1. What DevOp tools have you worked with? 
Answer:

• Cloud Technology/ Services  : Amazon Web Services – AWS EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, EKS, Load Balancer, Cloudwatch, Secret Manager, S3 Glacier, AWS Lambda, EC2 Container Service
• Containerization/Orchestration : Kubernetes, Docker, AWS EKS, VMware, Cloud Foundry
• CI/CD   : GIT, BitBucket, Subversion (SVN), Code Commit, Gitlab, Jenkins
• Artifacts Management : JFrog Artifactory, Sonatype Nexus, AWS Code Artifact
• Code Quality & Code Security  : SonarQube (Static)
• Configuration Management : Terraform, AWS Cloud Formation, Ansible
• Monitoring : Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, ELK
• API Management : Swagger UI, Postman, Blazemeter, cURL
• Bigdata Ecosystem : HDFS, Sqoop, Hive, Impala, Spark, HCatalog
• Scripting Languages : Unix Shell Scripting, SQL, Python, basics of Java
• Database Management : Snowflake, Cassandra, PostgresDB, CockroachDB, Hive, Impala, Pentaho
• Security Concepts : AWS Secret Manager, IAM, KMS, Identity Providers, OAuth, SSO
• Scheduling Tools : Apache Airflow, CRON, Control-M
• Incident Reporting : ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, ITSM
  

2. Explain your understanding and expertise on both the software development side and the technical operations side of an organization you’ve worked for  in the past. 
Answer:

• DevOps engineers almost always work in a 24/7 business critical online environment.
• I was adaptable to on-call duties and able to take up real-time, live system responsibility.
• I successfully automated processes to support continuous software deployments.
• I have experience with public/private clouds, tools like Chef or  Puppet, scripting and automation with tools like Python and PHP, and a background in Agile.

3. Discuss your experience building bridges between IT Ops, QA and development. 
Answer:

• DevOps is all about effective communication and collaboration.
• I’ve been dealing with production issues from the development and operations sides, effectively straddling the two worlds.
• I’m less interested in finding blame or playing the hero than I am with ensuring that all of the moving parts come together.

4. What types of testing are needed? 
Answer:

• Software teams will often look start from an assumption that software will usually work and only occasionally fail.
• I believe in practicing defensive programming in a pragmatic way, which often means assuming that the code will fail and planning for those failures.
• I try  to incorporate unit test strategy, test harnesses, load testing, network simulation, A/B and multivariate testing etc.

5. Give me an example of how you would handle projects? 
Answer:
As a professional with managerial responsibilities, I would demonstrate a clear understanding of DevOps project management tactics and also work with  teams to set objectives, streamline workflow, maintain scope, research and introduce new tools or frameworks, translate requirements into workflow and follow up.

I  would resort to CI, release management and other tools to keep interdisciplinary projects on track.

6. What’s your career objective in your role as a DevOps engineer? 
Answer:

• My passion is breaking down the barriers and building and improving processes, so that the engineering and operations teams work better and smarter.
• It’s an opportunity to be involved in the entire delivery system from start to finish.

7. How would you make software deployable? 
Answer:

• The ability to script the installation and reconfiguration of software systems is essential towards controlled and automated change.
• Although there is an  increasing trend for new software to enable this, older systems and products suffer from the assumption that changes would be infrequent and minor, and so make  automated changes difficult.
• As a professional who appreciates the need to expose configuration and settings in a manner accessible to automation, I will work with  concepts like Inversion of Control (IoC) and Dependency Injection, scripted installation, test harnesses, separation of concerns, command-line tools, and infrastructure  as code. 

8. What is the one most important thing DevOps helps do? 
Answer:

• The most important thing DevOps helps do is to get the changes into production as quickly as possible while minimizing risks in software quality assurance and  compliance.
• That is the primary objective of DevOps. However, there are many other positive side- effects to DevOps.
• For example, clearer communication and better  working relationships between teams which creates a less stressful working environment. 

