mohitsethi/devops-interview-questions

DevOps Job Interview Questions

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

Table of Contents

1. General Questions
2. Network Questions
3. Linux Questions
4. Windows Questions
5. Security Questions
6. Cloud Questions
7. Architecture Questions
8. CI Questions
9. Coding Questions
10. Fun Questions

Getting Involved

1. Contributors
2. How to Contribute
3. License

General Questions

• 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)
• Describe the most challenging situation that you were faced with and how did you fix it?

Network Questions

• 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?

Linux Questions

• 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?

Windows Questions

• 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?

Security Questions

• Difference between authorization and authentication?
• Describe two-factor authentication

Cloud Questions

• 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?

Architecture Questions

• 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?

CI Questions

• Are you familiar with CI tools? Which ones?
• Describe your experience implementing continuous deployment

Coding Questions

• Describe a dev/test/production workflow using GIT
• More on Front-end Developer Job Interview Questions

Fun Questions

• Do you have any side projects?
• If you could learn any technology now, what would be?