Search the practice set

275 questions, 991 terms and 600 topics in 30 areas.

49 results for “Deployment Gates”

Terminology · 26
term

Automated Release Verification

A gate that compares the new version's live signals against the old one's and decides, on stated criteria, whether to continue or revert.

Deployment Gates
term

Blue-Green Deployment

Running two identical production environments and switching traffic from the old one to the new one in a single cut, with the old kept warm for rollback.

Software Architecture
term

Deployment Pipeline

The automated path from commit to production, structured so that each stage increases confidence and the whole is fast enough to be run on every change.

CI/CD
term

Deployment Topology View

A diagram showing where software actually runs — regions, zones, networks and hosts — which is where availability and cost properties become visible.

Deployment Diagrams
term

Etsy's Continuous Deployment

Etsy moved from infrequent, risky releases to dozens of deploys a day, demonstrating that deployment frequency and stability improve together rather than trading off.

Software Architecture
term

Artifact Signing

Cryptographically signing build outputs so that deployment can verify what is being run was produced by the expected pipeline from the expected source.

Supply Chain Security
term

Blast Radius Reduction

The set of deliberate partitions — accounts, regions, zones, cells, tenants, deployment stages — that bound how far any single failure or compromise can reach.

Cloud Architecture
term

Blue-Green Database Schema

The constraint that makes fast rollback actually work — both application versions must be able to run against one schema at the same time.

Release Strategies
term

Build Attestation

A signed statement about how an artifact was produced — by which builder from which source — that a deployment gate can verify rather than trust.

Supply-Chain Provenance
term

CI/CD

Merging work continuously into a shared trunk with automated verification, and keeping every commit in a state that could be released.

Software Architecture
term

Canary Release

Routing a small fraction of traffic to a new version, watching its metrics, and expanding or rolling back based on what they show.

Software Architecture
term

DORA Metrics

Four measures of software delivery performance — deployment frequency, lead time for change, change failure rate, and time to restore service.

Software Architecture
term

Definition of Done

The agreed, explicit conditions under which work is finished, which functions as a quality gate only when it is automated and non-negotiable.

Quality Gates
term

Evidence Based Approval

Replacing a human judgement about whether a change is safe with a machine-produced record of the checks it passed, assessed once for the class rather than per instance.

Change Advisory vs Automated Gates
term

Expand-Contract Migration

Changing a schema in additive steps that keep old and new code both working, so deployment and migration never have to be simultaneous.

Database Migration Under CD
term

Feature Flag

A runtime switch that decouples deploying code from releasing behaviour, so unfinished or risky work can ship dark.

Software Architecture
term

Image Registry

The store from which container images are pulled, and an under-appreciated availability and security dependency of every deployment and every autoscale event.

Containers
term

Microservices

An architectural style where an application is a set of independently deployable services, each owning its data and aligned to a business capability.

Software Architecture
term

Monolith vs Microservices

A trade of deployment independence against distributed-systems complexity, decided by team topology far more often than by technology.

Architecture Decision-Making
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Preventive Control Placement

Choosing where in the lifecycle a control acts — at authoring, at admission or after the fact — which determines both its strength and its cost.

Guardrails vs Gates
term

Prompt Registry

A versioned store of production prompts with their model bindings, parameters and evaluation results, so a prompt change is a reviewable, traceable, reversible deployment.

AI-Era Architecture
term

Prompt Regression Suite

A set of test cases with expected properties, run against a prompt on every change, to detect quality regressions before deployment.

Prompt & Version Management
term

Prompt Versioning

Treating prompts as versioned, reviewed, tested artefacts rather than as strings edited in place.

AI-Era Architecture
term

Reconciliation Loop

A controller that continuously compares declared state with actual state and acts to close the gap, replacing deployment as an event with convergence as a property.

GitOps
term

Rolling Update Surge

The extra capacity a rolling deployment temporarily adds, and the unavailability it is permitted, which together decide whether the rollout is safe under load.

Deployment Strategies
term

Zero-Downtime Migration

Changing a schema or system while it stays in service, by adding the new alongside the old, migrating, then removing the old.

Legacy Modernization
Questions · 6
quiz

A global SaaS product has a 200 ms p95 API budget. Users in Sydney see 900 ms against a single US-East deployment. The application team says the service responds in 40 ms. Who is right and what do you do?

Both are right, and that is the point The service does respond in 40 ms. The other 860 ms is network — and no amount of application profiling will show it, whic

Network Performance
quiz

A release must rename a heavily used database column and ships tonight. The team proposes doing the rename in the deployment. What is wrong, and what do you propose?

What is wrong A rename is not additive. During a rolling deployment both versions of the application run simultaneously: one expects the old name, one the new.

Database Migration Under CD
quiz

Every deployment produces a small spike of 502s that the team has learned to ignore. Fix it.

The cause In flight requests are being severed because the instance terminates before the load balancer has stopped sending to it, or before existing requests c

Load Balancing
quiz

Knight Capital lost roughly $460M in 45 minutes in 2012 after a deployment reached seven of eight servers. Which architectural failures made that possible, and which one would you fix first?

The case, as publicly reported Per the SEC's 2013 order, Knight Capital deployed new order routing code to eight production servers ahead of a NYSE programme la

Software Architecture
quiz

p99 latency on checkout tripled overnight. Dashboards look normal, no deployment went out, and every service reports healthy. How do you find it?

What the interviewer is testing Systematic diagnosis in a distributed system when the obvious signals are clean — which is the realistic version of this problem

Observability
quiz

In July 2019 a single regex deployed globally took Cloudflare's network to 100% CPU within seconds. What does this say about how configuration should be released?

The case, as publicly reported On 2 July 2019, Cloudflare deployed a new managed WAF rule. It contained a regular expression that caused catastrophic backtracki

Reliability & Resilience