9. Which scripting languages do you think are most important for a DevOps engineer? 
Answer:
As far as scripting languages go, the simpler the better. In fact, the language itself isn’t as important as understanding design patterns and development  paradigms such as procedural, object-oriented, or functional programming.

10. How do you expect you would be required to multitask as a DevOps professional? 
Answer:  

• Focus attention on bridging communication gaps between Development and Operations teams.
• Understand system design from an architect’s perspective, software  development from a developer’s perspective,operations and infrastructure from the perspective of a seasoned Systems Administrator.
• Execute – to be able to actually do  what needs to be done.

11. What testing is necessary to ensure that a new service is ready for production? 
Answer:

• DevOps is all about continuous testing throughout the process, starting with development through to production.
• Everyone shares the testing responsibility. 
• This ensures that developers are delivering code that doesn’t have any errors and is of high quality
• It also helps everyone leverage their time most effectively. 

12. What’s a PTR in DNS? 
Answer:

• Pointer records are used to map a network interface (IP) to a host name.
• These are primarily used for reverse DNS. Reverse DNS is set up very similarly to how  normal (forward) DNS is set up.
• When you delegate the DNS forward, the owner of the domain tells the registrar to let your domain use specific name servers. 

13. Describe two-factor authentication? 
Answer:

Two-factor authentication is a security process in which the user provides two means of identification from separate categories of credentials; one is typically a  physical token, such as a card, and the other is typically something memorized, such as a security code.

14. Tell us about the CI tools that you are familiar with?
Answer:
The premise of CI is to get feedback as early as possible because the earlier you get feedback, the less things cost to fix. Popular open source tools include  Bitbucket, Jenkins, CruiseControl and CruiseControl.NET. Commercial tools include ThoughtWorks’ Go, Urbancode’s Anthill Pro, Jetbrains’ Team City and Microsoft’s  Team Foundation Server.

15. What are the advantages of NoSQL databases over RDBMS? 
Answer:
The advantages are: 

• Less need for ETL
• Support for unstructured text
• Ability to handle change over time
• Breadth of functionality
• Ability to scale horizontally
• Support for multiple data structures
• Choice of vendors

   

16. What is an MX record in DNS? 
Answer :
MX records are mail exchange records used for determining the priority of email servers for a domain. The lowest priority email server is the first destination for email. If  the lowest priority email server is unavailable, mail will be sent to the higher priority email servers.

17. What is the difference between RAID 0 and RAID 1?
Answer:

• RAID 1 offers redundancy through mirroring, i.e., data is written identically to two drives.
• RAID 0 offers no redundancy and instead uses striping, i.e., data is split across all the drives.
• This means RAID 0 offers no fault tolerance; if any of the constituent drives fails, the RAID unit fails.

18. How would you prepare for a migration? 
Answer:

• This question evaluates your experience of real projects with all the awkwardness and complexity they bring.
• Include terms like cut-over, dress rehearsals, roll back and roll-forward, DNS solutions, feature toggles, branch by abstraction, and automation in your answer.
• Developing greenfield systems with little or no existing  technology in place is always easier than having to deal with legacy components and configuration.
• As a candidate if you appreciate that any interesting software  system will in effect be under constant migration, you will appear suitable for the role. 

19. What’s your system background? 
Answer: 

• Some DevOps jobs require extensive systems knowledge, including server clustering and highly concurrent systems.
• As a DevOps engineer, you need to analyze system capabilities and implement upgrades for efficiency, scalability and stability, or resilience. It is recommended that you have a solid knowledge of OSes and supporting technologies
• DevOps relies on virtualization for rapid workload provisioning and allocating compute resources to new VMs to support the next rollout, so it is useful to have in depth knowledge around popular hypervisors.
• This should ideally include backup, migration and lifecycle management tactics to protect, optimize and eventually recover computing resources.
• Operations expertise must include extensive knowledge of systems management tools like Microsoft System Center, Puppet, Nagios and Chef.

