Question 1

What does a CI/CD pipeline do? Describe one you built.

Accepted Answer

CI builds and tests every change; CD deploys passing builds automatically. Describe stages: checkout, build, unit tests, security scan, build image, deploy to staging, tests, deploy to production with approval.

Question 2

Container vs virtual machine?

Accepted Answer

A VM virtualises hardware and runs a full operating system; a container shares the host kernel and isolates processes - lighter and faster to start, but with weaker isolation.

Question 3

How do you make a Docker image smaller?

Accepted Answer

Use a slim or distroless base image, multi-stage builds so build tools stay out of the final image, combine layers, and use .dockerignore.

Question 4

Explain pods, deployments and services in Kubernetes.

Accepted Answer

A pod runs one or more containers; a deployment manages replicas of pods and rolling updates; a service gives pods a stable address and load-balances to them.

Question 5

A pod is in CrashLoopBackOff. How do you debug it?

Accepted Answer

kubectl describe pod for events, kubectl logs --previous for the crash output, then check config, environment variables, secrets, resource limits (OOMKilled) and the readiness/liveness probes.

Question 6

Blue-green vs canary deployments?

Accepted Answer

Blue-green runs two full environments and switches traffic at once, with instant rollback. Canary sends a small share of traffic to the new version first and grows it while watching metrics.

Question 7

What is Terraform state, and why does it matter?

Accepted Answer

State maps your configuration to real resources. Store it remotely with locking (for example S3 with a lock table) so team members don't overwrite each other, and never edit it by hand.

Question 8

How do you manage secrets?

Accepted Answer

Never in Git. Use a secrets manager (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager) or Kubernetes secrets with encryption, inject at runtime, restrict access and rotate them.

Question 9

What would you monitor for a web application?

Accepted Answer

The four golden signals - latency, traffic, errors and saturation - plus alerts that point to user impact, dashboards, and centralised logs.

Question 10

Tell me about an outage you handled.

Accepted Answer

What broke, how you found it, how you restored service, and what you changed afterwards so it wouldn't happen again. Blameless and specific.

Question 11

Can freshers get DevOps jobs?

Accepted Answer

Yes, often starting in support or cloud operations roles. Learn Linux, Git, Docker, one CI tool and one cloud, and build a pipeline that deploys a small app.

Question 12

Which cloud should I learn for DevOps?

Accepted Answer

AWS has the most job listings in India; Azure is common at enterprises and services companies. Concepts transfer between clouds.

Question 13

Is coding required for DevOps?

Accepted Answer

Scripting is - Bash and usually Python - plus reading application code well enough to debug builds and deployments.

DevOps engineer interview questions and answers

What to revise before the interview

1.What does a CI/CD pipeline do? Describe one you built.

2.Container vs virtual machine?

3.How do you make a Docker image smaller?

4.Explain pods, deployments and services in Kubernetes.

5.A pod is in CrashLoopBackOff. How do you debug it?

6.Blue-green vs canary deployments?

7.What is Terraform state, and why does it matter?

8.How do you manage secrets?

9.What would you monitor for a web application?

10.Tell me about an outage you handled.

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