Prepare for DevOps interview session by reviewing these most popular and important DevOps interview questions and answers. This massive article offers an overview of DevOps and its principles such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and that of tools such as Git, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, and so on. It is also important to know about IaC and its counterparts, microservices architecture, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment types.
Know about the purpose and use of the monitoring tool and configuration management and understand the concept of Agile and DevOps. If you will be working in cloud DevOps, ensure that you familiarize yourself with cloud computing, serverless computing, and the 12-factor app methodology. Ideal for anyone who wants to gain more experience in DevOps or is just starting their way to this profession.
1. What is DevOps? 🤔
DevOps is a concept that amalgamates two activities; software development and IT operations. The software development that is being embarked on aspires to reduce its development lifecycle and to deliver frequently while offering a quality software solution. The primary concepts of DevOps are collaboration, automation, integration, and monitoring.
2. What should be the primary outcomes of DevOps? 🎯Most important question of DevOps interview questions.
Key benefits of DevOps include:
- Faster delivery of features
- More stable operating environments
- Improved communication and collaboration
- Less time is spent on solving problems and troubleshooting (there is more time for reinventing).
3. What makes up the skeleton of DevOps? 🧩
The core components of DevOps are:
- Continuous Integration (CI)
- Continuous Delivery (CD)
- Continuous Deployment
- Continuous Monitoring
- Version Control
- Configuration Management
- Collaboration and Communication
4. Explain Continuous Integration (CI). 🔄
This is one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. Continuous Integration (CI) is a subtype of the Agile methodology as far as the development sub-processes are concerned; it means that developers merge their changes into the common source. For each integration there is an automated build and, to catch errors early on, automated tests are run.
5. Explain Continuous Delivery (CD). 🚀
Continuous Delivery (CD) is the methodology that goes with the software development process where the code changes are being prepared for the production release constantly. It confirms that one can be confident about when a software is going to be released and secondly, they can be released at the mere click of a button.
6. What is Continuous Deployment? 🚢
Continuous Deployment takes Continuous Delivery a notch higher to where changes take a one-way trip to your customer without any interference, after passing through several production stages.
7. What functional concept is referred to as version control, and why is it so essential? 🗂️
Version Control means that a record is kept of changes made to a single file, or on a team of files so that these changes can in the future be revisited. It is important because with this tool more than one individual can edit the same project, the records of changes can always be retrieved and the conflicts can be managed and solved easily.
8. What is Git? 🧑💻
Git is a kind of version control for software development which tracks the changes in source codes made by the developers. It is intended for managing the working processes of programmers; however, it can be applied to follow alterations in any number of files. Its objectives comprise; speed, accuracy and favouring of distributed and non-linear working.
9. What is meant by Infrastructure as Code (IaC). 🛠️
Infrastructure as Code is a concept which describes the management and engineering of infrastructure through the use of definition files that are intelligible to machines rather than having to configure the system on a hardware level or by running complicated graphical interfaces. Because this approach involves the utilization of high-level descriptive coding languages, it may be used as a means of energizing the provisioning process of the architecture of IT infrastructure.
10. What is Docker? 🐳
Docker is an open business order tool designed to build, ship, and run applications. Docker helps you to deploy your applications, and decouple them from infrastructure to deliver software more rapidly. As mentioned above, with Docker you do not need to talk about infrastructure in different terms than applications.
11. What is a Docker container? 📦
A Docker container is a lightweight, standalone, executable package of software that includes everything needed to run an application: personal code, personal runtime environment, system tools, system libraries, and system configuration.
12. What is Kubernetes? ☸️
This is one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration tool that helps in automating many of the aspects one would think about concerning deploying, managing and scaling containerized applications. It arranges containers that constitute an application in a manner that assists in their administration and identification.
13. What is a Pod in Kubernetes?🐙
A Pod is the most basic resource that can be managed by a Kubernetes cluster. It is an object that signifies a single instance of a running process in your cluster. Pods include one or many containers, for example, the Docker containers. When a Pod is being made to run numerous containers, these containers are all treated as one Pod and all contend for the Pod’s resources.