20. How does HTTP work?
Answer:

• The HTTP protocol works in a client and server model like most other protocols.
• A web browser is called as a client and a web server software which responds to that request is called a server. 
• WWW Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force are two spokes in the standardization of the HTTP protocol. 
• HTTP allows improvement of its request and response with the help of intermediates, e.g. a gateway, a proxy or a tunnel. 
• The resources that can be requested using the HTTP protocol, are made available using a certain type of URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) called a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). 
• TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is used to establish a connection to the application layer port 80 used by HTTP. 

21. How much have you interacted with cloud based software development? 
Answer:
Share your knowledge around use of cloud platforms, provisioning new instances, coding new software iterations with the cloud provider’s APIs or software development kits, configuring clusters to scale computing capacity, managing workload lifecycles and so on.

• This is the perfect opportunity to discuss container-based  cloud instances as an alternative to conventional VMs.
• Event-based cloud computing, such as AWS Lambda offers another approach to software development, a boon  for experienced DevOps candidates.
• In your interview, mention experience handling Bigdata, which uses highly scalable cloud infrastructures to tackle complex computing tasks. 

22. What other tools are you familiar with that might help you in this role? 
Answer:  

• DevOps is so diverse and inclusive that it rarely ends with coding, testing and systems.
• A DevOps project might rely on database platforms like SQL or NoSQL, data structure servers like Redis, or configuration and management issue tracking systems like Redmine.
• Web applications are popular for modern enterprises, making a background with Web servers, like Microsoft Internet Information Services, Apache Tomcat or other Web servers, beneficial.
• Make sure to bring across that you are familiar with Agile application lifecycle management techniques and tools.

23. Are you familiar with just Linux or have you worked with Windows environments as well? 
Answer:
Demonstrate as much as you can, a clear understanding of both the environments including the key tools. 

24. How can you reduce load time of a dynamic website? 
Answer:
Talk about Web Page optimization, cached web pages, quality web hosting, compressed text files, Apache fine tuning. 

25. Describe your experience implementing continuous deployment? 
Answer:
Answer with a comprehensive list of all the tools that you used. Include inferences of the challenges you faced and how you tackled them. 

26. How would you ensure traceability? 
Answer:
Go through this page : Observability and Monitoring

• This question probes your attitude to metrics, logging, transaction journeys, and reportin
• You should be able to identify that metric, monitoring and logging  needs to be a core part of the software system, and that without them, the software is essentially not going to be able to appear maintained and diagnosed.
• Include  words like SysLog, Splunk, error tracking, Nagios, SCOM, Avicode in your answer. 
  

27. What was your greatest achievement on a recent project? 
Answer:

• Make sure you demonstrate your perfect understanding of both development and operations.
• Do not let your answer lean towards one particular skill set  ignoring the other.
• Even if you have worked in an environment wherein you had to work more with one skillset, assure the interviewer that you are agile according to the  needs of your organization.

28. What problems did you face and how did you solve them in a way that met the team’s goals? 
Answer:

• This question aims to find out how much you can handle stress and non- conformity at work.
• Talk about your leadership skills to handle and motivate the team  to solve problems together.
• Talk about CI, release management and other tools to keep interdisciplinary projects on track. 

29. Are you more Dev or Ops? 
Answer:

• This is probably the trickiest question that you might face in the interview.
• Emphasize the fact that this depends a lot on the job, the company you are working  for and the skills of people involved.
• You really have to be able to alternate between both sides of the fence at any given time.
• Talk about your experience and  demonstrate how you are agile with both. 

30. What special training or education did it require for you to become a DevOps engineer? 
Answer: 

• DevOps is more of a mind-set or philosophy rather than a skill-set.
• The typical technical skills associated with DevOps Engineers today are Linux systems administration, scripting, and experience with one of the many continuous integration or configuration management tools like Jenkins and Chef.
• Having the ability to learn new skills quickly to meet the needs.
• It’s all about pattern recognition, and having the ability to merge your experiences with current requirements.
• Proficiency in Windows and Linux systems administration, script development, an understanding of structured and structured data manipulation.