CD basics

CD basics interviews cover how verified artifacts reach users: environment separation, secret injection, rollout strategy, rollback design, and feature flags that decouple deploy from release.

Subtopics: environments, secrets, deployment strategies, rollbacks, feature flags.

On interviews: walk from green CI to staging to production; where approvals live; how you would roll back a frontend deploy with a bad migration.

Common pitfalls: secrets in repo or build logs; no rehearsed rollback; flags used as authorization.

The trade-off is release agility versus blast radius and governance overhead.

Checklist:

• Version environment configuration.
• Use least-privilege secrets per environment.
• Choose rollout strategy by risk.
• Plan rollback before you need it.