This file contains a number of interview questions that can be used when vetting potential candidates. It is by no means recommended to use every single question here on the same candidate (that would take hours). Choosing a few items from this list should help you vet the intended skills you require.
Note: Keep in mind that many of these questions are open-ended and could lead to interesting discussions that tell you more about the person's capabilities than a straight answer would.
Inspired by Front-end-Developers-Interview-Questions
- General Questions
- Network Questions
- Linux Questions
- Windows Questions
- Security Questions
- Cloud Questions
- Architecture Questions
- Automation Questions
- CI Questions
- Coding Questions
- Fun Questions
- Tell me about yourself and why do you want this role?
- Backend SWE that worked on Distrbuted Systems + APIs in the AWS platform
- 4 years developing with DevOps focused teams familiar with most of the DevOps tools and practices
- I've always wanted to improve and automate processes in the workplace - good for DevOps - improvement in operational effciency
- Want a DevOps role because
- more involved infrastructure so for the past 2 months I got AWS certified and learned Terraform and Python
- aligned with long-term goal of being a Solution Architect
- Mobile ads - negative connotation, solving a glaring problem for both app. developers and marketers
- Aki technologies is a place where I could contribute a lot using my technical skill-set and passion for automation.
- What does the term "DevOps" mean to you?
- "Hard"/hands-on/SRE vs
- "Soft"/Three Ways/Theory of Constraints/philosophy of DevOps
- Delivering at high-veolicity through practices and tools.
- Build, Test, Release
- Monitor, Plan
- Describe your experience with task management
- Agile
- Kanban
- Waterfall
- What drew you to DevOps
- Solution Architect goal
- Wanting to dive more into the infrastructure side of things
- Describe the most challenging situation that you were faced with and how did you fix it?
- Perf. test of IM
- create monitoring resource-level dashboards and test endpoints
- adjust scaling parameters
- Perf. test of IM
- How do you stay current?
- Follow a lot of tech channels in YT e.g. freeCodeCamp, Simplilearn, TechLead
- Often volunteer for POCs
- DevOps vs Agile
- Agile focus on timeline, DevOps on Timeline, delivery model, and quality
- Agile feedback is from customers, DevOps feedback is from tools
- Why do we need DevOps?
- customer satisfaction through reduced lead time
- smaller faster but quality releases means a happy customer or product owner
- DevOps tools you used and how you used them?
- Push code to Git
- Run Jenkins pipeline
- Pipeline builds the code using Gradle
- Docker image pushed to ECR
- Terraform/Cloudformation provisions the resources
- Docker images deployed on ECS
- Robot framework tests run
- Jmeter tests run on PERF
- Continuous monitoring is done through Kibana or Cloudwatch.
- Slack channel for PROD errors
- Advantages of DevOps?
- Reduced lead time
- Issues are caught early on
- We just feel more confident and secure having set of automated steps
- more time to do things that add value to the product
- Most important thing about DevOps?
- minimize lead time without sacrificing quality
- Most notable thing you did that involves DevOps?
- As DEV owner, kickstarted most services including code and pipeline
- Implemented several monitoring tools such as Kibana Alerts, Slack-Jenkins build integrations.
- Supported PERF testing, all the while creating monitoring dashboards and adjusting scaling parameters.
- What is IAC?
- Represent your infrastructure as code.
- Allows provisioning of your infra in just a few commands
- Allows raipid but safe update of infra.
- Say I open a web browser and enter an address. I hit enter. Describe how the connection the works in as much detail as possible. Trying to hear that they understand:
- DNS
- Network routing
- Load Balancing
- Ports on server
- Service that is serving port
- What’s a PTR in DNS?
- What’s a MX record in DNS?
- How a CDN chooses the closest host to serve a client?
- In which cases would you choose to not implement a CDN?
- How do you measure the performance of a server/web application? (tools, methods)
- What are secure ways to SSH to a server inside a private network from a public location?
- Difference between RAID 0, 1 and 5?
- What’s the advantage of one RAID over another?
- Alternative to init.d in Linux?
- How to view running processes in Linux?
- How to check DNS records in Linux?
- Describe your experience with scripting
- Are you familiar with just linux or have you worked with Windows environments as well?
- If yes to windows do you use powershell? Octopus Deploy? TeamCity? Active Directory? Azure?
- Difference between authorization and authentication?
- Describe two-factor authentication
- Describe how would you secure a web application
- HTTP vs HTTPS
- Talk about PKI/your experience with SSL/Certificates
- Have you used AWS or other cloud platforms?
- How long for?
- In production or just at home on personal projects?
- How to keep logs on servers or containers with ephemeral storage?
- Where to look when trying to reduce cloud costs without reducing capacity?
- Name the "Big Three" cloud providers
- AWS
- GCP
- Azure
- Describe the advantages/disadvantages of using CloudFormation to manage your resources
- Would you use CloudFormation to create a RDS database?
- Describe EC2 spot instances and which use cases it can be used to reduce costs
- Talk about IAM roles
- Talk about VPC's
- Subnets
- Internet Gateways
- NATing
- NACL's
- VPN/VPC Peering
- What's the use case for a database read replica?
- How to scale a database without just increasing capacity of a single machine while maintaining ACID?
- How to choose between relational database and noSQL?
- What advantages a NoSQL database like MongoDB has, comparing to MySQL?
- How to manage API versions?
- How to reduce load time of a dynamic website?
- How to reduce load time of a static website?
- Have you used Puppet, Chef, Salt or Ansible?
- How long have you used it for?
- Have you used it in production?
- Describe the size of the environment that you automated (how many servers, small scale or large scale)
- Are you familiar with CI tools? Which ones?
- Describe your experience implementing continuous deployment
- How do you setup an end-to-end pipeline from dev to deployment? (long answer)
- How can Docker help in this case?
- How frequently have you been deploying?
- Have you been able to improve the frequency of deployments? If so, how?
- Describe a dev/test/production workflow using GIT
- Feature branching vs trunk based development
- Advantages of requiring pull requests and approvals
- More on Front-end Developer Job Interview Questions
- Do you have any side projects?
- If you could learn any technology now, what would be?