20 CI/CD Interview Questions DevOps Engineers Should Know

• Docker is a containerization platform which packages your application and all its dependencies together in the form of containers so as to ensure that your application works seamlessly in any environment be it development or test or production.
• Docker containers, wrap a piece of software in a complete filesystem that contains everything needed to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries etc. anything that can be installed on a server.
• This guarantees that the software will always run the same, regardless of its environment.

Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early.

Nowadays instead of releasing big sets of features, companies are trying to see if small features can be transported to their customers through a series of release trains. This has many advantages like quick feedback from customers, better quality of software etc. which in turn leads to high customer satisfaction. To achieve this, companies are required to:

1. Increase deployment frequency
2. Lower failure rate of new releases
3. Shortened lead time between fixes
4. Faster mean time to recovery in the event of new release crashing

DevOps fulfills all these requirements and helps in achieving seamless software delivery. 

Microservices, aka Microservice Architecture, is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small autonomous services, modeled around a business domain.

• Agile software development methodology focuses on the development of software.
• DevOps on the other hand is responsible for development as well as deployment of the software in the safest and most reliable way possible.

• Maintain a code repository
• Automate the build
• Make the build self-testing
• Everyone commits to the baseline every day
• Every commit (to baseline) should be built
• Keep the build fast
• Test in a clone of the production environment
• Make it easy to get the latest deliverables
• Everyone can see the results of the latest build
• Automate deployment

Containerisation is a type of virtualization strategy that emerged as an alternative to traditional hypervisor-based virtualization.

In containerization, the operating system is shared by the different containers rather than cloned for each virtual machine. For example Docker provides a container virtualization platform that serves as a good alternative to hypervisor-based arrangements.

An instance of an image is called a container. You have an image, which is a set of layers. If you start this image, you have a running container of this image. You can have many running containers of the same image.

You can see all your images with docker images whereas you can see your running containers with docker ps (and you can see all containers with docker ps -a).

So a running instance of an image is a container.

CI server function is to continuously integrate all changes being made and committed to repository by different developers and check for compile errors. It needs to build code several times a day, preferably after every commit so it can detect which commit made the breakage if the breakage happens.

Blue-green deployment is a technique that reduces downtime and risk by running two identical production environments called Blue and Green. At any time, only one of the environments is live, with the live environment serving all production traffic. For this example, Blue is currently live and Green is idle.

As you prepare a new version of your software, deployment and the final stage of testing takes place in the environment that is not live: in this example, Green. Once you have deployed and fully tested the software in Green, you switch the router so all incoming requests now go to Green instead of Blue. Green is now live, and Blue is idle.

This technique can eliminate downtime due to application deployment. In addition, blue-green deployment reduces risk: if something unexpected happens with your new version on Green, you can immediately roll back to the last version by switching back to Blue.

• Docker a low overhead way to run virtual machines on your local box or in the cloud. Although they're not strictly distinct machines, nor do they need to boot an OS, they give you many of those benefits.
• Docker can encapsulate legacy applications, allowing you to deploy them to servers that might not otherwise be easy to setup with older packages & software versions.
• Docker can be used to build test boxes, during your deploy process to facilitate continuous integration testing.
• Docker can be used to provision boxes in the cloud, and with swarm you can orchestrate clusters too.

• Developers practicing continuous integration merge their changes back to the main branch as often as possible. By doing so, you avoid the integration hell that usually happens when people wait for release day to merge their changes into the release branch.
• Continuous delivery is an extension of continuous integration to make sure that you can release new changes to your customers quickly in a sustainable way. This means that on top of having automated your testing, you also have automated your release process and you can deploy your application at any point of time by clicking on a button.
• Continuous deployment goes one step further than continuous delivery. With this practice, every change that passes all stages of your production pipeline is released to your customers. There's no human intervention, and only a failed test will prevent a new change to be deployed to production.

Serverless refers to a model where the existence of servers is hidden from developers. It means you no longer have to deal with capacity, deployments, scaling and fault tolerance and OS. It will essentially reducing maintenance efforts and allow developers to quickly focus on developing codes.

Examples are:

• Amazon AWS Lambda
• Azure Functions

The hypervisor handles creating the virtual environment on which the guest virtual machines operate. It supervises the guest systems and makes sure that resources are allocated to the guests as necessary. The hypervisor sits in between the physical machine and virtual machines and provides virtualization services to the virtual machines. To realize it, it intercepts the guest operating system operations on the virtual machines and emulates the operation on the host machine's operating system.

The rapid development of virtualization technologies, primarily in cloud, has driven the use of virtualization further by allowing multiple virtual servers to be created on a single physical server with the help of hypervisors, such as Xen, VMware Player, KVM, etc., and incorporation of hardware support in commodity processors, such as Intel VT and AMD-V.

Chef is a powerful automation platform that transforms infrastructure into code. Chef is a tool for which you write scripts that are used to automate processes.

• Chef Server: The Chef Server is the central store of your infrastructure’s configuration data. The Chef Server stores the data necessary to configure your nodes and provides search, a powerful tool that allows you to dynamically drive node configuration based on data.
• Chef Node: A Node is any host that is configured using Chef-client. Chef-client runs on your nodes, contacting the Chef Server for the information necessary to configure the node. Since a Node is a machine that runs the Chef-client software, nodes are sometimes referred to as “clients”.
• Chef Workstation: A Chef Workstation is the host you use to modify your cookbooks and other configuration data.

• Monolithic Architecture is similar to a big container wherein all the software components of an application are assembled together and tightly packaged.
• A Service-Oriented Architecture is a collection of services which communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity.
• Microservice Architecture is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small autonomous services, modeled around a business domain.

In its conceived form, virtualisation was considered a method of logically dividing mainframes to allow multiple applications to run simultaneously. However, the scenario drastically changed when companies and open source communities were able to provide a method of handling the privileged instructions in one way or another and allow for multiple operating systems to be run simultaneously on a single x86 based system.

The net effect is that virtualization allows you to run two completely different OS on same hardware. Each guest OS goes through all the process of bootstrapping, loading kernel etc. You can have very tight security, for example, guest OS can't get full access to host OS or other guests and mess things up.

The virtualization method can be categorized based on how it mimics hardware to a guest operating system and emulates guest operating environment. Primarily, there are three types of virtualization:

• Emulation
• Paravirtualization
• Container-based virtualization

• In Blue Green Deployment, you have TWO complete environments. One is Blue environment which is running and the Green environment to which you want to upgrade. Once you swap the environment from blue to green, the traffic is directed to your new green environment. You can delete or save your old blue environment for backup until the green environment is stable.

• In Rolling Deployment, you have only ONE complete environment. The code is deployed in the subset of instances of the same environment and moves to another subset after completion.