Most Asked DevOps Interview Questions & Best Answers

DevOps would be the merging of the development and operations practice to shorten the cycle of software development and continually deliver high-quality software. It emphasizes collaboration, automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and monitoring. DevOps becomes important, as it reduces the gap between development and IT teams, which influences the pace of deployment, the quality of the resulting product, and customer satisfaction.

Instead of separate operations and development in organizations, there would be an industry-level development-and-operation model in large organizations. Organizations would respond in real time to changes agile and therefore more scalable in business operations creating an innovative competitive advantage.

The following image shows that the U.S. DevOps market is projected to grow significantly from $1.5 billion in 2021 to over $10 billion by 2032. Both solution and service components show steady growth, with services gaining momentum. This reflects rising DevOps adoption, tool investments, and increasing demand for skilled professionals and managed services.

A checklist of DevOps Interview Questions gives you the headstart to keep yourself aligned with what the hiring manager will expect from you. It also decodes every question customized to the type asked in an interview. So, you can prepare well-structured and self-assured replies. These help cover real-world scenarios and tool-based queries besides best practice questions that help greatly in impressing your interviewer.

DevOps interview questions and answers also give you a better understanding of those real DevOps tools: Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines. This will help you find gaps in your knowledge and also help exercise answers. Put together, this is a wily method of increasing your prospects of getting that dream role in DevOps.

1. What is DevOps?

DevOps is an abbreviation for Development and Operations. It is a software development practice that aims at uniting the operations team and the development team for the automation of the project at each level. This helps in automating the project service management easily to support the goals at the operational level and enhance the comprehension of the technological stack applied in the production environment.

This practice is associated with agile methodology and it primarily deals with team communication, resource management, and teamwork. The primary advantages of adhering to this structure are the development speed and fixing the issues at the production environment level, application stability, and innovation behind it.

2. What can be a preparatory approach for developing a project using the DevOps methodology?

The project can be designed with the help of the following steps by utilizing DevOps:

• Step 1: Plan: Design and create a plan for implementation by conducting a detailed analysis of the already in-place processes to determine the areas that require improvement and the blind spots.
• Stage 2: PoC: Create a proof of concept (PoC) just to get an idea about the involved complexities. Once the PoC is accepted, the real implementation work of the project will begin.
• Stage 3: Follow DevOps: After making the project ready for implementation, real DevOps culture can be implemented through the utilization of its stages such as version control, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous deployment, continuous delivery, and continuous monitoring.

3. How does AWS assist DevOps?

AWS is short for Amazon Web Services and it is a popular cloud provider. AWS assists DevOps by bringing the following benefits:

• Flexible Resources: AWS offers readily available flexible resources for usage.
• Scaling: Thousands of machines can be put on AWS by using unlimited computation power and storage.
• Automation: Many tasks can be automated by leveraging different services offered by AWS.
• Security: AWS is secure and with the different security options offered under the hood of Identity and Access Management (IAM), the application builds and deployments can be made safe.

4. What is Resilience Testing?

Resilience Testing is a software process that tests the application for its behavior under uncontrolled and chaotic situations. It also checks whether the data and functionality are not lost after a failure.

5. What is CBD in DevOps?

CBD stands for Component-Based Development. It is a different method for product development. In this, developers continue searching for already available well-defined, tested, and proven components of code and free the developer from coding from scratch.

6. Can you mention some KPIs that are utilized for measuring the success of DevOps?

KPIs is an abbreviation for Key Performance Indicators. Some of the widely used KPIs utilized for measuring the success of DevOps are:

• Application usage, performance, and traffic
• Automated Test Case Pass Percentage.
• Application Availability
• Change volume requests
• Customer tickets
• Successful deployment frequency and time
• Error/Failure rates
• Failed deployments
• Meantime to detection (MTTD)
• Meantime to recovery (MTTR)

7. Define the various stages in DevOps methodology.

DevOps primarily has 6 stages and they are:

• Planning:

This is the initial phase of a DevOps lifecycle that requires complete knowledge about the project to finally create the optimal product. When executed well, this phase provides different inputs needed for the development and operations phase. This phase also clarifies the project development and management process for the organization.

Google Apps, Asana, Microsoft Teams, etc are utilized for this purpose.

• Development

The Development phase comes next where the project is developed by creating system infrastructure, creating features through writing codes, and then creating test cases and the automation process. Developers keep their codes in a code manager named remote repository which facilitates team collaboration in the sense that it provides view, modification, and versioning of the code.

Tools such as git, IDEs such as Eclipse, and IntelliJ, and tech stacks such as Node, Java, etc are utilized.

• Continuous Integration (CI):

The phase provides space for the automation of code validation, build, and testing. It ensures that changes are done appropriately without development environment errors and provides space for detecting errors at an early stage.

Tools such as Jenkins, circleCI, etc are utilized here.

• Deployment:

DevOps facilitates the automation of deployment through the utilization of tools and scripts which ultimately has the aim of automating the process through feature activation. In this context, cloud services can be utilized as a force that helps to upgrade from finite infrastructure management to cost-optimized management with the possibility of infinite resources.

Tools such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Heroku, etc are utilized.

• Operations:

This phase typically takes place during the lifespan of the software/product because of the dynamic infrastructure changes. This gives the team chances to increase the availability, scalability, and efficient transformation of the product.

Tools such as Loggly, BlueJeans, Appdynamics, etc are used commonly in this phase.

• Monitoring:

Monitoring is an ongoing phase of DevOps methodology. This phase is employed to monitor and examine information to understand the status of software applications.

Tools such as Nagios, Splunk, etc are used generally.

