DevOps Interview Academy

60 expert-level interview questions with detailed answers covering every major DevOps domain. Filter by category and difficulty.

🎯Interview Practice Mode160 scenario-based questions · Self-paced · Progress tracked

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DevOps Interview Academy

How do you troubleshoot high CPU usage on a Linux server?

Explain the difference between TCP and UDP and when you'd choose each.

What is a Linux namespace and how does it relate to containers?

How does DNS resolution work end-to-end?

Explain iptables chains and how traffic flows through them.

What happens when you run 'ls -la' at the kernel level?

Explain the difference between CMD and ENTRYPOINT in a Dockerfile.

How do Docker layers work and how do you optimize image size?

What is a Docker multi-stage build and why would you use one?

How does container networking work in Docker?

What are Docker health checks and why are they important?

How do you handle secrets in Docker containers?

What happens when you type 'kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml'?

How would you debug a pod stuck in CrashLoopBackOff?

Explain Kubernetes networking — how do pods communicate?

What are liveness, readiness, and startup probes in Kubernetes?

How does Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) work?

Explain the difference between a Deployment, StatefulSet, and DaemonSet.

What is the difference between blue-green and canary deployments?

How do you implement zero-downtime deployments?

Explain GitOps principles and how ArgoCD implements them.

How do you structure a CI/CD pipeline for trunk-based development?

What is a GitHub Actions workflow and how does matrix strategy work?

How do you handle database migrations in a CI/CD pipeline?

Explain the AWS Shared Responsibility Model.

How does a VPC work and how do you design a multi-tier network architecture?

What is IAM and how do you implement least-privilege access?

How do you design for high availability on AWS?

What is the difference between ALB, NLB, and CLB?

How does AWS Lambda cold start work and how do you mitigate it?

Explain how Terraform state locking works.

How do you structure Terraform for a large-scale multi-environment setup?

What is Terraform drift and how do you detect and handle it?

Explain Terraform modules and when to use them.

How do you handle secrets in Terraform?

What are Terraform provisioners and why should you avoid them?

What are SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs? Give an example.

Explain the three pillars of observability.

How do you design an effective alerting strategy?

How does Prometheus work and what is its pull-based model?

What is distributed tracing and how does OpenTelemetry implement it?

How do you monitor a Kubernetes cluster effectively?

How would you secure a Kubernetes cluster?

What is shift-left security and how do you implement it in CI/CD?

Explain the principle of least privilege and give implementation examples.

How do you implement secrets management in a microservices architecture?

What is a supply chain attack and how do you protect against it?

How do you implement network segmentation and zero-trust in the cloud?

Design a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices architecture.

How would you design a highly available logging system?

Design a disaster recovery strategy for a critical production system.

How would you migrate a monolith to microservices?

Design a platform engineering self-service developer portal.

How do you design a multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure?

Tell me about a time you dealt with a production outage.

How do you handle disagreements with developers about deployment practices?

Describe how you would introduce SRE practices to a traditional ops team.

How do you prioritize technical debt in a fast-moving team?

Describe a time you automated a painful manual process.

How do you stay current with DevOps tools and practices?