25 DevOps Engineer Interview Questions & Answers

25 DevOps Engineer Interview Questions & Answers

DevOps interviews test CI/CD, infrastructure, containerization, monitoring, and SRE practices. Here are the essential questions with technical answers.

CI/CD & Automation (8)

1. "Describe your CI/CD pipeline from commit to production"
2. "How do you implement blue-green deployments?"
3. "What's your approach to infrastructure as code?" — Terraform, CloudFormation
4. "How do you handle secrets management?" — Vault, AWS Secrets Manager
5. "Describe implementing canary deployments"
6. "How do you manage configuration across environments?"
7. "What's your testing strategy in CI/CD?"
8. "How do you handle rollbacks?"

Containers & Orchestration (7)

1. "Explain Docker vs Kubernetes"
2. "How do you optimize Docker image sizes?"
3. "Describe Kubernetes networking" — Services, Ingress, CNI
4. "How do you handle persistent storage in K8s?"
5. "What's your approach to Kubernetes security?"
6. "How do you scale microservices?" — HPA, VPA, cluster autoscaler
7. "Describe your experience with service mesh" — Istio, Linkerd

Monitoring & SRE (5)

1. "How do you implement monitoring and alerting?" — Prometheus, Grafana, DataDog
2. "What SLIs/SLOs do you define for a web service?"
3. "Describe your incident response process"
4. "How do you do post-mortem analysis?"
5. "What's your approach to capacity planning?"

Behavioral (5)

1. "Tell me about yourself"
2. "Describe a production incident you handled" — STAR
3. "How do you balance reliability with velocity?"
4. "Tell me about automating a manual process"
5. "Why DevOps/SRE?"