Which factors do you check first?
What determines your decision to perform rollback?
The way you respond to these questions during your DevOps interview provides you with a chance to show the interviewer your technical knowledge, practical analytical skills, and communication skills.
In order to be ready for your DevOps interview, you will need to grasp the idea and learn what approaches to apply.
This guide explores common DevOps interview questions with sample answers, followed by dedicated sections for entry-level, mid-level, and experienced candidates. It will help you structure thoughtful answers and connect them to your own projects and experience.
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Five Common DevOps Interview Questions
- What is DevOps, and how does it improve collaboration between development and operations teams?
- What is the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment?
- Can you walk me through a CI/CD pipeline you have worked on, from a code commit to a production deployment?
- What is infrastructure as code, and why would you use it to manage infrastructure?
- A deployment has failed and production users are affected. What would you do first?
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How to Answer These Common Questions
| Question | What a strong answer should cover |
|---|---|
| 1. What is DevOps? | Explain shared responsibility, collaboration, automation and continuous feedback. Connect these practices to faster delivery and more reliable services. Avoid giving only a list of tools. |
| 2. How do CI and the two forms of CD differ? | Explain that CI integrates changes frequently with automated builds and tests. Continuous delivery keeps validated changes ready for release, with a production approval step; continuous deployment automatically releases changes that pass the required checks. |
| 3. Describe a CI/CD pipeline. | Use a genuine work, internship or personal project. Explain the trigger, build, tests, security checks, versioned artefact, deployment stages and verification. State what you personally implemented. |
| 4. Explain infrastructure as code. | Describe defining infrastructure in version-controlled configuration files. Explain repeatability, reviewable changes and reuse, using an example such as provisioning networking and compute resources with Terraform. |
| 5. Respond to a failed deployment. | Establish the impact, stop further rollout and coordinate the response. Choose a safe mitigation, such as rollback where compatible, and verify recovery. Preserve logs and the incident timeline, then investigate causes and preventive changes. |
Other Interview Questions That Have a High Probability of Being Asked
Five Entry-Level DevOps Interview Questions
- How would you resolve a merge conflict in Git while preserving the intended changes from both contributors?
- Which Linux commands would you use to inspect running processes, CPU and memory usage, disk space, and service logs?
- What is the difference between a Docker image, a container, and a virtual machine?
- What happens between entering a website address in a browser and receiving a response from the server?
- How would you write a Bash or Python script that checks disk usage and raises an alert when it exceeds a specified threshold?
Five Mid-Level DevOps Interview Questions
- A Kubernetes Pod repeatedly enters
CrashLoopBackOff. How would you investigate and resolve the problem? - How would you manage Terraform state safely when several engineers work on the same infrastructure?
- A CI/CD pipeline takes 30 minutes to complete. How would you identify bottlenecks and reduce its execution time while retaining essential checks?
- How would you securely manage the secrets and credentials used by CI/CD pipelines and deployed applications?
- An application intermittently returns HTTP 502 errors. How would you use metrics, logs, and traces to investigate the cause?
Five DevOps Interview Questions for Experienced Candidates
- How would you design highly available cloud infrastructure for a growing production application while controlling costs?
- How would you choose between rolling, blue-green, and canary deployments for an application that also requires database schema changes?
- Tell me about a major production incident you led. How did you coordinate the response, communicate progress, and prevent recurrence?
- How would you design and test a disaster recovery plan to meet the organization’s recovery time and recovery point objectives?
- How would you use service-level objectives and error budgets to decide when to prioritize reliability improvements over feature releases?
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What is DevOps and how does it help with collaboration between the development and operations teams?
DevOps brings collaboration of the development and operations teams in the process of creating, releasing, and maintaining the software. It’s about the responsibility of the development and operations teams, common tools, and automation, for example, the testing and deployment process. This leads to better communication and less delays between teams that can deliver stable updates.
What are the differences between continuous integration, delivery, and deployment?
Continuous integration means developers frequently combine their code changes in a shared repository, where automated builds and tests check them. Continuous delivery keeps tested changes ready for production, with a person approving the release. Continuous deployment automatically releases changes to production once they pass all required checks.
Can you walk me through a CI/CD pipeline you have worked on, from a code commit to a production deployment?
(Adapt this one to your project)
With a web app project, for automated releases I’ve used GitLab CI/CDer. We do build and automated tests every time a code gets pushed. If the test results are good, I’ll generate a versioned Docker image.
And we deploy it in the staging environment to test further. Then we deploy the same image to production. I would check the health of the app and monitor errors to see if things are working with the release.
What is infrastructure as code? Why do you want to use it for your infrastructure management?
Infrastructure as code is about configuring resources like servers, networks, and storage in a file. For example, I can use Terraform to create resources that an app needs. By having it in git, I have the ability for the team to review the changes, keep a history, and provide similar environments with fewer steps.
You have a failure in the deployment, and it is impacting production users. What is your first step?
My first thought would be to minimize the impact to the user. So right away, I would try to assess the situation, stop the deployment, and alert the on-call people. If there is a safe way to roll back, I’d try to roll back to the last working version and ensure that things get back online. I’d also keep the team aware and keep the logs around. After the service is stable, I’ll try to figure out what happened and improve the checks to catch something like that in the future.
