You’re here because you’re probably about to interview for a DevOps Engineer job. No need to be nervous, we’ve got you covered!
Let’s explore some of the most common DevOps Engineer interview questions you’ll likely be asked.
What are some common DevOps tools you’ve used?
This is a really broad question, it could be asking about CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code tooling, Monitoring Tools, Linux utilities or others!
What is version control?
Version control software or source control allows us to track and manage changes to code. It records changes to source code in a repository and allows us to manage those changes and see a history.
What are the advantages of DevOps?
DevOps has tons of advantages.
Here’s a few quick ones:
- Quicker software delivery
- gathering early feedback
- better software quality
What is the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment?
CI, or continuous integration, refers to how developers merge code in to the main branch of version control continuously. Usually, a pipeline will run and perform code checks and tests for bugs.
CD, or continuous deployment, refers to how code is deployed to testing or production environments after it’s been built and tested.
Jenkins, Gitlab, Travis, CircleCI and Bamboo are just a few popular CI/CD systems tools.
What is configuration management and how is it used in DevOps?
Configuration management refers to the process of maintaining a desired state on a system. Configuration management tools like Ansible and Salt ensure that our compute resources or virtual machines are versioned in code with software packages and configuration they need to run applications.
What monitoring platforms are you familiar with?
We recommend if you’re being interviewed that you be honest. Don’t name tools you’ve never used before.
That said, Prometheus, DataDog, Nagios, Dynatrace, and New Relic are just a few monitoring tools that are in use today for monitoring application environments.
What is Infrastructure as Code?
Infrastructure as Code allows us to define our resources as code. Was that obvious from the title? The major benefit over making changes manually is that we can always see what’s currently deployed. Infrastructure as Code is our “desired state” or outcome we want deployed in our environment.
We check our Infrastructure as Code into version control like Git and collaborate with teammates on changes more easily.
Imagine deploying an RDS database in AWS by going through the console and clicking and entering all of the settings manually. That’s tedious. If you do it through code, you can simply have a single file for that database.
Some popular Infrastructure as Code tools are Terraform, Cloudformation and Pulumi.
How does AWS use Infrastructure as Code?
AWS uses Cloudformation as its Infrastructure as Code Platform. You can still use platforms like Terraform on AWS as well!
What is a Blue-Green Deployment Pattern?
Blue-Green deployments are just one way of deploying new versions of applications without user interruption. “Blue-green” means that we run two versions at the same time. Blue is the old version and green refers to the new version we want to switch over to.
Both applications are probably sitting behind a load-balancer. Then, traffic is gradually moved from the Blue version to the Green version. This allows Engineers to rollback to the Blue version if something goes wrong.
What is a canary release?
Canary releases are a way to slowly roll features out to a small subset of users before deploying it to all of the users. This has the benefit of making a small, incremental test with lower-risk before rolling the change out to all users. The term came from the old saying canary in a coal mine.
What are containers?
This is another broad question.
Let’s answer it simply:
A container is a form of operating system virtualization. Containers are light-weight and solve the problem of code having many dependencies. Sometimes code will run differently on different computers.
With containers, you don’t need to worry that code will run differently. It’s going to run the same on every server it’s deployed on. Docker is the most common container virtualization platform.
What is Kubernetes? What does Kubernetes do?
Pronounced Koo-Ber-netes and often shortened as k8s, Kubernetes is for “Orchestrating” Containers.
Kubernetes is the standard platform for orchestrating and managing containers today. It allows Engineers and Operators to automate deployment, scaling, load-balancing of containers easily.
Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains the project.
Summary
We’ve given you only a handful of DevOps Interview questions. DevOps Interviews can be very broad given the skills required!
Be prepared to answer about your experience with Cloud Platforms, Monitoring Software, CI/CD Platforms, Systems Design or any other number of topics! Good luck!
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