Freshers (0–2 years)
Practise this level-
1. What is CI/CD?
What they look for: Continuous integration runs builds and tests on every change; continuous delivery keeps the code always releasable. Describe a pipeline you have built.
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2. What is the difference between a container and a virtual machine?
What they look for: Containers share the host kernel and start fast; VMs include a full OS.
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3. Explain the basic parts of a Dockerfile.
What they look for: Base image, copying code, installing dependencies, the start command. Mention layer caching.
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4. Which Linux commands do you use to debug a server?
What they look for: top or htop, df, free, ss or netstat, journalctl and tail on logs. Explain what you look for in each.
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5. What is Git branching and how do you resolve a merge conflict?
What they look for: Feature branches, pull requests, and resolving conflicts by understanding both changes.
Mid-level (2–5 years)
Practise this level-
6. What are Pods, Deployments and Services in Kubernetes?
What they look for: Pods run containers, Deployments manage replicas and rollouts, Services give a stable network address.
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7. How do you do zero-downtime deployments?
What they look for: Rolling updates with readiness probes, or blue-green and canary releases, plus a quick rollback path.
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8. What is Infrastructure as Code? Why use Terraform?
What they look for: Infrastructure defined in version-controlled files. Mention state files and plan before apply.
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9. How do you manage secrets in pipelines and clusters?
What they look for: A secret manager or sealed secrets, never plain text in the repository, with rotation.
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10. What do you monitor for a web service?
What they look for: Latency, traffic, errors and saturation, with alerts on symptoms users feel.
Senior (5+ years)
Practise this level-
11. Walk me through how you handled a production incident.
What they look for: Detection, mitigation first, root cause, and a blameless post-mortem with follow-up actions.
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12. How do you reduce cloud costs?
What they look for: Right-sizing, autoscaling, reserved or spot capacity, storage lifecycle rules, and cost visibility per team.
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13. What are SLOs and error budgets?
What they look for: Reliability targets agreed with the business; the error budget decides when to slow releases.
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14. How would you design a CI/CD platform for many teams?
What they look for: Reusable pipeline templates, self-service environments, security scanning built in, and clear ownership.
Frequently asked questions
Which cloud should I prepare for?
AWS is the most common in job descriptions, followed by Azure and GCP. The concepts carry across all three.
Do DevOps interviews include coding?
Usually scripting — Bash or Python — rather than algorithm questions.
Are certifications required?
Not required, but an AWS or Kubernetes certification helps get shortlisted, especially early in your career.