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All Interviews

Top 21+ CI/CD Interview Questions and Answers

28/Jun/2021 | 10 minutes to read

devops

Here is a List of essential CI/CD Pipeline Interview Questions and Answers for Freshers and mid level of Experienced Professionals. All answers for these CI/CD Pipeline questions are explained in a simple and easiest way. These basic, advanced and latest CI/CD Pipeline questions will help you to clear your next Job interview.

CI/CD Pipeline Interview Questions and Answers

These questions are targeted for CI/CD Pipeline which is an essential part of application deployment. Developers and DevOps engineers should have good knowledge of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery or Deployment (CD) process. These interview questions are common for Azure CI CD pipeline, Jenkins CI/CD pipeline or any other CI/CD pipeline. You must the answers of these frequently asked CI/CD interview questions to clear a DevOps Engineer interview.

1. What is CI/CD Pipeline? Why to use it? When to use it?

CI/CD is a set of best practices of DevOps that ensures to deliver code changes very frequently in a reliable way. Let's discuss CI/CD and CD.

  • Continuous Integration (CI) - Continuous Integration is a process where developers work on code changes and commit the code very frequently to repository. CI triggers the build every time whenever new code changes detected in repository. Unit testing is performed against these code changes every time. CI enables to detect the errors at early stage or when code is being integrated. CI is a set of principles that helps developers to manage code integrations and detect early stage bugs and rectify them.
  • Continuous Delivery (CD) - Continuous Delivery is a process where integrated code is pushed to specific environments. It ensures code delivery to specified infrastructure environment. It starts after continuous integration. CD ensures the automation of delivering new code with minimum efforts. Some extra checks are also performed during CD process such as performance test for production environment.
  • Continuous Deployment (CD) - Continuous deployment is most critical stage in pipeline. In this process code changes are automatically deployed to production environment where end customers or users are using the application. It is achieved by taking the benefit of continuous delivery by automating new stage (Production) in the pipeline. There is very less human interaction at this stage and it helps to reduce delay in making code changes live.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
Image Source: Continuous integration vs. continuous deployment vs. continuous delivery

2. What are the advantages of CI/CD Pipeline?

Continuous Integration and Continuous delivery comes with certain benefits Which will help you to decide to opt for CI/CD for your organization.

  • CI/CD allows you to integrate small code changes very quickly and the code changes can be tested easily.
  • Fault isolation is faster and easier for properly designed systems with CI/CD setup. Fault isolation includes monitoring the system, fault occurrence time and triggering the location of fault.
  • CI/CD provides fast MTTR (Mean time to resolution) as changes are smaller and easier.
  • Unit Testing and Integrations Testing reliability improves with CI/CD setup.
  • CI/CD setup provides faster release rate as it merges the small code changes very quickly and make the code ready for production.
  • CI helps to find early stage failure like merge issues, build failure, integration test failure etc. that will improve transparency within team. CD helps to make code available to end users.

3. What do you understand by fully automated CI/CD (Continuous Deployment) Pipeline?

A fully automated pipeline is one, that provides the capability to deploy new developer changes to production or any non-production environment with seamless experience and without human intervention. A fully automated pipeline may consist of many stages as below. Once developer commits the code changes then no human intervention is required.

  • Commit new changes - Developer commits new code changes to source code manager.
  • Build - Latest changes are build and artifacts are created on server.
  • Tests - Unit Tests or Integration testing is performed on server.
  • Deploy - The Latest build version is deployed.

4. What is difference between Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery?

Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery are two different processes.

  • Continuous Deployment - refers a system that allows deployment of every new changes that comes in source code from a developer.
  • Continuous Delivery - refers the automation of entire software release process.

5. How to implement an effective and successful CI/CD Pipeline?

6. How to setup a CI/CD Pipeline from Scratch?

7. How to choose right CI/CD Tool?

8. What developers can do with CI/CD?

9. How CI/CD is different from DevOps?

CI/CD and DevOps are two related concepts rather than different. CI/CD emphasize the automation of activities carried along the software-defined life cycle from building to delivery. DevOps refers core set of practices for quality software development and focus on culture that removes barriers between operations and engineering team.

10. Does CI/CD require any programming knowledge?

CI/CD does or noes not required any programming or scripting language. When you are working with some GUI based tool such as Azure DevOps (ADO) then no programming or scripting language is required. Some other ways like ARM templates in Azure DevOps required the knowledge of scripting language. So It's depend on tools and different ways of CI/CD setup.

11. How will you secure your CI/CD pipeline?

Security of a CI/CD Pipeline depends on many factors. Let's discuss them.

  • Unit testing is important to test multiple unit testable distributed components. So make sure you have proper unit testing of your code.
  • SAST (static analysis security testing) is a tool that scans for security vulnerabilities in your code and libraries that you use. All modern tools provide good integration with CD pipeline to ensure SAST scanning.
  • DAST (dynamic analysis security testing) is a tool which perform dynamic scan for security vulnerabilities in your application. It performs the testing from outside the application similar to what an attacker would do.
  • For more visit DevSecOps

12. What are the best practices for managing CI/CD secrets?

Pipeline secrets should be secure at both in-transit and at rest. You should follow some best practices to secure CI/CD secrets as below.

  • There should not be any hard coded secrets in pipeline.
  • Use password managers, secret key vaults etc.
  • There should be proper RBAC - Role Based Access Control. You should know who need what.
  • Follow the practices of lease privilege means you should grant the minimum level of access or secrets required to perform tasks.
  • For more visit Manage CI/CD Secrets

12. What are the CI/CD best practices?

13. What do you understand from Pipeline as Code?

Pipelines as code means, The configuration of build, test, release and infrastructure pipelines is managed via code that should be placed under some source control. Pipeline as code can be reused with other components. This code perform all activities of pipeline jobs like build, test and deploy in an automated manner. Azure Resource Manager templates (ARM templates) in Azure is the common example of Pipeline as Code.

14. Why do we need CI CD? Without CI CD everything works.

15. How will you improve a CI/CD Pipeline?

You can refer this article to know more about CI CD best practices. CI-CD Best Practices

16. What different CI/CD tools do you know?

There are many DevOps tools in the market which allow you to create CI/CD pipelines.

Some General Interview Questions for CI/CD Pipeline

1. How much will you rate yourself in CI/CD Pipeline?

When you attend an interview, Interviewer may ask you to rate yourself in a specific Technology like CI/CD Pipeline, So It's depend on your knowledge and work experience in CI/CD Pipeline.

2. What challenges did you face while working on CI/CD Pipeline?

This question may be specific to your technology and completely depends on your past work experience. So you need to just explain the challenges you faced related to CI/CD Pipeline in your Project.

3. What was your role in the last Project related to CI/CD Pipeline?

It's based on your role and responsibilities assigned to you and what functionality you implemented using CI/CD Pipeline in your project. This question is generally asked in every interview.

4. How much experience do you have in CI/CD Pipeline?

Here you can tell about your overall work experience on CI/CD Pipeline.

Conclusion

We have covered some frequently asked CI/CD Pipeline Interview Questions and Answers to help you for your Interview. All these Essential CI/CD Pipeline Interview Questions are targeted for mid level of experienced Professionals and freshers.
While attending any CI/CD Pipeline Interview if you face any difficulty to answer any question please write to us at info@qfles.com. Our IT Expert team will find the best answer and will update on the portal. In case we find any new CI/CD Pipeline questions, we will update the same here.