14. What is Jenkins? 🏗️
Jenkins is an open-source web application that is created under Java. Jenkins is used to assisting the unidimensional human aspect of the SDLC through integrating and in continuative delivering technology factors.
15. What is a Jenkins Pipeline? 🔧
Jenkins Pipeline is a set of plugins that enable the development as well as the integration of Continuous Delivery pipelines into Jenkins. You will need to create a pipeline that outlines the process of creating a build, a test, and deployment of an application.
16. What is Ansible? 🤖 Most important question of DevOps interview questions.
The major use of Ansible is in IT where it is applied in configuration management, application deployment, intraservice orchestration and provisioning among others. It can be useful for constructing, organizing, and launching applications, for undertaking some standard activities, and for maintaining IT assets.
17. What is Terraform? 🌍 Most important question of DevOps interview questions.
Terraform is Infrastructure as a code tool which is developed by HashiCorp and is an open-source software. All the data centre infrastructures are programmed and created by a user through a higher level declarative language called HashiCorp Configuration Language abbreviated (HCL) or JSON.
18. What is a Chef in DevOps? 🍴
Chef is an application that is used to maintain the configuration of the nodes; it offers a manner of expressing infrastructure in code. It initiates, configures and controls the infrastructure throughout your network.
19. What is the meaning of Puppet in DevOps? 🐩
Puppet stands for Perl-based, Unix-driven, Automated, Purely, Textual which is an open source tool that is used for configuration management of servers. Puppet on the other hand implements a so-called declarative language more specifically for configuring a system.
20. What is Nagios? 👀 Most important question of DevOps interview questions.
This is one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. Nagios is a free software designed for monitoring systems, networks as well as infrastructure. Application wise Nagios is used to monitor servers, switches, applications, and services its main function is to alerts.
21. What is “Immutable Infrastructure”? 🔒
Immutable Infrastructure is another paradigm in which servers or systems are not altered at any point in their use or even when they were deployed. If there is something that requires modification, a patch, or a new addition to address a new need, the new servers’ basic image is set up with the modifications made and then they are deployed. The old servers are then retired.
22. What is meant by the microservice architecture? 🏛️
Microservice architecture is one of the architectural approaches in developing a single large application where the application is developed as a combination of lots of small services where each of these services runs on its process and uses some lightweight mechanism like HTTP resource API for communication. These services are based on business capabilities and are operational services that are deployable individually.
23. What are the major activities of an organization going through the CI/CD pipeline? ⛓️
This is also one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. CI/CD pipeline means an automated process that combines scheduling of the steps involved in the delivery of an application starting from commit to production. The pipeline guarantees code changes are tested, built, and deployed hence the benefit of rapid and efficient release.
24. An effective CI/CD pipeline is made of several stages; what are these stages? 🏭
Common stages in a CI/CD pipeline include:
- Source Code Management
- Build
- Test
- Deploy
- Release
25. What is Blue-Green Deployment? 🌐 Most important question of DevOps interview questions.
This is one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. Blue-Green Deployment is a technique, which entails having two similar production instances, with only one instance processing live traffic at any given time, the Blue instance. The Green environment is an inactive usability archetype. Whenever there is an update of the application, it is carried out in the Green environment. Following the test the traffic is then directed to Green.
26. What is Canary Deployment? 🐦
Canary Deployment is a method of gradually releasing a new version of an application to only a small number of users before moving the update to all the structures. This can let a user monitor and solve problems on a local level if there is a need for adjustment before doing a broad release.
27. What is a rolling deployment? 🔄DevOps interview questions.
A rolling deployment is a form of software release where subsets of the application’s instances are updated to the new version while the rest remain in the old version until all of them have been changed to the new version. He was able to create this method and it assists in avoiding downtime as much as possible and guarantees a flow.
28. What exactly is a Configuration Management tool in DevOps and how is it of help? 🛠️
Configuration Management tools in DevOps assist in making provisions for the deployment, handling and maintenance of software as well as structures. These tools make it possible to achieve standardization, gain increased velocity, decrease the rate of mistakes, and regulate complicated systems through the use of config as a coding strategy.
