Intermediate DevOps Interview Questions
322 questions
What preventive controls would make an S3 public-write exposure incident less damaging in the future — bucket policies, Object Lock, or something else?
IntermediateAWSS36 min
Why might an organization choose not to enable account-level S3 Block Public Access by default, and what legitimate use case would that block?
IntermediateAWSS36 min
Should a new AKS cluster use native Kubernetes RBAC or Azure RBAC for Kubernetes Authorization to control kubectl-level access, and what does the Azure option actually change?
IntermediateAzureKubernetesAKS6 min
You're standing up a new AKS cluster and need to choose a network plugin: Azure CNI or kubenet. What's the actual trade-off, and why can this decision be hard to reverse later?
IntermediateAzureKubernetesAKS7 min
A new LoadBalancer-type Service in AKS has been stuck in 'Pending' with no external IP for twenty minutes. How do you actually diagnose this in Azure specifically?
IntermediateAzureKubernetesAKS6 min
During a live incident, how would you distinguish a genuinely slow autoscaler scale-up from one that's actually stuck and won't complete on its own?
IntermediateAzureKubernetesAKS7 min
A just-deployed App Service release is causing production errors and needs an immediate rollback. Is swapping back to the previous slot genuinely faster than redeploying the old package?
IntermediateAzureApp Service6 min
How would you decide between App Service, Azure Functions, and AKS for a new event-driven workload, beyond just 'Functions is for small things'?
IntermediateAzureApp ServiceAzure Functions7 min
An App Service deployment tested perfectly in staging, but broke immediately in production right after a slot swap. What's the most likely cause, and how do you investigate it?
IntermediateAzureApp Service6 min
An Azure Function on the Consumption plan is getting cold-start complaints, and someone suggests 'just move it to Premium.' When does that actually pay for itself, versus just adding cost?
IntermediateAzureAzure Functions6 min
Right after scaling an App Service plan from one instance to several, users started randomly getting logged out and losing cart contents. What changed, and how would you fix it properly?
IntermediateAzureApp Service6 min
A new Key Vault needs a permission model — should you use Azure RBAC or the older vault access policies, and why does Key Vault even have two separate systems for this?
IntermediateAzureKey Vault6 min
An Azure DevOps pipeline currently authenticates to Azure using a service principal with a stored client secret. Why would you migrate to a managed identity instead, and what are the actual limits of doing so?
IntermediateAzure7 min
You need to control outbound traffic from a VNet, including blocking access to specific malicious domains and inspecting traffic content. Are Network Security Groups sufficient, or do you need Azure Firewall?
IntermediateAzure7 min
An app needs to reach an Azure Storage account without traffic crossing the public internet. Should you use a Service Endpoint or a Private Endpoint, and what's the actual security difference?
IntermediateAzure7 min
A user was granted Contributor access to a single resource group, but they can see and modify resources across the entire subscription. How is that possible, and how do you audit for this?
IntermediateAzure6 min
How would you design a resource group and subscription structure for an organization with 15 teams, balancing isolation, cost tracking, and not making every team manage their own subscription?
IntermediateAzure8 min
A CI/CD pipeline that's deployed successfully for two years suddenly fails every run overnight, with no recent pipeline or code changes. How do you diagnose it, and prevent it happening silently again?
IntermediateAzure6 min
How would you design a pipeline template that fails fast with a clear error when a required tool is missing on the agent, instead of a raw "command not found"?
IntermediateAzure Pipelines6 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
Beyond tool availability, what are the actual trade-offs of self-hosted versus Microsoft-hosted Azure Pipelines agents — cost, control, security, and startup latency?
IntermediateAzure Pipelines7 min
How would you design a multi-stage Azure Pipelines YAML pipeline so production deployment requires manual approval, while dev and staging deploy automatically?
IntermediateAzure Pipelines6 min
How would you use the Cache task in Azure Pipelines to speed up dependency installation, and what determines whether your cache key is actually effective?
IntermediateAzure Pipelines5 min
Your team still has several Classic (UI-designer-based) release pipelines nobody wants to touch. What's the actual case for migrating them to YAML pipelines, and how would you approach it?
IntermediateAzure Pipelines6 min