Top 20 Devops Interview Questions and Answers

NovelVista

Last updated 13/07/2023

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DevOps professionals are highly demanded across the world right now.

How much you might ask?

If you open naukri.com right now, you’ll see 7707 open positions for DevOps professionals there. But if you think, just because there are a lot of open positions the competition is going to be less, you are wrong there. Since DevOps is a culture, DevOps professionals need to be the ones who are responsible for cultural changes. 

As we all know, DevOps professional works as a bridge between Development and Operations teams. To implement that successfully, you need to acquire some basic skills for DevOps. You need to have strong communication skills, software development skills, cloud skills, coding and scripting skills, a deep understanding of DevOps tools and a command over automation technologies and tolols.  Hence, during interviews, your interviewers check if you have an in-depth knowledge of DevOps to do take that responsibility along with all these mentioned skills.

Even if we leave that amazing salary segment, a DevOps job can provide you with lot of other parts as well. Some of them are as follows:

• Continuously evolving DevOps practices
• Ability to create a business impact
• Empowerment to point out the misfits of the DevOps culture
• Conversion of self as the best communicator

Now the question is, how to crack a DevOps interview?

The first DevOps interview tips you are going to hear from us is, stick to the basics. If your core is strong, no one can beat you at the interview. The next point you need to take care of is, go through the most common interview questions over the year. Well, you are in luck here, since we have done the needful for you already! 

Here are some mostly asked DevOps questions that are gonna help you to prove your worth:

1. What is DevOps? Explain in brief.

DevOps is a term used in the IT industry which promotes collaboration and communication between software development and operations team to streamline the process of software delivery with a minimum failure rate of releases. It also helps to speed up the delivery, optimize automation of processes and improvise through quick feedbacks.

You are suggested to have a clear knowledge of agile methodology.

2. What is the usage of DevOps in the industry?

There are many industries that are using DevOps in order to minimize the time deadline risks, mitigation of bug fixes, better working relationships, quality delivery of software and taking care of customer satisfaction. Moreover, it reduces costs and increases the chances of succeeding companies. The primary objective of DevOps is to help us to get the production processes as quickly as possible while minimizing the risks in software quality assurance and compliance.

3. What is the difference between Agile, Lean IT and DevOps?

Agile is a methodology that focuses on the development of software. It aims to establish continuous delivery, shorten feedback loops and improve team collaboration through the software development life cycle (SDLC).

Lean IT is a methodology that focuses on eliminating unwanted processes that add no value and it aims to streamline the value stream of the product development cycle.

DevOps which consists of Dev – development & Ops – operations focuses on both processes of the product. For smooth and automated processes, it allows us to effectively unite the roles between automation tools and IT professionals.

4. What are the advantages of DevOps?

If you have work experience in the past then you can mention how it helped in your previous job. Otherwise, you can explain it as below :

Technical Benefits :

• Continuous software delivery
• Faster problem resolving methods
• Minimal problems to manage 

Business Benefits :

• Faster delivery of features
• More stable operating environments
• Improve communication among the teams

5. What are the three important DevOps KPIs?

Three most common DevOps KPIs are:

• Meantime to failure recovery
• Deployment frequency
• Percentage of failed deployments

6. Explain the typical roles involved in DevOps.

DevOps Architect: The person responsible for leading the entire DevOps process from the design and implementation of enterprise applications and infrastructure among production and non-production environment.

DevOps Engineer: the person must have experience with Agile, Version Control or SCM, CI/CD and infrastructure automation and database management skills. Any developer who has coding or scripting skills can qualify for the role of DevOps Engineer.

7. List out some popular tools and which tools have you worked on?

• Selenium
• Puppet/ Chef/ Ansible
• GIT/ SVN
• Jenkins
• Docker
• Jira
• Monit
• Bamboo
• SonarQube
• Nagios/ Splunk

You can refer a few of them but you need to make sure about having knowledge of every tool. The other part of the question includes two possibilities:-

1 if you’re experienced and have worked on all the tools mentioned above, then it would be easy for you to demonstrate it in words as you can say that I have worked on all these tools for developing quality software and deploying it frequently in a reliable manner.

2 if you don’t have experience with some of the above-mentioned tools, you must take an overview of all of those with you and you can elaborate your work with the tool you have specialization in.

8. Which scripting tools are used in DevOps

Python, Ruby, MS Powershell, Perl, etc.

9. Name the cloud computing platforms which are used for DevOps

The popular cloud computing platforms which are used for DevOps implementation are :

• Amazon Web Services
• Microsoft Azure
• Google Cloud 

10. What are the pre-requisites for the implementation of DevOps?

Some of the pre-requisites that are useful for implementation of DevOps are :

• Communication across the organization in need of changes;
• Commitment at a senior level in the organization
• Automated tools for processes
• Automated testing
• Version Control Software
• Automated deployment

11. What do you understand by “Infrastructure as code” and configuration management?

Infrastructure as Code (IAC) is a type of IT infrastructure that manages and tracks configuration in files automatically rather than the manual process. This allows for transparent tracking of infrastructure changes and allows for more scalable configuration through usually versioning system.

