Beginner DevOps Interview Questions
50 questions
When would you choose squash-merge over a regular merge commit for landing a pull request into main?
BeginnerGit6 min
A new job you added to .gitlab-ci.yml is stuck 'pending' forever and never picked up by any runner. What's the most likely cause, and how do you fix it?
BeginnerGitLab CI/CD5 min
A teammate accidentally merged a merge request that was still a work in progress, because nothing in GitLab's workflow signaled it wasn't ready. How would you prevent this going forward?
BeginnerGitLab CI/CD5 min
What's the actual difference between GitLab's Developer, Maintainer, and Owner roles in terms of what each one can do to a protected branch and CI/CD variables?
BeginnerGitLab6 min
What's the difference between a "Protected" and a "Masked" GitLab CI/CD variable, and why would you want both on the same variable?
BeginnerGitLab CI/CD5 min
A Chart.yaml has both a version and an appVersion field — what's the difference, and how should each actually be bumped?
BeginnerHelm5 min
What's etcd's actual role in a cluster, and what happens if it becomes unavailable?
BeginnerKubernetesEtcd5 min
Why does setting only limits (no requests) on a container break HPA's CPU-based scaling calculation?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
What's the difference between envFrom and individually listing env entries sourced from a ConfigMap/Secret, and when does it matter?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
Why are Kubernetes Secrets only base64-encoded by default, not encrypted, and how would you actually protect them at rest?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
What's actually different about a CustomResourceDefinition versus a built-in Kubernetes resource like a Deployment?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
What's the actual difference between a Pod and a Deployment in Kubernetes, and why would you almost never create a bare Pod directly in production?
BeginnerKubernetes6 min
What's the difference between ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer, and ExternalName, and how do you choose?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
Why does Kubernetes require a CNI plugin at all — what job does it do that kube-proxy doesn't?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
What's the difference between a Role/RoleBinding and a ClusterRole/ClusterRoleBinding, and when would you bind a ClusterRole at namespace scope on purpose?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
What's the practical difference between node affinity and a plain node selector, given affinity seems strictly more powerful?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
What's the difference between ReadWriteOnce, ReadWriteMany, and ReadWriteOncePod, and what production symptom does picking the wrong one cause?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
A production workload needs persistent storage, and its pods may be rescheduled to different nodes — how do you design storage so data survives that?
BeginnerKubernetes6 min
How would your investigation differ if a Pod entered ImagePullBackOff instead of CrashLoopBackOff?
BeginnerKubernetes6 min
What's actually different at the API level between kubectl rollout restart and deleting all of a Deployment's pods manually?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
chmod 755 vs chmod 644 — what do these numbers actually mean, and how would you figure out the right mode for a new file without guessing?
BeginnerLinux6 min
Why does Docker report exit code 137 specifically for an OOM-killed container, and how does that map to the underlying kernel signal?
BeginnerDocker5 min
You see the same data expressed as both 'ports: [80, 443]' and a multi-line dashed list in different YAML files. Are these actually equivalent, and when would you use each?
BeginnerYAML5 min
A Kubernetes manifest that looked correct in the editor fails to apply with a cryptic YAML parsing error. How do you systematically debug indentation-related YAML errors?
BeginnerYAML6 min