The probe
A CI/CD system is a distributed task execution engine with dependencies (steps must run in order), resource management (build agents have finite capacity), and artifact management (build outputs must be stored and retrieved). The interesting distributed systems problem is the task scheduler under resource constraints.
Step 1 — Clarify
- Trigger: push to any branch, PR creation, or manual?
- Steps: lint → test → build → deploy (DAG with dependencies)
- Build agents: fixed pool or autoscaled? (Autoscaled is production)
- Artifact storage: where do build outputs go?
- Maximum pipeline duration SLO: 10 minutes (GitHub Actions target)
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