DevOps is a cultural and technical movement that bridges the gap between software development and IT operations. In this guide, we’ve compiled 50 essential DevOps Basic Interview Questions and Answers to help you prepare for your next job interview. Whether you’re a beginner or an aspiring DevOps engineer, these questions will give you a solid foundation to build your knowledge and confidence.
Table of Contents
1. What is DevOps?
Answer:
DevOps is a set of practices that integrates software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It aims to shorten the development lifecycle while delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently in close alignment with business objectives.
2. What are the key benefits of DevOps?
Answer:
- Faster time to market
- Improved collaboration
- Continuous delivery and integration
- More stable operating environments
- Early detection and correction of defects
3. What is Continuous Integration (CI)?
Answer:
CI is the practice of frequently merging all developers’ code changes into a central repository, followed by automated builds and tests to detect issues early.
4. What is Continuous Deployment (CD)?
Answer:
CD is the practice of automatically deploying every code change that passes tests to production, ensuring faster delivery and reduced manual intervention.
5. What is the difference between Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery?
Answer:
- Continuous Delivery: Code is always in a deployable state, but deployment requires manual approval.
- Continuous Deployment: Every successful change is deployed automatically without manual steps.
6. What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?
Answer:
IaC is the process of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure through machine-readable definition files, rather than manual configuration.
7. Name some popular CI/CD tools.
Answer:
- Jenkins
- GitLab CI
- CircleCI
- Travis CI
- Bamboo
- Azure DevOps
- GitHub Actions
8. What is version control and why is it important in DevOps?
Answer:
Version control is a system that tracks changes to code over time. It enables collaboration, rollback, branching, and merging, which are crucial for team-based development and CI/CD.
9. Name some popular version control systems.
Answer:
- Git
- Subversion (SVN)
- Mercurial
- CVS
10. What is Git?
Answer:
Git is a distributed version control system used to manage source code history and coordinate work among developers.
11. What is a Git branch?
Answer:
A Git branch is an independent line of development. It helps in working on features or fixes without affecting the main codebase.
12. What are microservices?
Answer:
Microservices are an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small, autonomous services modeled around a business domain.
13. What are containers?
Answer:
Containers are lightweight, portable, and self-sufficient units that package application code along with dependencies and runtime environment.
14. What is Docker?
Answer:
Docker is a containerization platform that allows you to package applications into standardized units called containers.
15. What is Kubernetes?
Answer:
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that automates deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
16. What is the role of DevOps in Agile development?
Answer:
DevOps complements Agile by enabling rapid development and frequent deployments through automation, collaboration, and feedback loops.
17. What is configuration management?
Answer:
Configuration management is the process of maintaining computer systems, servers, and software in a consistent state through automated tools.
18. Name some configuration management tools.
Answer:
- Ansible
- Puppet
- Chef
- SaltStack
19. What is monitoring in DevOps?
Answer:
Monitoring is the continuous process of collecting and analyzing system metrics to ensure applications run smoothly and issues are detected early.
20. Name some monitoring tools.
Answer:
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Nagios
- Zabbix
- Datadog
- New Relic
21. What is a pipeline in DevOps?
Answer:
A pipeline automates the software delivery process, including building, testing, and deploying code in a defined sequence of stages.
22. What is a build tool?
Answer:
Build tools automate the process of compiling source code into binary code. Examples: Maven, Gradle, Ant.
23. What is a deployment strategy?
Answer:
A deployment strategy defines how new application versions are released. Common strategies include Blue-Green, Rolling, and Canary deployments.
24. What is Blue-Green Deployment?
Answer:
It’s a deployment strategy where two environments (Blue and Green) are maintained. One is live, and the other is idle. Traffic is switched to the idle environment once the new version is deployed.
25. What is a Canary Deployment?
Answer:
It’s a technique to reduce risk by gradually rolling out changes to a small subset of users before a full deployment.
26. What is rollback in DevOps?
Answer:
Rollback is the process of reverting to the previous stable version of an application in case a new release causes issues.
27. What is the role of automation in DevOps?
Answer:
Automation reduces manual effort, ensures consistency, improves reliability, and accelerates deployment cycles.
28. What are logs and why are they important?
Answer:
Logs are records of events that happen within software or systems. They’re vital for troubleshooting and auditing.
29. What is fault tolerance?
Answer:
Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to continue operating properly in the event of failure of some of its components.
30. What is high availability?
Answer:
High availability ensures that services remain accessible and operational with minimal downtime, typically through redundancy.
31. What is a load balancer?
Answer:
A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers to ensure no single server is overwhelmed.
32. What is a reverse proxy?
Answer:
A reverse proxy sits in front of web servers and forwards client requests to the appropriate server, often used for load balancing and security.
33. What is meant by shift-left testing?
Answer:
Shift-left testing refers to moving testing earlier in the development lifecycle to identify and fix bugs early, reducing cost and effort.
34. What is Test Automation?
Answer:
It’s the use of tools to run tests automatically, compare actual outcomes with expected outcomes, and improve CI/CD efficiency.
35. Name some test automation tools.
Answer:
- Selenium
- JUnit
- TestNG
- Cucumber
- Postman (for API testing)
36. What is a service mesh?
Answer:
A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication, often used in microservices architecture. Example: Istio.
37. What is the 3-way handshake in networking?
Answer:
It’s a method used in TCP/IP networks to establish a connection: SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK.
38. What is SSH and how is it used in DevOps?
Answer:
SSH (Secure Shell) is a protocol for securely accessing remote systems. In DevOps, it’s used for automation scripts, server access, and remote deployments.
39. What is a virtual machine (VM)?
Answer:
A VM is a software-based simulation of a physical computer. It runs an OS and applications like a physical machine.
40. How are containers different from virtual machines?
Answer:
Containers share the host OS kernel and are lightweight, while VMs run full OS instances and are heavier.
41. What is a YAML file and where is it used?
Answer:
YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) is a human-readable data serialization format used in configuration files, especially in Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines.
42. What is Helm in Kubernetes?
Answer:
Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that helps in defining, installing, and upgrading Kubernetes applications using charts.
43. What are namespaces in Kubernetes?
Answer:
Namespaces are virtual clusters within a Kubernetes cluster, used to separate resources and manage multi-tenant environments.
44. What is a pod in Kubernetes?
Answer:
A pod is the smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes. It encapsulates one or more containers that share storage and network.
45. What is DevSecOps?
Answer:
DevSecOps integrates security practices into the DevOps process, ensuring security is part of the development lifecycle, not an afterthought.
46. What is an artifact repository?
Answer:
It’s a repository to store build artifacts (e.g., JARs, WARs, Docker images). Examples: Nexus, Artifactory.
47. What is the role of cloud in DevOps?
Answer:
Cloud platforms provide scalable infrastructure, automation tools, and services that support CI/CD, monitoring, and collaboration in DevOps.
48. What are some popular cloud providers?
Answer:
- AWS
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- IBM Cloud
49. What is the principle of “Fail Fast”?
Answer:
Fail fast means detecting errors quickly in development so that issues are resolved early and don’t propagate to later stages.
50. What is a post-mortem in DevOps?
Answer:
A post-mortem is a structured analysis after an incident to understand what happened, why, and how to prevent it in the future.
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