DevOps Interview Questions

DevOps Interview Questions: DevOps is a collaborative approach that combines software development and operations to streamline the software delivery process. It involves close collaboration between developers, system administrators, and other IT professionals to ensure faster and more reliable software delivery. As DevOps continues to gain popularity, there is an increasing demand for professionals with DevOps skills.

If you are preparing for a DevOps interview, it is important to have a strong understanding of the DevOps principles, practices, tools, and technologies. DevOps interview questions are designed to assess your knowledge and proficiency in these areas.

DevOps interview questions can cover a wide range of topics such as continuous integration and delivery, infrastructure automation, containerization, monitoring, and more. Being prepared to answer these questions can help you showcase your expertise and increase your chances of landing your dream DevOps job. In this article, we will explore some common DevOps interview questions and provide tips on how to approach them.

DevOps Interview Questions

Round 1 – Technical Discussion
Duration – 45 Minutes
Designation – DevOps Engineer – II
Experience – 1 – 7 Years

• Can you introduce yourself?
• What are your day-to-day tasks as a DevOps engineer?
• Can you explain the projects you have worked on?
• What is the purpose of .gitignore?
• How do git merge and git rebase differ?
• How do git reset and git revert differ?
• How do git fetch and git pull differ?
• How do you check the differences between two commits in Git?
• How do you check the status of the working directory in Git?
• While you’re working on a feature, you realize you need to address an urgent bug fix that requires your immediate attention. How would you handle temporarily setting aside your current changes to focus on the bug fix without committing incomplete work?
• How do you handle and resolve CPU-related tickets?
• Where do you configure Docker Hub credentials and RDS credentials?
• As the sole DevOps engineer working with a few developers, how do you Collaborate and manage tasks?
• What are the differences between virtualization and containerization?
• Can you explain VPCs? How can you distinguish between a private subnet and a public subnet?
• What are NACLs and NAT gateways, and how are they used?
• What are Dockerfiles and pipelines? How are they used in CI/CD?
• Where should Nexus credentials be stored securely?
• What is Maven, and what are its primary uses?
• How do you ignore certain files while creating a Dockerfile?
• What is EKS, and what are its benefits?
• What is a change request, and how is it handled in a DevOps environment?
• Can you compare NLB (Network Load Balancer) and ALB (Application Load Balancer)?
• What are the differences between HTTP and HTTPS?

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Round 2 – Technical Round 2
Duration – 30 minutes
Designation – DevOps Engineer
Experience – 2+ Years

• Do you have knowledge about Terraform?
• How do you use Ansible?
• You have written Ansible playbooks, Can you explain?
• Do you have experience with Jenkins? What have you used Jenkins for?
• Did you use stages or separate jobs in Jenkins?
• Tell me your experience with monitoring
• What do you know about automation?
• You have done POC, Is it through Terraform or something else?
• Tell me what Terraform is and how it is different from others like AWS CLI or CloudFormation.
• Can you tell me the use cases for Ansible playbooks? And what have you done?
• Could you tell me what CI/CD means?
• How can you achieve CI/CD through Jenkins?
• How to deploy it to Kubernetes using Jenkins?
• How do you set up the dashboards in Grafana?
• Did you store logs in Prometheus?
• What did you use to save logs if not Prometheus?
• Walk me through some use cases of automation
• What did you use Python and Shell Scripting for?
• How did you backup a file

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• How do you explain a business perspective Dev-Ops Culture, IT Automation, and DevOps Lifecycle to the customer?
• How do you implement DevOps in a real-time environment?
• Explain Dev-Ops Tools and how you use them in your project.
• Explain from a business perspective about Dev-ops tools as a step-by-step process to the customer.
• Explain any one source code management tool (Git or SVN or CVS) and what is the purpose.
• Explain any one continuous integration tool (Jenkins or TeamCity or Bamboo) and what is the purpose.
• Explain the deployment process using the webserver (Apache Tomcat or WebLogic)
• Explain the Configuration Management tool used in Dev-Ops (Chef, Puppet, Ansible) and what is the purpose.
• Explain anyone’s code analysis tools (Sonar) and what is the purpose of this tool.
• Explain ELK and what is the purpose of this tool.
• Explain one monitoring tool and the purpose of this tool (Nagios).
• Explain any collaboration tools like “Jira” and what their purpose is.
• Explain the burndown chart.
• Explain Docker and what is the purpose of this tool.
• Explain DevOps Metrics and in-depth knowledge of business case creation and competitive analysis.
• Tell me any public cloud architecture “AWS or Azure”
• What are the benefits and what are the services available in Azure?
• Explain in detail about IAAS, PAAS, & SAAS and how we use each service in real time.
• How do you present Dev-Ops Metrics and Reports in a dashboard to the client?
• Final question: As an automation consultant, how do you approach the customer to use Dev-Ops for their project, and how do they get benefits and advantages?
• First and foremost, questions, Roles, and Responsibilities. In short, your daily work approach.
• What version of VCS are you using?
• How do you create a new user in VCS?
• Through which client, have you installed/using VCS? Is it, Apache or some other mode? Explain?
• Do you commit DB scripts with your source code as well?
• What, according to you, is a Release? Are you involved in the release process?
• How do you create a Branch? And can developers create their own branches?
• What branching strategy are you following? Explain?

