Deployment and Operations
What to know
Expect questions on infrastructure as code (declarative vs imperative), immutable infrastructure, and CI/CD pipelines with build, test, deploy, and rollback stages. Understand blue/green and canary deployment strategies and when each reduces risk. Know configuration management, environment parity, and the role of version control as the source of truth. Operational concepts include patching strategy, backup and restore testing, and change management. Automation is the theme: repeatable, idempotent deployments beat manual steps. Also know tagging conventions for cost allocation and ownership, and the idea of runbooks for incident response.
Traps
A classic trap is choosing "manual verification" where automated testing fits, or treating infrastructure as code as a one-time provisioning tool rather than a continuously reconciled state. Questions may conflate blue/green (switch all traffic at once, easy rollback) with canary (gradual percentage rollout, limits blast radius). Another trap: assuming backups are valid without a restore test - the correct answer usually includes periodic restore validation. Watch for options that deploy directly to production without a staging or approval gate when the scenario mentions regulated change control.
Worked example
A team wants to release daily with minimal user impact. Blue/green gives instant rollback but doubles cost during cutover; canary limits exposure to a small percentage first. If the scenario emphasizes "detect problems before most users are affected," choose canary. Rule of thumb: canary for risk containment, blue/green for fast rollback.