Study Guide: CI/CD Concepts & Tools in 35 Flashcards (Delivery vs Deployment)
Study CI/CD with deck XR8592: continuous integration, delivery vs deployment, atomic commits, feature toggles, staging, plus the deployment cards to add.
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CI/CD questions show up in every DevOps interview, and the terms are easy to blur: is "continuous delivery" the same as "continuous deployment"? Deck XR8592 – CI/CD: Concepts & Tools (35 cards) gives you clear definitions. This guide shows how to study them, which card to correct, and what to add before an interview.
Study this deck: CI/CD: Concepts & Tools
1 / 10CI/CD
Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not
Concepts in the deck
The cards cover: CI vs continuous delivery vs continuous deployment, the CI/CD pipeline, integrating at least daily, "integration hell" (merge hell), build automation, the one-command build, atomic commits, TDD, feature toggles, static analysis and quality metrics (code coverage, complexity, build times), regression tests attached to bug fixes, fast builds, staging environments, service virtualization, least privilege, build lights, the main branch, lean software development, build tools (Maven, Gradle, Make, Ant) next to CI platforms (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions), build artifacts (DEB, RPM, MSI), one pipeline vs many, and the Infuse environment (Kaiser, Perry and Schell, 1989).
Key cards
| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| Continuous Delivery | Short cycles so reliable software can be released at any time |
| Continuous Deployment | Automatic rollout to production without manual intervention |
| 'integration hell' | Integrating takes longer than the original changes did |
| Atomic commit | All of a developer's changes handled as a single unit |
| Feature toggles | Disable incomplete features so CI doesn't break the build |
| Bug-fix best practice | Every fix ships with a test that reproduces the bug |
| Service virtualization | Simulating APIs, third-party services and mainframes you can't control |
| Main risks of CI | Setup effort, test maintenance, test-quality dependence, build latency |
Learn the one-word difference
Cards 3 and 4 are the interview trap. Put a single tag on both backs: delivery = a human presses "release"; deployment = no human gate. Then explain any pipeline you've used in those terms. A GitHub Actions workflow that stops at "await approval" is delivery, not deployment.
Fix and split while you review
- Card 18 calls staging "a scalable version of production". The source wording is "scaled-down": staging copies production's configuration at a smaller size. Fix the back.
- Card 31 mixes two kinds of tool. Split it: build tools (Maven, Gradle, Make, Ant) compile and package code; CI servers (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) run those builds whenever someone commits.
- Card 26 ("start the day by updating from the repository") is the old wording. Today's equivalent is: pull or rebase before you push, and keep branches short-lived.
Cards worth adding
The deck is mostly theory from the history of CI. It never covers the delivery half of the pipeline. Write six cards: blue-green deployment, canary release, rollback, pipeline as code (YAML in the repo), artifact repository, and secrets management. Add the four DORA metrics too (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, time to restore service). Interviewers ask about these more than about Infuse.
Where it fits
CI/CD connects the rest of the toolchain: containers get built in the pipeline, and clusters receive the result. Continue with our guides to Docker commands and Compose and Kubernetes essentials.
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