DevOps Interview Questions For Freshers

• How many folders are you using in your branching strategy? And Why do they require it?
• After Release 1 and while Release 2 is in the process, I have come up with a P1 issue that should be fixed right away. What is the strategy you follow to resolve it?
• What are Hotfix and Bugfix?
• What is the Feature Branch? And its importance?
• How to take back up and load the Repository? What’s the command?
• Do you merge the code? What are the Merge conflicts that you came across?
• Can you retrieve a set of revisions into a particular file and display it?
• List out the Admin commands that you have used in your project?
• Have you written, Batch scripts? If yes, in what case did you write it?
• How to send an email notification after my commit is successful?
• I have a scenario where every developer works on his own branch. Every developer develops his application code with different versions of the software patch, for example. Developer 1 works on Hibernate, Developer 2 works on Spring, and Developer 3 works on Struts. So, as an SCM admin, how do you maintain dependencies for these versions?
• When do you move the codebase to Tag? After production or Before?
• BUILD Tool
• What version of the Build Tools are you using?
• How do you pass parameters @ runtime?
• Difference between ear, war, and jar?
• Where do you deploy the artefact in Tomcat?
• What is the Maven script? How is it different from Ant?
• JENKINS
• The version of Jenkins?
• What is a Master/Slave configuration? How do you configure it?
• What is the executor? And its importance?
• How many ways can you create a project?
• How do you configure a project?
• I have my codebase in two VCS; one is in GIT, and the other is in SVN.
• How do you check out the code from these at a time in Jenkins?
• Can I commit a codebase in Jenkins?
• What is LDAP and how do you configure it?
• How do you create users?
• What are the Freestyle Project and the Maven Project?
• Can I create or call a Maven script in the Freestyle project?
• How do you create nightly builds? What is the Cron Syntax?
• What is a CI and CD Job? Explain
• If every hour, the CI job gets triggered, don’t you think it leads to space constraints?
• How does my CD Job pick up the latest stable CI Job? Do you manually retrieve it, or do you pass any parameters on to it?
• What are the plugins U have used? List a few.
• How do you integrate Junit in Jenkins?
• Have you been involved in static code analysis? If Yes, in what way have you implemented it?
• What is the Sonar cube? How do you configure it?
• I have 3 Jobs to trigger. The first Job from Machine 1 and the second Job from Machine 2 should trigger. How do you configure it?
• What are the Upstream and Downstream Jobs?
• What is the Pipeline concept? How do you achieve it? When is it useful?
• What are the Prebuild activities and Post Build activities?
• How can I send an email to 50 developers at a time? How do you configure it?
• What is the Jenkins workspace?
• How do you back up the Jenkins Jobs?
• How can I track the error if my build fails?
• What is Poll SCM
• I have a Release 1 parent build called R1.1, which contains 100 child builds: R1.1.1, 1.2, R1.1.3, R1.1.4,………. R1.1.100. Now, for Release 2, R2.1 should get all the child builds, i.e., R1.1.1 to R1.1.100. Therefore, without any human error, all my child builds’ version numbers of Release 1 should automatically change to R2.1.1, R2.1.2, and so on. How is this achieved?
• SHELL SCRIPTING
• Why Shell scripting? Why is it used for?
• Which shell are you using? And how many types of Shells are there?
• If Ant can deploy the artifacts what is the need of Shell?
• What is the difference between Shell and Powershell?
• Few questions on commands like “grep, sed, touch, head, tail, username -a username -r, PID, and ppid, to kill a process, chmod, awk, alias
• What is Shebang in the Shell script? And it’s the syntax?
• Execute shell script with command-line properties?
• What is $0,$1,$*,$#,$$,$?,$@?
• What the deployment script you wrote can you explain?
• How do you establish a connection with your remote server, Command?
