🚀 DevOps Interview Questions & Answers (2025)
Basic Level Questions
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What is DevOps?DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations to shorten development lifecycles and deliver high-quality software continuously.
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What are the key benefits of DevOps?Faster delivery, improved collaboration, higher deployment frequency, quicker recovery from failures, and better product quality.
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What is CI/CD?Continuous Integration is merging code changes frequently; Continuous Delivery/Deployment automates testing and release of code to production.
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Common DevOps tools?Git, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Nagios, Prometheus, Terraform.
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What is containerization?Packaging applications and dependencies together for consistent execution across environments; Docker is widely used.
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Explain Infrastructure as Code (IaC).Managing infrastructure through code and automation instead of manual setup; tools include Terraform and CloudFormation.
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What is version control?Tracking and managing source code changes over time; Git is most popular.
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What is Jenkins?An open-source automation server to build CI/CD pipelines automating builds, tests, and deployments.
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What is DevSecOps?Integration of security practices into the DevOps lifecycle for continuous security and compliance.
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What are microservices?An architectural style that structures applications as small, independent services that communicate over APIs.
Intermediate Level Questions
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What’s the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment?Continuous Delivery prepares code for release and involves manual approval; Continuous Deployment automates release to production without manual intervention.
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How to create a Jenkins pipeline?Using Jenkinsfile, define stages like build, test, and deploy to automate CI/CD workflows.
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How does Docker differ from Virtual Machines?Docker containers share the host OS and are lightweight; VMs run full OS instances and use more resources.
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What is Kubernetes?Open-source container orchestration platform automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
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Explain Kubernetes health checks.Liveness probes check if containers are running; readiness probes check if containers can receive traffic, enabling load balancer management.
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What is Blue-Green deployment?Deploy new code to idle environment, then switch traffic over, reducing downtime and deployment risk.
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Explain Canary deployment.Gradual release of new features to a small user segment before full rollout, enabling monitoring and rollback.
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What is monitoring in DevOps?Collecting, analyzing, and reacting to metrics and logs for system health and performance.
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Tools used for monitoring and logging?Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), Nagios, Splunk.
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What is configuration management?Automating configuration and maintenance of systems using tools like Ansible, Puppet, Chef.
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What is Infrastructure as Code best practice?Use version control, modular templates, testing, and automated deployments for infrastructure management.
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Explain load balancing.Distributing network or application traffic across multiple servers to ensure reliability and performance.
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What is container orchestration?Managing lifecycle, scaling, networking, and availability of containers across clusters.
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What are secrets management tools?Tools such as HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager securely store and manage sensitive data like credentials.
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What is GitOps?Using Git as the source of truth for declarative infrastructure and application delivery automation.
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What is Helm in Kubernetes?Kubernetes package manager for managing complex applications with charts and templates.
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What is the difference between stateful and stateless applications?Stateful apps maintain client state on server; stateless do not, enabling easier scaling and resilience.
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Explain RBAC in Kubernetes.Role-Based Access Control restricts user and service permissions to resources for security.
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What are sidecar containers?Containers that run alongside main app containers to provide utility or helper services.
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What is Chaos Engineering?Practice of introducing failures in production to improve system resilience and reliability.
Advanced Level Questions
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Explain Immutable Infrastructure.Infrastructure components are replaced rather than modified, improving reliability and rollback capabilities.
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What is service mesh?A dedicated infrastructure layer to manage service-to-service communications, security, and observability in microservices.
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What is the role of observability?Provides insights into system behavior through metrics, logs, and tracing to diagnose and fix issues effectively.
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Describe canary releases.Deploying new versions to a small subset of users first to validate and minimize risks before full rollout.
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How does Kubernetes handle auto-scaling?Using Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, Kubernetes adjusts the number of pods based on CPU/memory usage or custom metrics.
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What is the significance of CI/CD pipeline security?Securing pipelines prevents unauthorized code changes, protects secrets, and ensures trusted deployments.
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Explain Git branching strategies.Strategies like Git Flow, trunk-based development manage code development and release cycles effectively.
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How do you implement blue-green deployment in Kubernetes?By running two identical environments and switching traffic from blue to green to minimize downtime and risk.
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What are Kubernetes Operators?Custom controllers that extend Kubernetes functionality to manage complex stateful applications.
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Discuss some challenges with DevOps adoption.Cultural shift, tool integration, legacy system compatibility, security, and continuous learning are major challenges.
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How does Configuration Drift occur and how to prevent it?Configuration drift happens when environments diverge; prevention includes IaC, automated compliance checks, and consistent deployments.
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Explain the use of secrets management in DevOps.Secrets management tools store and encrypt sensitive data such as passwords, keys, and certificates securely in pipelines.
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What is canary monitoring?Monitoring the performance and errors of canary deployments to decide if they are safe for full rollout.
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What is the difference between stateless and stateful services?Stateless services do not retain client state between requests; stateful services maintain state, requiring persistent storage.
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How does service discovery work in Kubernetes?Services are assigned DNS names; kube-proxy routes requests to healthy pods automatically.
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What is scalable microservice design in DevOps?Designing services to be loosely coupled, independently deployable, and stateless where possible with auto-scaling.
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Explain Role of HashiCorp Vault in DevOps.Vault provides secure secret storage, dynamic secrets, and encryption-as-a-service to protect sensitive information.
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What is the importance of audit logging?Audit logs help track changes, detect breaches, and meet compliance requirements.
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How does feature flagging support DevOps?Feature flags enable toggling features on/off without deployments, facilitating canary releases and A/B testing.
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What are the challenges of managing multiple cloud providers?Challenges include diverse APIs, security models, cost management, and integration complexity.