10 Top DevOps Interview Questions (2023)

Want to hire a DevOps engineer? Then, you need the right DevOps interview questions. These questions are our top choices when evaluating a DevOps engineer. Read on!

DevOps interviews

DevOps combines software development (Dev) and operations (Ops). It’s complementary to Agile software development and many of the aspects derive from Agile. The aim of DevOps is to help different roles (IT operations, development, quality engineers, and security) to work together and shorten the systems development life cycle. 

In other words, DevOps engineers play a critical role in technical teams. But how do you hire DevOps specialists for your own team? Here’s how to interview DevOps engineers with the right interview questions. 

Beginner DevOps interview questions

If you’re looking for less experienced, junior DevOps developers, you need to fit the questions to their level of knowledge. Here are the best DevOps interview questions for beginner DevOps engineers. 

1. What is DevOps? 

Answer:

DevOps is a mix of software development and operations. A DevOps engineer, who is typically a developer or systems admin, is someone who works with both the IT staff on the operational side and software developers on the development side to ensure smooth releases. They understand Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and are proficient users of automation tools for developing CI/CD pipelines.

2. What are the benefits of DevOps?

Answer:

DevOps can help teams perform better and build products faster. Teams can achieve business goals like maintaining system stability and reliability, staying competitive, and faster delivery of features. They improve communication and collaboration and have more time to innovate. 

3. DevOps is complementary to Agile. But in what ways are the two methodologies different from each other?

Answer:

DevOps helps teams work together so that they can continuously develop, test, integrate, deploy, and monitor software throughout the lifecycle. 

Agile, on the other hand, focuses on the relationship between the customer and developers. It’s built on small, iterative, and rapid releases of software. 

4. What are the phases of the DevOps lifecycle? 

Answer:

The different DevOps phases are:

Plan: The first step is a plan for the application that needs to be developed. This phase helps different stakeholders to understand the project and to lay the foundation for building a great product. Some of the tools that can be used in this phase are Microsoft Teams, Google Apps, and Asana.

Development: The application is coded according to requirements. System infrastructure and features are built and test cases and the automation process are defined. Developers store code in a code manager (remote repository), which helps team collaboration because everyone has access to view, modify, and version the code.

Here, the team uses tools like git, IDEs, IntelliJ, and tech stacks like Java or Node. 

Continuous Integration: Code validation, building, and testing can be automated at this stage to ensure that changes are made properly without development environment errors and to allow the identification of errors at an initial stage. At the CI stage, tools like Jenkins and circleCI can be used.

Deployment: The code is deployed into a cloud environment. It’s tested to ensure that these changes don’t affect a website’s functioning. At this stage, DevOps makes use of tools and scripts to support the deployment automation process. Cloud services can be used to assist in the upgrade from finite infrastructure management to cost-optimized management. 

Tools that are used at this stage include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Heroku. 

Operations: The operations phase is executed throughout the software life cycle due to the dynamic infrastructure changes. The team has the possibility to increase the availability, scalability, and effective transformation of the product.

The tools that are used here include Appdynamics, Loggly, and BlueJeans.

Monitoring: This is a permanent phase and it’s used to monitor and analyze information to understand the status of applications. At this phase, tools like Nagios and Splunk are used.  

5. How do you approach a DevOps project?

Answer:

A DevOps project can be approached in the following way: 

Stage 1 

First, start by assessing the existing process and implementation for 2-3 weeks to identify areas of improvement. The team then comes up with a roadmap for the implementation.

Stage 2

Create a proof of concept and approve and accept it. The team then starts implementation and rolling out the project plan.

Stage 3

The project is ready for implementation of DevOps by using version control/integration/testing/deployment/delivery and monitoring. 

6. What are three important DevOps KPIs?

Answer:

DevOps can be measured in several ways. Three such ways are: 

• Mean time to failure recovery: How much the average time it takes to recover from a failure has been reduced.

• Deployment frequency: How much deployment frequency has increased.

• Percentage of failed deployments: How much the percentage of failed deployments has decreased. 

Advanced DevOps interview questions

What are some advanced DevOps questions? Here are a few of the best questions to ask to understand what level of knowledge a senior DevOps engineer has. 

6. What is configuration management? Why is it important? 

Answer:

Configuration management (CM) is a practice that provides administrative and technical directions to the design and development of an application. It’s about systematic change handling so that the system doesn’t lose its integrity over time. It includes policies, procedures, tools, and techniques for evaluating change proposals, managing them, tracking their progress and keeping up appropriate documentation.

CM helps teams with the automation of tasks. That way, the team’s performance and agility improve. It also brings consistency and improves the product development process by supporting design streamlining, documentation, control and change implementation. 

7. Why is AWS used as part of DevOps? 

Answer:

AWS (Amazon Web Services), a cloud provider, is used to help DevOps with these benefits:

• AWS provides ready-to-use flexible resources for usage

• It helps with scaling, as thousands of machines can be deployed on AWS by making use of unlimited storage and computation power

• AWS can help automate plenty of tasks

• AWS is secure and by using its security options, deployments and builds can be secured

8. What are Post Mortem meetings in DevOps?

Answer:

These are meetings that are set up to discuss what can go wrong while the DevOps methodology is implemented. The team also needs to come up with steps that need to be taken to avoid them in the future. 

9. What is the DogPile effect? How can you prevent it? 

Answer:

The DogPile effect is also referred to as cache stampede and it can occur when parallel computing systems that are employing caching strategies are subjected to heavy loading. It happens when the cache expires or is invalidated and there are simultaneously many requests to the website. DogPile can be prevented by implementing semaphore locks in the cache.

10. What is Jenkinsfile?

Answer:

Jenkinsfile includes the definition of a Jenkins pipeline. It’s a text file that’s checked into the source control repository. Jenkinsfile allows code review and iteration on the pipeline, it permits an audit trail for the pipeline, and it contains a single source of truth for the pipeline, which can be viewed and edited.

Over to you! 

That’s it, now you know what DevOps interview questions to ask. 

Want to make sure that you pick the right candidate for your team? 

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