DevOps Interview Questions
Test your DevOps knowledge with questions on CI/CD, containers, monitoring, infrastructure automation, and site reliability engineering.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the key DevOps topics for interviews?
CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins), containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), IaC (Terraform), monitoring and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, DataDog), logging (ELK stack), and incident management. Understanding the DevOps culture and practices is equally important.
How do DevOps interviews differ from software engineering interviews?
DevOps interviews focus more on operational concerns: deployment strategies (blue-green, canary), monitoring, incident response, automation, and infrastructure. There's less emphasis on algorithms and more on systems thinking, reliability, and tooling expertise.
What is the difference between blue-green and canary deployments?
Blue-green maintains two identical environments and switches traffic instantly. Canary gradually routes a small percentage of traffic to the new version and increases it over time. Blue-green is simpler but requires double the infrastructure. Canary is more gradual and catches issues with less user impact.
What are SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs?
SLI (Service Level Indicator) is a metric like latency or error rate. SLO (Service Level Objective) is the target value for that metric (e.g., 99.9% availability). SLA (Service Level Agreement) is the contractual commitment with consequences for missing targets. These concepts are central to SRE interviews.
How should I set up monitoring and alerting?
Monitor the four golden signals: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. Use metrics (Prometheus), logs (ELK/CloudWatch), and traces (Jaeger/X-Ray) for full observability. Alert on symptoms (user-facing issues) rather than causes. Set up dashboards for at-a-glance health and runbooks for incident response.
What is Infrastructure as Code and why is it important?
IaC manages infrastructure through code rather than manual processes. It enables version control, peer review, automated testing, and repeatable deployments. Tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, and Pulumi make infrastructure changes auditable and reversible, reducing human error and configuration drift.