29. Explain the concept of “Shift Left” in DevOps. 🔄
Using an abbreviation, “Shift Left” about DevOps is the process of testing and quality assurance at an early stage of the development. This strategy assists in isolating and correcting the flaws as quickly as possible before they cause much more harm in the development process and reduces the amount of resources needed to solve a problem at a later stage.
30. What is DevSecOps? 🛡️
This is also one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. DevSecOps implies the integration of security elements into the DevOps practice. This derives from the fact that everybody in the software delivery cycle chain is required to be accountable for security thus providing means for building secure software at high speed.
31. What is a CI/CD tool? ⚙️Most important question of DevOps interview questions.
A CI/CD tool provides the automated features of integration and/or deploying code changes. These assist in code integration, testing, and deployment to any stage or production of the software development life cycle.
32. List some well-known CI/CD tools. 🔧
Popular CI/CD tools include:
- Jenkins
- GitLab CI
- CircleCI
- Travis CI
- Bamboo
- TeamCity
33. What is Continuous Testing? 🧪Most important question of DevOps interview questions.
Continuous Testing is the process of performing tests on a software release candidate while it progresses through the delivery pipeline to get the risk assessment concerning the business impacts of the release candidate instantly.
34. What is Continuous Monitoring? 🖥️
Continuous Monitoring is the real-time or steady observance of the state of the system, app performance and security to detect and intervene in emerging problems that affect the proper functioning of apps and structures.
35. What is a Vagrant? 📦
This is one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. Vagrant essentially is an open-source software for use in creating and deploying multiplatform, lightweight, virtual development environments. PowerCLI offers an opportunity to perform actions via CLI and control the lifecycle of virtual machines, thus making the setup of the perspective environment for development easy.
36. What is Prometheus? 📈
This is one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. One of the most imprtsnt question of DevOps interview questions. Prometheus is an Open source monitoring and alerting toolkit which was developed in sound cloud. It is aimed to be reliable and easily scalable with powerful queries, great data models, and efficient storage.
37. What is Grafana? 📉Most important question of DevOps interview questions.
Grafana is solely a monitoring and visualization tool, which is open-source. It has features to transform obtained time-series database data into plots and charts.
38. Define the differences between Monolithic and Microservices Architecture: 🏗️
Monolithic Architecture is a basic type that has all the elements of the application linked and dependent on each other. On the other hand, Microservices Architecture breaks the application into smaller working services that can work independently for development, and deployment along with distinct scaling.
39. What is a Service Mesh? 🕸️ Most important question of DevOps interview questions.
This is one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. Service Mesh is an additional layer that an application has to implement and helps manage how services communicate with each other over a network. It has facilities such as load balancing, service discovery, failure recovery, metrics, and monitoring.
40. What is Helm in Kubernetes? 🐙Most important question of DevOps interview questions.
Helm is a package manager of Kubernetes that enables you to manage Kubernetes applications. Helm employs a file that consists of a group of several files that describe the related resources known as charts, and it utilizes them to install, define, or upgrade applications.
41. An Orchestration tool is defined as a software asset that automates the coordination of an organization’s various IT systems. 🧩
Orchestration tools are used to help in the configuration, and coordination as well as to manage large complex software systems. They facilitate the setup and growth of applications, dealing with resources and availability.
42. What does the term Build Tool mean? 🔨
A build tool is designed with the capability to make the creation of executable applications from source code easier. In this, the code produced is combined, connected, and integrated into a form that can easily be run or used.
43. Explain some of the known Build Tools. 🧰
Popular build tools include:
- Maven
- Gradle
- Ant
- Make
44. What is Deployment strategy 🚀
This is one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. A deployment strategy is defined as a strategy or approach that is used to roll out software into production channels. It describes the procedure of update deployment and mechanisms to minimize the impact on availability.
