"How would you design a CI/CD pipeline?"
CI/CD is the backbone of modern software delivery. This tests whether you can design reliable, fast, and secure deployment workflows.
Define pipeline stages: build, test, security scan, deploy.
Discuss branching strategy and environment promotion.
Cover rollback strategies and deployment patterns.
Mention monitoring and feedback loops.
I design pipelines with five stages. Build: compile code, run linters, generate artifacts. Test: unit tests run on every commit, integration tests on PRs, E2E on merge to main. Security: SAST scanning with Snyk, dependency vulnerability checks, and secrets detection. Deploy: promote through staging and canary environments before full production rollout. Monitor: automated health checks post-deploy with automatic rollback if error rates spike. I use trunk-based development with short-lived feature branches. Deployments are blue-green or canary depending on risk level. In my last role, this pipeline reduced our deployment frequency from weekly to multiple times daily while cutting production incidents by 60%.
Emphasize fast feedback — developers should know within minutes if their code is broken.
Security scanning should be automated and non-optional.
Include rollback as a first-class pipeline capability.
GitHub Actions for GitHub-centric teams, GitLab CI for GitLab users, Jenkins for maximum flexibility, and ArgoCD for Kubernetes-native deployments. Choose based on existing infrastructure.
Run migrations as a separate pipeline step before application deployment. Use forward-only migrations, test them in staging first, and have a rollback plan for each migration.
Target under 10 minutes for the full pipeline. If it takes longer, parallelize stages, cache dependencies, and consider splitting into fast-feedback and thorough-check phases.
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