Design a CI/CD pipeline with scheduler
Overview
The question evaluates proficiency in designing production-grade CI/CD platforms and orchestration schedulers, testing skills in scalable pipeline architecture, multi-tenant isolation and fairness, build and artifact management, comprehensive testing and security scanning, deployment and rollback strategies, observability, scheduling concepts (DAG modeling, concurrency limits, retries, caching, rate limiting), and API/schema and data-store/queue design. Commonly asked in system design interviews to probe architectural trade-offs, operational resilience, distributed-systems and scheduling competence, and failure-handling under load; it is in the System Design domain and primarily tests practical application with substantial conceptual architectural reasoning.
System Design: Production‑Grade CI/CD for a Large Microservices Monorepo
Context
You’re designing a scalable, secure CI/CD platform for a large monorepo containing many microservices. The platform must serve multiple teams (multi‑tenant), handle high throughput, and provide strong isolation and fairness.
Requirements
Design a CI/CD pipeline and the orchestration scheduler covering:
- Source Control Triggers
- Build and Artifact Management
- Tests: Unit, Integration, and End‑to‑End (E2E)
- Security Scanning (SAST/SCA/Secrets/IaC/Container)
- Deployment Strategies (Canary, Blue‑Green)
- Rollback Strategies
- Observability (metrics, logs, traces, audit)
-
Job Scheduler and Orchestrator
- DAG modeling of dependencies
- Concurrency limits, priorities
- Retries with exponential backoff
- Caching
- Rate limiting
- Data stores, queues, coordination mechanisms
- APIs and schemas for pipelines, jobs, and logs
- Scalability, multi‑tenant isolation and fairness
- Handling flaky/nondeterministic tests
- Failure scenarios and mitigations
Solution
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