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10 questions
CI vs continuous delivery vs continuous deployment?
Continuous integration checks changes frequently through automated builds and tests. Continuous delivery keeps a verified release ready for deployment, while continuous deployment automatically sends qualifying changes to production. The distinction is the production release decision, not whether any automation exists.
What should a pipeline do?
A delivery pipeline turns source changes into a verified, versioned artifact and releases it through controlled environments. Each step should provide evidence that the next step is safe and reproducible. Promoting the same artifact avoids rebuilding slightly different software for each environment.
What are GitHub Actions concepts?
GitHub Actions defines automated workflows triggered by repository or scheduled events. Workflows contain jobs that run on runners, and jobs contain ordered steps using commands or reusable actions. Artifacts and outputs move results between steps or jobs, while permissions control what the workflow may access.
Which AWS and Azure concepts should I know?
Cloud platforms provide managed building blocks for compute, storage, databases, networking and operations. AWS and Azure use different service names, but the underlying choices—virtual machine versus managed runtime, object storage versus database, public versus private network—are transferable. Understanding responsibilities is more useful than memorizing a long service list.
How do DNS, load balancers, IAM and secrets fit together?
DNS resolves names to records, load balancers select healthy destinations, IAM controls identities and permissions, and secret managers store sensitive credentials. These components connect an application to users and dependencies without putting all configuration into code. A failure at any layer can look like “the API is down” from the outside.
The container exits immediately. What should I check?
A container stays running while its main process remains alive. An immediate exit usually means the command finished, failed startup or was killed, rather than that Docker randomly stopped a healthy application. Logs, exit status and runtime configuration tell you which case occurred.
The app cannot reach the database container. What should I check?
Each container has its own network context, so localhost points back to that container rather than a sibling service. Reaching a database requires the correct address, network path, credentials and an accepting database process. Compose startup order can start a process without guaranteeing it has finished initialization.
Tests pass locally but fail in CI. Why?
A local/CI mismatch means the test depends on something that differs between environments. Common differences include runtime versions, installed files, operating-system behavior, time, service availability or test order. Reproducing the CI command in a clean setup exposes these hidden assumptions.
How would I roll back a bad deployment?
Rollback restores a previously working application version after a harmful release. It works only if that version is compatible with the current database, message formats and configuration. A complete rollback plan includes health verification and a way to preserve or reconcile work already performed by the new version.
A cloud API is unreachable. Where do I start?
An unreachable cloud API may fail before the request reaches application code. DNS, TLS, routing, firewall rules, load-balancer health and listening ports are separate layers to verify. Checking them in order avoids opening broad access or restarting healthy services without evidence.
Difficulty is editorial guidance. These questions are not a ranking of interview frequency.
All Delivery & cloud interview questions by concept
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