Intermediate DevOps Interview Questions
24 questions
An Ansible playbook reports "changed" on the same tasks every single run, even when nothing about the target host actually changed. Why, and how do you fix it?
IntermediateAnsible8 min
A Lambda function times out for about 2% of invocations, seemingly at random, but works fine when you test it manually. How would you track down the cause?
IntermediateAWSLambda10 min
An Azure Pipelines YAML job runs fine on Microsoft-hosted agents but fails only on self-hosted agents with 'command not found' for a tool the job needs. Why, and how do you fix it?
IntermediateAzure Pipelines7 min
Tell me about a time you strongly disagreed with a technical decision on your team. How did you handle it, and what was the outcome?
IntermediateDevops6 min
How would you integrate SAST, dependency scanning, and secrets scanning into a CI/CD pipeline without making every single PR painfully slow?
IntermediateDevSecOps8 min
Your CI pipeline's Docker build takes 12 minutes and produces a 1.8GB image for a small Node.js service. How would you diagnose and fix it?
IntermediateDockerNodejsCI/CD10 min
A required status check on a GitHub branch protection rule is permanently stuck showing "Expected — Waiting for status to be reported", blocking every PR from merging. What's going on?
IntermediateGitHub7 min
What's the difference between a branch pipeline and a merge request pipeline in GitLab CI, and why does it matter which one actually runs for a given push?
IntermediateGitLab CI/CD7 min
An Argo CD application shows OutOfSync even though the pods running in the cluster look correct and healthy. What would you check?
IntermediateArgo CDKubernetesGitOps8 min
A `helm upgrade` gets interrupted (CI job killed, network blip) and now every subsequent `helm upgrade` or `helm rollback` fails with "another operation (install/upgrade/rollback) is in progress". How do you recover?
IntermediateHelmKubernetes8 min
Someone manually changed a cloud resource in the console that's managed by your IaC. What actually happens the next time the pipeline runs, and how would you handle the drift?
IntermediateTerraform8 min
A Jenkins pipeline stage runs `docker build`. It works fine when run by hand on the agent, but fails in the pipeline with a permission denied error talking to the Docker daemon. Why?
IntermediateJenkinsDocker8 min
You deploy a new version of a Kubernetes Deployment. The pods show Running and pass their readiness checks, but the Service in front of them stops routing traffic entirely. Where do you look?
IntermediateKubernetes10 min
Your container runs fine locally but repeatedly gets OOMKilled after you deploy it to Kubernetes. How would you investigate it?
IntermediateKubernetesContainers10 min
A pod goes into CrashLoopBackOff immediately after you roll out a ConfigMap change, but only in one namespace. How do you investigate it?
IntermediateKubernetesContainers10 min
df says a server's disk is 100% full, but running du -sh on every top-level directory only adds up to a fraction of that. Where did the rest of the space go?
IntermediateLinux8 min
An application intermittently fails to resolve a hostname — most requests succeed, but a small percentage fail with a DNS error. How would you track this down?
IntermediateDNSLinux8 min
You already have logs and metrics for your services. When does it actually become worth investing in distributed tracing, and what problem does it solve that the other two don't?
IntermediateOpentelemetry7 min
A Python script that processes a large file works fine on your laptop but gets OOM-killed when run in a container with a memory limit. What's likely wrong, and how do you fix it?
IntermediatePythonDocker8 min
You inherit a legacy CI/CD pipeline with zero documentation, and the person who built it left the company months ago. How do you approach understanding it and safely making your first change?
IntermediateCI/CD8 min
How would you go about setting an SLO and error budget for a service that's never had one, and what should actually happen once that error budget runs out?
IntermediateSRE9 min
Your team has copy-pasted the same VPC Terraform configuration into six different repositories. Design a module structure and versioning strategy to fix that.
IntermediateTerraform10 min
You get paged with just "the app is slow" and no other context. Walk through your actual troubleshooting methodology before you touch anything.
IntermediateObservability8 min
A CI config field intended as the string "no" silently breaks everything downstream. Why does this happen with YAML specifically, and how do you avoid this whole class of bug?
IntermediateYAML6 min