch?(Hard)
  58. How do you achieve zero-downtime deployment?(Hard)
  59. How do you roll back safely?(Hard)
  60. What is expand and contract for database changes?(Hard)
  61. How do you deploy to multiple regions?(Hard)
  62. What is progressive delivery?(Medium)
  63. How do you handle deployment of a stateful service?(Hard)
  64. What health checks does a deployment need?(Medium)
  65. What is the difference between imperative and declarative deployment?(Medium)
  66. How do you deploy configuration changes safely?(Medium)
  67. What is immutable infrastructure?(Medium)
  68. How do you decide between rolling, blue-green and canary?(Medium)
  69. What makes a good container image for production?(Medium)
  70. How does Docker layer caching work and how do you use it well?(Medium)
  71. How do you scan container images for vulnerabilities?(Medium)
  72. What is image signing and provenance?(Hard)
  73. What is a registry retention policy and why does it matter?(Medium)
  74. How do you build container images inside a container?(Hard)
  75. Why should containers run as non-root?(Medium)
  76. What is the difference between CMD and ENTRYPOINT, and why does it matter for signals?(Hard)
  77. How do you handle logs from containers?(Medium)
  78. What resource requests and limits should a container have?(Hard)
  79. How should secrets be handled in a pipeline?(Medium)
  80. What is OIDC federation for CI and why is it better than stored credentials?(Hard)
  81. What are the security risks of running CI on pull requests?(Hard)
  82. How do you prevent secrets being committed?(Medium)
  83. What permissions should a pipeline have?(Medium)
  84. What is SAST, DAST and SCA, and where do they belong?(Medium)
  85. How do you secure a self-hosted runner?(Hard)
  86. What is the risk of third-party CI actions and how do you manage it?(Hard)
  87. How do you handle compliance requirements in a pipeline?(Hard)
  88. What should never be logged by a pipeline?(Medium)
  89. How do you handle an emergency deployment safely?(Medium)
  90. What is the blast radius of compromising a CI system?(Hard)
  91. What are the DORA metrics and what do they tell you?(Medium)
  92. How do you know a deployment succeeded?(Medium)
  93. How do you correlate a production problem with a deployment?(Medium)
  94. What is automated rollback and when should it trigger?(Hard)
  95. What should be monitored about the pipeline itself?(Medium)
  96. How do you debug a pipeline failure that does not reproduce locally?(Medium)
  97. What is a post-incident review and how does it relate to the pipeline?(Medium)
  98. How do you reduce the time to restore service?(Medium)
  99. How do you introduce CI/CD to a team that has none?(Medium)
  100. What distinguishes a good pipeline from one that merely works?(Medium)