8. What is the difference between DevOps and the Agile Methodology?

DevOps is a culture or practice that enables the operations team and the development team to collaborate and come together for effective product development. This is done by utilizing practices such as continuous development, integration, testing, deployment, and monitoring of the SDLC cycle.

DevOps tries to reduce the gap between the developers and the operations team for the effective launch of the product.

Agile is nothing but a software development methodology that focuses on incremental, iterative, and rapid releases of software features by involving the customer using feedback. This methodology removes the gap between the requirement understanding of the clients and the developers.

9. Are you familiar with post-mortem meetings in DevOps?

Post-mortem meetings are the ones that are scheduled to discuss whether or not some things fail when following the DevOps methodology. When this meeting is held, it is hoped that the team will come up with steps that must be taken to prevent the failure in the future.

10. What is the idea behind sudo in Linux OS?

Sudo is an abbreviation of 'superuser do' in which superuser refers to the Linux root user. Sudo is a Linux/Unix-based system program that provides provision to let users having superuser permissions use some of the system commands in their root context.

11. Can you describe Jenkins's architecture?

Jenkins uses the master-slave architecture. The master fetches the latest code from the GitHub repository whenever there is a commitment to the code. The master asks slaves to execute operations such as build, test, and run and generate test case reports. This load is shared among all the slaves evenly.

Jenkins also employs more than one slave since there could be opportunities that demand different test case suites to be executed for various environments once the code commit is complete.

12. How do you make a script run every time the repository receives new commits via git push?

There are three ways of putting a script on the destination repository to be executed based on when the script must be triggered precisely. These methods are referred to as hooks and they are three in number:

• Pre-receive hook: This hook is run before the references are updated while commits are being pushed. This hook is effective in making sure the scripts that pertain to enforcing development policies are executed.
• Update hook: This hook invokes the script to execute before any updates are committed. This hook is invoked once for each commit that has been pushed to the repository.
• Post-receive hook: This hook assists in triggering the script after the updates or changes have been approved by the destination repository. This hook is suitable for setting up deployment scripts, any continuous integration-based scripts or email notification process to the team, etc.

13. What are the core operations of DevOps in terms of development and infrastructure?

The core operations of DevOps in terms of development and infrastructure are:

• Application development: Developing a product that can meet all customer requirements and offers a remarkable level of quality.
• Code coverage: A measurement of the total number of blocks lines or arcs of the code executed while the automated tests are running.
• Code building: Getting the codebase ready to be used in product building.
• Configuration: Making the product ready to be used in the best possible manner.
• Deployment: Deployment of the software to be executed by the end-user.
• Orchestration: Arranging a series of automated processes.
• Packaging: Process involved when the release is deployment-ready.
• Provisioning: Making sure the infrastructure changes are delivered just in time with the code that needs it.
• Unit testing: Used for testing an individual unit or component.

14. What are the various benefits of Git?

The benefits of Git are as follows:

• It assists in data replication and redundancy.
• It is readily available.
• It facilitates collaboration.
• It can be applied to multiple projects.
• It makes use of a single Git directory per repository.
• It facilitates disk usage.
• It provides better network performance.

15. Do we have a method to manage merge conflicts in Git?

Yes, we can manage to merge conflict using the following three steps:

• Step 1: Create a clear understanding of the conflict by using Git status to check everything.
• Step 2: Staging and resolving the conflict by using the merge tool.
• Step 3: Executing commit and merge with the existing branch and the master branch.

16. Can we relocate or copy Jenkins from one server to another?

Yes, we can transfer or duplicate Jenkins from one server to the other. For example, by duplicating the Jenkins jobs directory can be transferred from the old server to the new server.

17. What is the difference between automation testing and continuous testing?

In continuous testing, the execution of the automated test is included in the software delivery process. Automation testing, on the other hand, is a process where the manual process of testing is implemented where an independent testing tool assists the developers in generating test scripts that can be run repeatedly without any form of manual intervention.

18. What is the role of a Selenium Grid?

The job of a Selenium Grid is to run the same or disparate test scripts in different platforms and browsers. It assists in cross-browser testing across various environments as well as helps save execution time.

19. What are post-mortem meetings?

Sometimes, there is a necessity to talk about what went wrong in the course of a DevOps process. For that purpose, post-mortem meetings are scheduled. These meetings provide steps that need to be followed to prevent the same failure or group of failures in the future for which the meeting has been scheduled in the first place.

20. Compare and contrast Asset Management and Configuration Management.

The act of monitoring as well as preserving items of worth to an organization or group is known as Asset Management.

Configuration Management is the act of controlling, identifying, planning for, and verifying the configuration items of service in support of Change Management.

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With modern businesses demanding faster and more reliable software delivery, mastering DevOps practices has become essential for professionals aiming to thrive in tech-driven environments.

GSDC’s Certified DevOps Developer Certification is designed for individuals seeking a strong foundational understanding of DevOps principles, tools, and best practices, enabling them to streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and automate development pipelines.

The Certified DevOps Developer Certification is ideal for professionals across domains whether in software engineering, IT operations, QA, or cloud infrastructure who wish to gain hands-on expertise in CI/CD, containerization, infrastructure as code, and continuous monitoring to accelerate digital transformation efforts.

This DevOps Interview Questions Guide would be your ace in the hole to cover all the required requirements for a solid preparation plan. The answers provided will help you master some of the most asked DevOps interview questions, offered in smart but brief responses.

Prepare to build your confidence from scratch with the DevOps interview questions and answers guide, whether you are a fledgling or someone comfortable with the concept of DevOps. It is an ideal companion with which to begin sharpening your knowledge, addressing any skills you feel could use some dedication, and finally achieving anything from basic or advanced DevOps.