Tag

Interview Questions

365 questions 9 domains

Interview question banks grouped by domain and topic, with each topic split into difficulty cards: concept questions from beginner to expert, then production scenarios. Every question links straight to its answer.

DevOps 150

Containers, orchestration, infrastructure as code and CI/CD.

Docker 29

Docker Interview Questions DevOps Engineer - Interview Questions

Kubernetes 32

Kubernetes Interview Questions DevOps Engineer - Interview Questions
Scenario

Advanced

9
  1. A Kubernetes application is healthy according to kubectl get pods, but users report 504 errors. Walk me through your troubleshooting flow.
  2. DNS works from your laptop but fails intermittently inside Kubernetes. What layers do you isolate?
  3. Gradual increase in latency across the NGINX ingress, but CPU/memory are stable. Next move?
  4. How would you monitor HPA scaling decisions in real time and detect metrics-server lag?
  5. Walk through advanced probe configurations to detect business-logic failures, not just HTTP 200.
  6. What's your approach to multi-zone pod affinity/anti-affinity so a node or zone failure doesn't break regional SLAs?
  7. Helm rollback worked. App still broken. Logs silent. What now?
  8. Your Karpenter setup just doubled costs overnight. Fix it without disrupting autoscaling.
  9. Every rolling update causes a burst of 502 errors, even though the readiness probes pass. Why, and how do you fix it?

Terraform 30

Terraform Interview Questions
Concepts

Beginner

11
  1. What is Terraform?
  2. What are the advantages in using Terraform or IaC in general?
  3. Does Terraform use declarative or imperative approach?
  4. What language does Terraform uses?
  5. What's a typical Terraform workflow?
  6. What's the difference between Terraform and technologies such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc.
  7. What are different variable types that you have used so far?
  8. What are different loops available in terraform?
  9. What is the difference between lists, tuples and set type in terraform?
  10. What's Terraform State? Where is it stored?
  11. What is Terraform state locking?
Concepts

Intermediate

8
  1. Explain the background tasks that are executed after running the command 'terraform init' on a new machine?
  2. How to define dependencies between resources in terraform? Which terraform command is used to check the dependencies between resources?
  3. What are terraform providers? Can we create our own terraform provider?
  4. What is the effect of setting variable as "sensitive"?
  5. If the same variable is defined in the following places, which source will be used first?
  6. What are locals? and why are they used instead of variables?
  7. What are "Provisioners"? What are different types?
  8. What is terraform backend? What are best practices for creating a terraform backend?
Concepts

Advanced

7
  1. Can we use a single terraform state file to store resources from multiple cloud providers? If yes, how does the authentication works for each cloud provider?
  2. How are secrets managed in terraform? Where are they stored and how are they accessed from terraform?
  3. What is the resource recreation lifecycle? and can we control the resource recreation lifecyle?
  4. Explain the folder structure that you will be creating in order to deploy individual env(webapp+db) for 10 customers.
  5. What are the locations where the terraform would search for providers if the internet is not accessible from a machine?
  6. What is Terraform Plugin Cache? How do we manage it in an controlled environment where internet is not accessible?
  7. How to import resources into terraform state when using modules? for_each? terragrunt?

Jenkins 35

Jenkins - Interview Questions
Concepts

Intermediate

15
  1. What is a Jenkins Pipeline?
  2. What are the differences between Declarative and Scripted Pipelines in Jenkins?
  3. How do you configure a Jenkins job?
  4. Explain how you would create and use Jenkinsfiles.
  5. What is the difference between a Freestyle project and a Pipeline in Jenkins?
  6. How do you schedule a Jenkins job?
  7. How do you secure Jenkins?
  8. How do you manage users and roles in Jenkins?
  9. Explain how to backup and restore Jenkins configurations.
  10. What strategies would you use to scale Jenkins?
  11. How do you integrate Jenkins with version control systems like Git?
  12. What are some common CI/CD tools that integrate with Jenkins?
  13. How do you automate tests with Jenkins?
  14. Describe how to set up a continuous deployment pipeline with Jenkins.
  15. How do you use Jenkins to deploy applications to different environments (e.g., dev, test, prod)?
Concepts

Advanced

10
  1. How do you monitor Jenkins and its jobs?
  2. What are some common issues you might encounter with Jenkins and how do you resolve them?
  3. How can you optimize Jenkins performance?
  4. What strategies would you use to handle long-running jobs in Jenkins?
  5. How do you handle failing Jenkins builds?
  6. Explain the use of Jenkins agents and how to configure them.
  7. What is the role of Blue Ocean in Jenkins?
  8. How do you use Jenkins for building Docker images?
  9. Describe how you can trigger Jenkins jobs remotely.
  10. How do you use Jenkins with Kubernetes for CI/CD?

SRE & Reliability 41

Incident response, observability and SLOs, chaos engineering and the data layer in production.

Cloud 22

Cloud fundamentals, compute and scaling, resilience across zones and regions, cost, and identity.

Networking 24

Fundamentals, DNS, load balancing and TLS, service mesh and cloud networking.

DevSecOps 25

Security built into the pipeline and the platform.

Architect 16

Cloud security architecture, identity, data protection, and the judgment behind the role.

System Design 16

Designing scalable, reliable systems from building blocks.

AI Infrastructure 26

GPUs on Kubernetes, training and inference platforms.

Programming 45

Programming languages - core concepts, idioms, debugging scenarios and coding exercises.

Python 35

Python Interview Questions
Concepts

Intermediate

7
  1. What is a decorator? Write one that logs how long a function takes.
  2. What are generators, and why use them instead of returning a list?
  3. How do context managers work, and how do you write one?
  4. Explain the LEGB rule, closures and nonlocal.
  5. What's the difference between str and repr, and when would you use a dataclass?
  6. What's the difference between an iterable and an iterator?
  7. How do try / except / else / finally work, and what are exception chaining and exception groups?
Scenario

Intermediate

5
  1. A script that parses a 20 GB log file gets killed by the OOM killer. How do you fix it?
  2. You create a list of callbacks in a loop, and they all use the last loop value. Why?
  3. A job calls 500 REST endpoints one after another and takes 10 minutes. How would you speed it up?
  4. The app works on your laptop but fails in CI with a different version of a dependency. How do you make builds reproducible?
  5. A background worker occasionally "loses" jobs, with no errors in the logs. Code review finds except Exception: pass. What's wrong, and how do you fix it?
Scenario

Advanced

5
  1. A long-running API service's memory grows steadily until the container is OOM-killed. How do you find the leak?
  2. A CPU-heavy image-processing job uses 16 threads on a 16-core machine, but it's no faster than one thread. Why, and what would you do?
  3. An asyncio web service freezes for a few seconds every so often, and all requests stall together. What do you check?
  4. A CLI tool takes three seconds to start, even for --help. How do you speed it up?
  5. A colleague wants to cache user session objects by pickling them into Redis. What concerns do you raise?