• How to copy binaries to the remote server, Command?
• How to bypass validation every time you copy binaries? How do you achieve it?
• What is the port number of your application?
• What is the port number of Sonar?
• Port number of MySql?
• Where do you store information about the challenges you have faced in every release? Do you maintain a Wiki or knowledge base?
• In how many ways, can you create a file and access it?
• What is Catalina.jar, Catalina_Home and What is JSS in Tomcat?
• Can you explain your day-to-day activities as a DevOps Engineer?
• Difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment?
• How do you take Jenkins Backup?
• How do you set up Environments(Dev, QA, UAT, Pre-production, Production) in DevOps?
• What is Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment (CI&CD)?
• What is Continuous Integration(CI)?
• What is Continuous Deployment(CD)?
• What kind of issues are you facing in Jenkins?
• What are the important tags in POM? The XML file, Can you explain some tags?
• What is the DevOps pipeline, Can you explain it?
• Can you tell me some important plugins in Jenkins? What do you know?
• How do we integrate Jenkins with GIT, MAVEN, SONARQUBE, NEXUS, and TOMCAT?
• How to create a job explaining in step-by-step details(General, SCM, Build Triggers, Build Actions, PostBuild Actions)?
• Where Builds are stored, and Where are jobs stored?
• How many jobs and environments do you create and manage in Jenkins?
• We have to remember all configuration files about(Git, MAVEN, JENKINS, SONARQUBE, NEXUS, TOMCAT, NAGIOS, APACHE)
• We have to remember all ports including(JENKINS, SONARQUBE, NEXUS, TOMCAT, NAGIOS, APACHE)
• Where will you get issues while merging branches & how will you resolve merge conflicts?
• Jenkins follows which architecture?
  Ans: Master-Slave Architecture
• Which strategy are you following for deployment release into the production server?
• What are the issues/errors you are facing regularly or recently in Jenkins?
• What is Maven’s life cycle? What issues/errors do you regularly or recently encounter in Maven?
• How to integrate Maven with Jenkins?
• Which domain are you working for your company?
• What is AWS Cloud Formation? Can you elaborate on that? Why do we use it?
• What are the templates in cloud formation?
• What are the parameters that are mandatory in AWS cloud formation templates?
• Tell me about autoscaling.
• Which services should I use to get reliability, robustness, and admirability for my application?
• What is discard capacity in Autoscaling? (I didn’t understand what the question is)
• What are the min-max instances in autoscaling configuration?
• What is ELB? What is the benefit of elb?
• What is the health check?
• I have enabled port no 80 while creating an instance in SG on my IP, even though am not getting my website, I have contacted AWS support on that, and they told me to check my VPC configurations; what should I do for that,
• what settings do I need to check?
• What is user data in ec2?
• Why do we use user data in the cloud formation template while creating an ec2 instance?
• What is Elastic Bean Stalk?
• Ec2 is there for hosting, so why do we use elastic Beanstalk?
• What is a managed platform?
• What is custom resourcing in AWS? What is its security in AWS?
• What is your elastic block storage? Can you elaborate on it?
• What is s3? What is versioning? What is lifecycle management?
• What is AWS Glacier?
• Which language worked on?
• For the last 6 months, what has been your most challenging project? Explain?
• What is a cloud front?
• Have you deployed any web applications in AWS? What did you deploy?
• Did you deploy any real-time projects?
• What is Autoscaling? What type of auto-scaling did you use, programmatic or manual auto-scaling? What are the things to do?
• How do you do auto-scaling? What parameters did you use as an API? What API did you use in Autoscaling?
• What is a cloud front? Did you configure the cloud front in AWS?
• What kind of security did you work on AWS?
• Have you done hybrid integration?
• What is Route 53? What is the use and how to work with it?
• What is CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing)

