CS DevOps & Deployment 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which practice involves automatically releasing every change that passes all pipeline stages to production without manual approval?
- Continuous deployment (Correct answer)
- Continuous integration
- Continuous delivery
- Continuous monitoring
Correct answer: Continuous deployment
Continuous deployment pushes every passing change to production automatically, whereas continuous delivery still requires a manual release decision.
Question 2: A rolling deployment updates a service across 10 servers. What is its key characteristic?
- Servers are updated incrementally in batches so the service stays available throughout (Correct answer)
- All servers are updated simultaneously to minimize version skew
- Traffic is duplicated to old and new versions for comparison
- The old environment is kept idle as a full standby copy
Correct answer: Servers are updated incrementally in batches so the service stays available throughout
Rolling deployments replace instances gradually, keeping enough old instances serving traffic to avoid downtime.
Question 3: What is the primary purpose of a container orchestration platform like Kubernetes?
- Automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters (Correct answer)
- Compiling application source code into container images
- Providing a version control system for containers
- Replacing the need for operating systems on servers
Correct answer: Automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters
Orchestrators schedule containers onto machines, scale them, restart failures, and manage networking across a cluster.
Question 4: In monitoring, what distinguishes a metric from a log?
- A metric is a numeric time-series measurement, while a log is a timestamped record of a discrete event (Correct answer)
- A metric is stored in files, while a log is stored in databases
- A metric records errors only, while a log records all activity
- There is no difference; the terms are interchangeable
Correct answer: A metric is a numeric time-series measurement, while a log is a timestamped record of a discrete event
Metrics are aggregatable numeric values sampled over time, while logs capture detailed individual events as text records.
Question 5: A build passes on a developer's laptop but fails in CI. Which DevOps principle most directly addresses this problem?
- Environment consistency through containerized or reproducible builds (Correct answer)
- Increasing the frequency of code reviews
- Adding more manual QA testing before merges
- Deploying only during off-peak business hours
Correct answer: Environment consistency through containerized or reproducible builds
Reproducible, containerized build environments eliminate 'works on my machine' failures by making all environments identical.
Question 6: What is the purpose of a rollback in a deployment process?
- Reverting the application to a previous known-good version after a failed release (Correct answer)
- Backing up the database before deployment
- Restarting servers to clear memory leaks
- Merging the release branch back into the main branch
Correct answer: Reverting the application to a previous known-good version after a failed release
A rollback restores the last stable version when a new release causes failures in production.
Question 7: Which of the following is a typical stage order in a CI/CD pipeline?
- Build, test, deploy to staging, deploy to production (Correct answer)
- Deploy to production, test, build, review
- Test, deploy to production, build, monitor
- Deploy to staging, build, test, commit
Correct answer: Build, test, deploy to staging, deploy to production
Pipelines typically compile and package first, run tests, then promote the artifact through staging before production.
CS DevOps & Deployment 3
Which practice involves automatically releasing every change that passes all pipeline stages to production without manual approval?