DevOps Interview Questions

What is DevOps? How is it different from traditional IT?

What is CI/CD? Explain the difference between Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment.

What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)? What are its benefits?

What is the difference between Blue/Green and Canary deployments?

What is Git branching strategy? Explain GitFlow vs Trunk-Based Development.

What are the essential Git concepts every DevOps engineer should know?

What Linux fundamentals should every DevOps engineer master?

Explain DNS, TCP/IP, and HTTP — the networking basics every DevOps engineer needs.

What are YAML and JSON? Why are they important in DevOps?

How do package managers work in Linux? Compare apt, yum, and brew.

How does SSH work? Explain key management best practices for DevOps.

What are cron jobs? How do you schedule and manage them in DevOps?

What is a reverse proxy? Compare Nginx and HAProxy for DevOps use cases.

What is load balancing? Explain the different algorithms and Layer 4 vs Layer 7.

What are the basics of log management in DevOps?

What is the difference between monitoring, observability, and alerting?

What are SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs? How do error budgets work?

How do you implement secret management in a DevOps pipeline?

What is GitOps? How does it differ from traditional CI/CD?

Compare Ansible, Chef, and Puppet for configuration management. When would you use each?

What is service discovery? How do Consul and CoreDNS work in a microservices architecture?

Compare container orchestration options: Kubernetes vs Docker Swarm vs Nomad vs ECS.

What is artifact management? Compare Nexus and Artifactory.

How do you handle incident management in DevOps? Explain PagerDuty and OpsGenie workflows.

What are change management and release strategies in DevOps?

What is chaos engineering? Explain tools like Litmus and Chaos Monkey.

What is toil in SRE? How do you measure automation ROI?

What is platform engineering? How does it relate to DevOps?

What is FinOps? How do DevOps engineers contribute to cloud cost optimization?

What are observability pipelines? How does OpenTelemetry fit in?

What are feature flags? How do they improve DevOps workflows?

How do you handle database migrations in CI/CD pipelines?

What is immutable infrastructure? How does it compare to mutable infrastructure?

How do you implement DevSecOps? What is shift-left security?

How do you design a highly available, scalable CI/CD system?

Explain SRE in depth: toil budgets, incident response, and the relationship with DevOps.

What distributed systems concepts should DevOps engineers understand?

Kubernetes vs Serverless: How do you decide which to use?

How do you design and implement a multi-cloud strategy?

What is compliance as code? How do OPA and Sentinel work?

What are advanced cost optimization strategies for cloud infrastructure?

How do you test infrastructure code? Explain Terratest, InSpec, and other IaC testing tools.

How do you design a disaster recovery (DR) plan for cloud infrastructure?

How do you approach capacity planning for infrastructure?

How do you build an effective post-mortem culture?

What are Developer Experience (DX) metrics and why should DevOps teams care?

What are the four golden signals of monitoring? How do you implement them?

What is event-driven architecture (EDA) and how does it apply to DevOps infrastructure?

What is the strangler fig pattern? How do you use it for migrating legacy systems?

What is zero trust networking? How do you implement it in a DevOps context?