Mid Interview Practice
Intermediate DevOps interview questions on Kubernetes, Terraform, monitoring, and architecture for 2-5 years experience.
41 questions
Activating Tags in Billing Reports
Your team tagged every resource with team and environment, but the tags are not showing up in cost reports. What is going on, and how is this different on AWS, GCP, and Azure?
intermediateFinOpsApplication Code vs Kubernetes Manifests in Separate Repos
Should your application source code and Kubernetes manifests live in the same repo or in separate repos? What is your take?
intermediateGitOpsHelm vs Kustomize for Per-Environment Config
Helm or Kustomize for handling environment differences in an Argo CD repo? Walk me through how you would pick and what the repo layout looks like for each.
intermediateGitOpsUsing Kustomize Overlays for Per-Environment Config
Walk me through how you would use Kustomize overlays to handle config that differs between dev and prod in an Argo CD setup.
intermediateGitOpsOrganizing a Shared Manifests Repo for Multiple Teams
Three teams share one Argo CD instance and one manifests repo. How do you lay it out so each team can ship without waiting on each other and can't accidentally deploy each other's stuff?
intermediateGitOpsHandling Secrets in an Argo CD Manifests Repo
Secrets can't go into Git in plaintext. How do you handle them in an Argo CD setup, and what does that look like in your repo structure?
intermediateGitOpsBlue-Green Deployment Strategy
What is a blue-green deployment, and what are its advantages and disadvantages compared to other deployment strategies?
intermediateCI/CDCI/CD Pipeline Design
How would you design a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices application? What stages would you include?
intermediateCI/CDDatabase Backup and Recovery
Describe database backup strategies and how you would design a recovery plan for production databases.
intermediateInfrastructureDesigning an On-Call Schedule
You've got six engineers split across two time zones and you need 24/7 coverage. How would you actually design the rotation? Walk me through the trade-offs you'd weigh.
intermediateIncident ManagementDocker Image Layers and Caching
How do Docker image layers work, and how can you optimize your Dockerfile to take advantage of layer caching?
intermediateDockerEnforcing Tagging Policies Across Clouds
How do you actually enforce that every resource in AWS, GCP, and Azure gets the required tags? Walk me through what you would put in place.
intermediateFinOpsDesigning an Escalation Policy
An alert fires at 3am and pages the primary on-call. Walk me through what your escalation policy should do from that moment, step by step, and tell me what failure modes you're designing around.
intermediateIncident ManagementEssential Tags for Multi-Cloud Cost Allocation
If you were designing a tagging standard for a company running on AWS, GCP, and Azure, which tags would you require on every resource and why?
intermediateFinOpsGitOps Principles and Implementation
What is GitOps and how does it differ from traditional CI/CD? Explain the pull-based deployment model.
intermediateDevOpsDesigning Golden Paths
We want our developers to follow best practices, but we do not want to slow them down with mandatory reviews for every infrastructure change. How would you design 'golden paths' in an internal developer platform?
intermediatePlatform EngineeringService Catalog and Ownership
You are building a service catalog for your IDP. Your company has 200 microservices, and nobody knows who owns half of them. How do you fix this, and what does a good service catalog look like?
intermediatePlatform EngineeringImmutable Infrastructure
Explain immutable infrastructure and its benefits. How does it differ from traditional server management?
intermediateInfrastructureInfrastructure as Code Patterns
What are the key principles and patterns of Infrastructure as Code? How do you structure IaC for multiple environments?
intermediateInfrastructureIstio Retries and Retry Amplification
How do you configure retries in Istio, and what's the danger of being too aggressive with them?
intermediateService MeshWeighted Canary Rollout with Istio
Walk me through how you'd canary a new version of a service with Istio. Say you want to start at 5% traffic to v2 and ramp up.
intermediateService MeshKubernetes Kubelet
What is the role of the kubelet in a Kubernetes cluster? How does it interact with the control plane?
intermediateKubernetesKubernetes Pod Lifecycle
Explain the different phases of a Kubernetes Pod lifecycle and what happens during each phase.
intermediateKubernetesKubernetes Services and Networking
Explain the different types of Kubernetes Services (ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer) and when to use each.
intermediateKubernetesRunning Your First Pod-Delete Experiment Safely
I hand you a fresh cluster with a demo nginx deployment. Take me from nothing to a controlled pod-delete experiment. What are the steps, and how do you keep it from turning into an outage?
intermediateChaos EngineeringHow Litmus Decides Pass or Fail: Probes
Your pod-delete experiment shows Pass, but during the run users got 502s for about 20 seconds. How can the experiment pass while the service was actually down, and how do you fix that?
intermediateChaos EngineeringLog Aggregation Strategies
How do you implement centralized logging in a distributed system? What are the key components?
intermediateMonitoringMonitoring and Alerting Strategy
How do you design a monitoring and alerting strategy? What metrics would you track and how do you avoid alert fatigue?
intermediateObservabilityAuto vs Manual Instrumentation
You need to roll out tracing across 40 services owned by six different teams. Do you go with auto-instrumentation or manual instrumentation, and how do you decide?
intermediateObservabilityContext Propagation Across Services
Service A calls service B over HTTP. How does B know the request belongs to an existing trace? What actually travels on the wire?
intermediateObservabilityApplication Performance Optimization
How do you identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in a production application?
intermediateSRECanary Releases in Progressive Delivery
You're deploying a new version of a critical payment service. Walk me through how you'd set up a canary release for it.
intermediateCI/CDFeature Flag Types and Use Cases
Can you walk me through the different types of feature flags and when you'd use each one?
intermediateCI/CDSecrets Management
How do you securely manage secrets (passwords, API keys, certificates) in a DevOps environment?
intermediateSecurityService Mesh Concepts
What is a service mesh and when would you implement one? Explain the sidecar pattern.
intermediateKubernetesSLI, SLO, and SLA Definitions
Explain the difference between SLI, SLO, and SLA with examples.
intermediateSREChoosing the Right SLIs
You're joining a team that runs a checkout service for an e-commerce platform. There are no SLOs yet. How would you decide which SLIs to track?
intermediateSREError Budget Management
Your service has a 99.9% availability SLO over a 30-day window. How much downtime does that give you, and what do you actually do with that error budget day-to-day?
intermediateSREUsername Availability with Bloom Filters
Explain how you'd check username availability for a service with billions of users without hitting the database on every keystroke.
intermediateSystem DesignCDN Image Delivery Under 50ms
Explain how a CDN serves images to users worldwide in under 50ms.
intermediateSystem DesignTerraform State Management
What is Terraform state, why is it important, and how do you manage state in a team environment?
intermediateTerraform