DevOps — Interview questions
CI/CD Pipelines
CI vs CD vs Continuous Deployment, pipeline stages and gates, deploy strategies and rollback, runners, artifacts and caches, pipeline secrets and supply-chain security.
15 questions
Cloud Fundamentals
IAM roles and least privilege, VPC and public/private subnets, security groups vs NACLs, autoscaling groups, regions and availability zones, and cost control.
10 questions
Configuration Management (Ansible)
Ansible idempotency, roles and their directory layout, variable precedence, module choices, Vault, serial rollout, and the imperative-vs-declarative question.
8 questions
Containers & Orchestration
Docker images and containers, container networking, Kubernetes and OpenShift core objects.
20 questions
Database Operations
Operational database concerns for DevOps — storage growth, bloat, and triaging a disk-full alert on a production database.
9 questions
Helm & GitOps
Helm charts and templating, release tracking and rollback, Helm vs Kustomize, the GitOps pull model, and ArgoCD drift reconciliation.
8 questions
HTTP & TLS
HTTP versions, headers, methods and status codes, virtual hosts and SNI, the TLS handshake, HSTS and mutual TLS, and reading a failing curl.
11 questions
Infrastructure System Design
Senior scenarios: HA stateless services, zero-downtime deploys and schema migrations, centralized logging, capacity planning, multi-region, secrets and rate limiting.
9 questions
Kubernetes Core & Architecture
Cluster architecture, control plane, etcd, the Pod as the schedulable unit, namespaces, and how kubectl apply flows through the control loop.
11 questions
Kubernetes Networking
Service types and how they route to Pods, Ingress and controllers, kube-proxy and CNI, cluster DNS, and NetworkPolicy.
9 questions
Kubernetes Scheduling & Resources
How the scheduler places Pods, resource requests and limits, QoS classes and eviction, health probes, and affinity and topology-spread controls.
9 questions
Kubernetes Security
RBAC and ServiceAccounts, ConfigMap vs Secret and why Secrets are not encrypted by default, SecurityContext and Linux capabilities, and cluster hardening.
8 questions
Kubernetes Storage
Volumes, PersistentVolume/PVC and StorageClass, static vs dynamic provisioning, access modes and reclaim policies, CSI, and StatefulSet storage.
8 questions
Kubernetes Troubleshooting
Diagnosing CrashLoopBackOff, Pending, OOMKilled, Evicted and ImagePull errors, node NotReady, stuck rollouts and Ingress 502s from kubectl output.
12 questions
Kubernetes Workloads
Deployment, ReplicaSet, StatefulSet and DaemonSet, Jobs and CronJobs, rolling updates and rollback, and the HPA and autoscaling family.
12 questions
Linux Boot & systemd
The boot sequence from power-on to login, BIOS vs UEFI, systemd units and targets, and debugging a failed service with journalctl.
5 questions
Linux Operations
Day-to-day Linux administration — disk, memory, processes, systemd, permissions, and troubleshooting.
17 questions
Linux Processes & Signals
Processes and fork/exec, process states, zombies and orphans and PID 1, signals, syscalls, file descriptors, and the PATH search.
9 questions
Linux Filesystems & Storage
Inodes and links, filesystem types, RAID levels, LVM, mounts and fstab, disk I/O analysis, and the buffer/cache in free output.
9 questions
Message Brokers
Message queues and Kafka — components, partition and consumer parallelism, ZooKeeper, dead-letter queues and TTL.
10 questions
Network Troubleshooting
The layered "site is slow" methodology, port and connectivity checks, tcpdump capture, and DHCP, VLAN, ICMP and proxy fundamentals for diagnosis.
8 questions
Networking
TCP/IP fundamentals, DNS, NAT, routing, BGP, subnetting and the OSI model for operations engineers.
23 questions
Observability & Monitoring
Metrics, logs, traces, alerting, dashboards, and diagnosing a degraded host or service.
11 questions
Reliability & SRE
SLI/SLO/SLA and error budgets, availability math, burn-rate alerts, the golden signals, toil, incident response and blameless post-mortems, chaos engineering and DR.
14 questions
Shell & Log Scripting
Shell pipelines and log analysis with awk, sed, sort and uniq, plus algorithmic log-processing tasks.
14 questions
Terraform & IaC
The plan/apply lifecycle, remote state and locking, drift and import, modules, count vs for_each, workspaces, taint/replace, and safe state refactors.
13 questions
Version Control
Git fundamentals — merge vs rebase, fetch vs pull, fork/pull-request workflow, and branching models.
9 questions
