Maintainable Infrastructure Automation Code | Dataford Interview Questions

How do you approach writing clean, maintainable code for infrastructure automation?

Implement plan_automation_steps(steps) to return a deterministic execution order for named automation steps and their dependencies. Return an empty list when the dependency graph contains a cycle.

Input is a list of dictionaries with name and depends_on fields. Output is a list of step names. Use lexicographic ordering when multiple steps are ready.

Constraints

0 <= steps.length <= 1000
Every step name is unique
Each dependency names another step in the input
A dependency appears at most once for a given step
Names are non-empty strings

Function Signature

def plan_automation_steps(steps):

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