Configuration management systems are software systems that allow managing an environment in a safe, consistent and reliable manner. By using a domain-specific language (DSL) multiple people can work and conduct the storage of system configuration for thousands of servers in a single place. 

12. Explain Chef, git bisect, puppet, vagrant, canary release.

You may be asked any of the top configuration management tools and their work process. Some of them are as below :

The chef is a powerful automation tool that transforms infrastructure into code.  To automate processes you can use written scripts in this tool. It is purely Ruby-based and is termed as programmable infrastructure.

Puppet is a Ruby-based configuration management tool that helps to automate administration tasks.

Git bisect is a tool designed to handle everything from small to large projects with speed and efficiency. It comes from the binary search algorithm and helps you to find a large set of data.

A vagrant is a tool that can manage and create virtualized environments for testing and developing software.

A canary release is a pattern which mitigates the risk of introducing new software features into the production environment. Before the availability of the complete user set, it is done by making it available in a controlled manner to a subset of the user.

13. Explain Blue/Green Deployment Pattern

In blue-green deployment you have two identical production environments.  However, only one among them is live a certain point of time. The LIVE environment is called as “Blue” environment where deployment takes place and the “Green” environment hosts the current production system.

For the final stage testing of new releases of software, the team conducts in an environment known as the “Green” environment. The traffic is routed to the green environment once verified.

14. What is CBD?

Component-Based Development (CBD) is a rare way to approach product development. The developers always look for tested and existing verified components to bring them together to a product instead of developing from scratch.

15. Explain Pair Programming with reference to DevOps

Pair programming is an engineering practice where two programmers; one as a driver and other as an observer; works on the same system with the same algorithm or code or design. The observer helps in identifying problems of the project continuously. Their roles can be reversed without any prior intimation.

16. List the key components of DevOps.

The following are the key components of DevOps:

• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Delivery
• Continuous Monitoring and Logging
• Microservices
• Infrastructure as Code
• Communication and Collaboration

I will suggest you take an overview of every component mentioned above in the list.

17. What is VCS? What are the benefits of using the Version Control System?

Version control systems (VCS) are software tools that record changes to the files and integrate these changes with the existing code. It consists of a central shared repository that allows teammates to change the code or revert files back to the previous state. Along with the integration, it allows us to know who did the last modification that might be causing a problem or who introduced an issue and when.

Primarily, there are three types of version control systems :

• Local Version Control Systems
• Centralized Version Control Systems
• Distributed Version Control Systems

Following are the primary benefits of using Version Control System :

There is an availability of complete long term history of changes that occurs in any file.

VCS allows merging all the changes into a common version whenever required by the team members as they are allowed to work freely on any file.

With VCS you can request any version at any time and you will have the snapshot of the complete project. All of the past variants and versions are securely packed up inside the VCS.

18. What experience or knowledge do you have in DevOps projects?

You can mention your previous job as a DevOps Engineer/ architect and explain your role as to how you were working and what all projects you were involved in and talk about providing support to the project teams. 

Example: .NET, J2EE with the Agile process and tools involved in the end to end automation.

19. Describe a centralized logging solution.

CLM – Centralized Log Management is designed to unify all of your log data and push it to an accessible center interface. Logging solutions are used for monitoring system health. It allows detecting events and metrics that diverge from a baseline. Metrics include storage space, load, memory or any other kind of data that has to be continuously monitored.

A commonly used open-source logging solution is the Elasticsearch-Kibana-Logstash (ELK) stack. Most of the cloud solutions either have their own centralized logging solutions which contain the components like Stacks. AWS CloudWatch, for example, consists of all parts and is heavily integrated into every component of AWS, while also allowing parallel exports of data to AWS S3 for cheap long-term storage.

Splunk is another popular commercial solution and is considered to be very scalable. It is used as a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system which allows the data model support and has an advanced table.

20. What is your outlook for the career prospect in DevOps?

The most important aspect would be to help in improving the processes, involvement at the end to end delivery, to enable the development and operations teams to work together and understand each other’s point of view.

Conclusion:

Once you go through all these DevOps interview questions that are mentioned above, going DevOps is not going to be an issue for you anymore. If you still think you are going to need some more details, maybe it’s time to go through a DevOps Training course! And again, you are in luck since we have curated our DevOps certification course material in such a way that leaves the essence of both theoretical and practical knowledge.

So what are you waiting for? Join our DevOps courses to know all about DevOps and rock your next interview with the DevOps knowledge!

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