45. What is the difference between Agile and DevOps? 🔄
Agile is a software delivery process that aims to give reasonable increments of usable software to the customers to assess as often as possible. DevOps is a culture as well as a practice aimed at bringing development and operations teams together to improve the efficiency of the system’s delivery. This development practice moves Agile beyond project implementation to cover the deployment and maintenance of the applications.
46. What is a Virtual Machine or VM as it is commonly used in Virtualization systems? 🖥️
A Virtual Machine (also abbreviated to VM) is a simulated version of a computer environment. VMs are similar to having a physical computer, but these cannot operate independently because instead they are run on an actual computer called host. They are used for supporting more than a single operating system on one physical computer.
47. Clarify the term ‘Cloud Provider’. ☁️ Most important question of DevOps interview questions.
This is one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions.. A Cloud Provider is an organization or an individual supplying multiple services of cloud computing which includes IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Some of them are Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Service.
48. What is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) explain it in detail. 🛠️
Cloud computing Infrastructure as Service (IaaS) delivers virtualized computing infrastructure over the internet. It provides essentials such as application platforms, storage space and networks, thus allowing firms to just lease infrastructure from a cloud service provider rather than having their hardware servers.
49. Can you define Platform as a Service (PaaS)? 🌐
Platform as a Service (PaaS) offers a computing platform that customers can use to host applications and provide application management tools while allowing the customer to avoid managing the underlying hardware. It encompasses services for the creation and hosting of applications, and the elimination of the issues with servers, storage, and networks.
50. What is Software as a Service commonly also known as SaaS? 💻
Software as a Service could also be termed as ‘on-demand software, being a software delivery model which involves access to software applications over the internet based on a paid-up service model. It enables users to terms of software through a browser, instead of being installed in their computers and maintained by the providers.
51. What is Cloud Computing? ☁️
Cloud Computing is thus defined as the utilization of resources such as servers, storage, databases, networks, software, analysis, and even intelligence accessed over the internet and many rallying points, which makes it a rapid way of innovation, has choices, and scale efficiencies.
52. What is Serverless Computing? 🚀
Serverless Computing is defined as one of the cloud computing models in which the cloud provider also handles instances/servers & resources are automatically provisioned. Based on the cloud, the developers can just concentrate on writing codes since they do not need to organize servers or other operational issues.
53. What is a CloudFormation? 🏗️
AWS CloudFormation is a service used to facilitate the creation of AWS resources through templates that follow the IaC model. It enables you to define templates whereby your AWS resources will be described, and their deployment and management will be automated.
54. What is an Artifact Repository? 🏺
This is one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. An Artifact Repository is a location that holds binaries commonly called artefacts created in the build process. It stores and governs artifacts such as code for development and testing, and ready-to-launch software, for efficient and accurate use.
55. What is Artifactory? 🏺
This is one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. Artifactory is a package repository management tool with support for all common formats of artefacts. It gives a chance for stable and secure access to artifacts and therefore contributes to the effective and secure control of the software release process.
56. What is Nexus Repository? 🏺
Nexus Repository is described as a Repository Manager that offers a solution for artefact storage and management. Finally, it supports several formats such as Maven, npm, and Docker among others and is also compatible with the most commonly used build tools.
57. What is a Build Artifact? 📦
A Build Artifact is a file or several files created by performing a build operation. Generally, artefacts contain compiled code, libraries, configurations and other necessary items which need to be deployed.
58. What is the 12-Factor App? 📐
This is one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. The 12-Factor App is a set of rules that propose how software-as-a-service applications should be created to be scalable, maintainable, and portable. They are such as codebase management, dependency management, configuration and logs.
59. What is a Release Management? 📅
Release Management can be defined as the processes of managing, planning, scheduling and controlling a build of software through different stages and environments which includes testing and deploying releases. The end of aim is to guarantee that releases are launched in a proper and unproblematic manner.
60. What is a regression test? 🔄
This is one of the most important question of DevOps interview questions. Regression testing is a type of software testing that aims to confirm that no new changes in the codes have reduced the functionality of the previous operations. It comprises rerunning past test cases and making a comparison to identify the new bugs that the new changes may have caused.