12 posts tagged with "CI/CD"

Whether you are preparing for your first DevOps role or interviewing for a Staff SRE position, these 50 questions cover the full spectrum. Each answer is concise enough to deliver in an interview, but detailed enough to demonstrate real understanding.

Google's DORA team spent seven years studying thousands of engineering organizations to answer one question: what separates elite performers from everyone else? The answer was not better tools or bigger budgets. It was four specific metrics that capture the speed and stability of software delivery. If you measure nothing else, measure these.

A developer pushes to main. Twenty minutes later, the changes are live in production — tested, built, deployed, and verified. No one SSH'd into a server. No one clicked a button in the console. No one held their breath. That's what CI/CD should feel like. AWS provides a full suite of developer tools to build this pipeline natively, and understanding how they fit together saves you from the "it works on my machine" disaster.

Your code passed all tests, the PR is approved, and you're ready to deploy. But how you deploy matters as much as what you deploy. A bad deployment strategy turns a minor bug into a site-wide outage, while a good one lets you roll back in seconds with zero customer impact.

Running terraform apply from your laptop works fine when you are the only engineer. The moment a second person joins the team, you need a pipeline. CI/CD for Terraform ensures every change is reviewed, planned, and applied through a consistent process — no more "I ran apply from my machine and forgot to commit the code."

Your CI pipeline builds a Docker image. Where does it go? Your Java app produces a JAR file. Where is it stored? Your Terraform module is versioned and shared across 12 teams. Where do they find it? If your answer to any of these is "somewhere on the build server" or "I just rebuild it," you have an artifact management problem. And it will bite you the first time you need to roll back a production deployment at 2 AM and cannot find the last known-good binary.