Design a CI/CD system with stuck-job handling

Q: Design a CI/CD system with stuck-job handling

This question evaluates a candidate's competence in designing fault-tolerant distributed systems, focusing on state management, failure detection, safe terminal transitions, and correctness of job lifecycle handling in a multi-tenant CI/CD environment.

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Question

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Scenario

Design a CI/CD platform similar to GitHub Actions/Jenkins that:

Triggers pipelines on events (e.g., push/PR/merge).
Runs pipelines as a DAG of steps (build/test/deploy).
Executes steps on a fleet of workers.
Exposes status to users (queued/running/succeeded/failed/canceled).

Required deep dive

A known issue: sometimes jobs get stuck in RUNNING forever (e.g., worker crashes, network partition). Explain how you would:

Detect stuck RUNNING jobs.
Transition them safely to a terminal state.
Avoid incorrectly failing slow-but-legitimate jobs.
Make the system robust to retries and duplicates.

You may assume a multi-tenant environment and that correctness of job state is important.

Design a CI/CD system with stuck-job handling

Scenario

Required deep dive

Solution

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Design a CI/CD system with stuck-job handling

Overview

Scenario

Required deep dive

Solution

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