Maven Interview Questions

Maven is a popular build automation tool used in Java development. Maven interview questions are designed to assess a candidate’s knowledge and proficiency in using Maven to manage project dependencies, build processes, and software releases. If you want more Maven Interview Questions, then you can follow the below link.

• Explain the Maven Build Lifecycle.
• What is convention over configuration? How does Maven use it?
• What are the phases of the Build Lifecycle and Clean life cycle? What happens in each phase?
• Explain maven dependency
• When does the maven use external dependency?
• What is a Build profile and what are the different types of Build Profiles?
• What are the different types of Maven Repositories? (or) they may ask the difference between types of maven repositories
• what is the sequence in which maven search for dependencies?
• What is the difference between a snapshot and a version in Maven?
• What are system dependency and transitive dependency in Maven?
• How are profiles specified in Maven?
• Explain all the dependency scopes in Maven

DevOps Interview Questions Github

GitHub is a popular web-based Git repository hosting service used for version control and collaborative software development. GitHub interview questions aim to evaluate a candidate’s knowledge and proficiency in using GitHub for code management, collaboration, pull requests, issues management, and more.

• What is the difference between GIT and SVN?
• Advantages of using GIT?
• What are the STAGING area and INDEX in GIT?
• What is the difference between GIT PUSH and COMMIT? When are they used?
• What is GIT STASH?
• How do you create a branch in GIT?
• How do you merge code from branch to master in GIT?
• How do you confirm if the GIT branch has merged into the master?
• What is HEAD in GIT? How many HEADS can you create in GIT?
• What does “git config” do?
• Learn about all the commands in GIT. The interviewer may ask indirectly how you can achieve one scenario. You should be able to tell him which command to use.
• What is the purpose of branching in GIT? What is the common branching pattern in GIT?
• How can u resolve conflict in GIT? The interviewer may also ask you to explain one scenario of how you resolved conflicts in GIT in your current project.
• What is the major difference between the Application and the Web server?
• How many servers do you have? As you cannot deploy a War file in Apache Tomcat, what other server do you use?
• Do you have two releases scheduled for today? One is in the QA phase, and the other is in the Production phase.
• The one in the Production phase is getting errors, and you cannot move further. What will you do?
• Can a War or Ear file be moved from the QA stage to the UAT and Production stages?
• How will move a War or Ear to UAT and Production environment which completed a successful
• Can we replace TestNG with Junit? If yes then give some good points.
• Use of git detach command?
• Use of Git reset head command?
• committed 2 sides, do you want the branch to be reverted to the previous one? how?

JENKINS Interview Questions

Jenkins is a widely used open-source automation server for building, testing, and deploying software. Jenkins interview questions aim to assess a candidate’s understanding and proficiency in using Jenkins to automate software delivery pipelines, manage builds, and integrate with other tools and technologies.

• Master-slave configuration: How do you connect to Jenkins from the slave machine?
• Build Pipelines?
• I have two Jobs. I want the master to execute the first job and the slave to execute the other job. How can I achieve this?
• Difference between a freestyle project and a Maven-based project?
• LDAP configuration
• What’s the difference between LDAP and Email notification?
• How to auto-deploy a war file into Tomcat? (process)
• You can deploy it in many ways
  • Using Tomcat manager
  • using ant script by downloading the catalina.jar file and defining custom ant tasks
  • You can deploy using Jenkins by placing the war file in web apps
  • You can deploy using shell scripts by placing the war file in web apps
  • How do you deploy a war file into Tomcat by shell scripting(process) when you are working on a Linux machine?
• Make use of the SCP command in the shell script to copy the war file to the tomcat web apps directory
• what would you do if your servers are on Linux machines and you are working on the windows machine when you are doing automation and deployment?
• I will make use of pscp and plink to do the deployment and perform the actions on the Linux server from Windows
• why do we use Jenkins instead of ANT, as both tools are used for the same purpose of building artefacts and deploying those to servers?
• How you will deploy the same .war file on multiple servers
• What is the process you will follow to give the installable file to the client?
• How do you convert a .war file into a .msi file(installable file)
• How to run the file.sh shell script in ant.
• How to call a target of another file within the different files.
• What is Jenkins
• What is the difference between Jenkins and Hudson?
• What SCM tools does Jenkins support
• How can you tell what version of Jenkins you are using?
• What is continuous integration in Jenkins?
• What are the prerequisites for using Jenkins?
• How can you move or copy Jenkins from one server to another server?
• Commands to use to start Jenkins manually
• What are the most useful plugins in Jenkins?
• How to create a Jenkins job and what are the types
• What are the two components that Jenkins mainly integrates with?
• What is the default session timeout value in Jenkins and How can you increase the session timeout value?
• Explain Jenkins’s security mechanism
• How can you pass parameters from one job to another job in Jenkins?
• Explain about building a pipeline in Jenkins
• How can someone execute the jobs in Jenkins without having permission to execute the job?
• How to re-execute a parameterized build job without entering the parameter values when the job fails? Note: The job should not ask for parameters, and it should run with the values of parameters that you entered during the previous execution
• How to install plugins in Jenkins
• How can configure slaves/nodes in Jenkins?
• How to run jobs for slaves
• How you are Jenkins in your project
• How to configure a build/project in Jenkins from scratch
• How to run builds periodically

Final Words:

By understanding the core concepts and best practices of DevOps and by practising with common interview questions, you can demonstrate your expertise and show that you are ready to take on the challenges of modern software development.