Release Engineering & CI/CD Flashcards

What is the purpose of a 'deployment pipeline' in the context of SRE?

Answer: To automate the path from code commit to production delivery with quality gates

A deployment pipeline automates build, test, and release steps, enforcing quality gates before production.

Which Git workflow practice helps avoid long-lived branches and supports frequent integration?

Answer: Trunk-based development

Trunk-based development requires developers to commit to the main branch frequently, reducing merge conflicts and integration risk.

What is a 'rollback' in release engineering?

Answer: Reverting production to a previously known-good version

A rollback restores the system to a previous stable version when a new release causes problems.

In CI/CD, what is the role of an 'artifact' produced by a build stage?

Answer: An immutable, versioned package ready to be deployed to any environment

Build artifacts are immutable outputs (binaries, Docker images, jars) that are promoted through environments without rebuilding.

Which metric best measures the efficiency of a CI/CD pipeline from an SRE perspective?

Answer: Lead time for changes (time from commit to production)

Lead time for changes is a DORA metric that captures how quickly code moves from commit to production.

What is a 'build matrix' in a CI system?

Answer: Running the same build steps across multiple combinations of environments or versions

A build matrix runs the same pipeline across multiple combinations (e.g., OS versions, language runtimes) in parallel.

Why should secrets like API keys never be stored in a CI/CD pipeline's version-controlled configuration files?

Answer: Version control history is typically accessible to many people and external systems, exposing the secrets

Storing secrets in version control exposes them to anyone with repo access and permanently in git history.