Intermediate DevOps Interview Questions
322 questions
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 container scanner reports 200+ vulnerabilities in a base image you didn't choose and can't easily replace. How do you triage this into something actionable?
IntermediateDevSecOpsDocker7 min
What's the actual trade-off between pinning exact dependency versions and allowing floating version ranges, from a supply-chain security perspective?
IntermediateDevSecOps6 min
What's the tradeoff between alpine and slim/distroless base images for a Node.js service?
IntermediateDockerNodejs6 min
How does Docker layer caching behave differently on CI runners without a persistent Docker daemon between builds, and how would you mitigate the resulting slowdown?
IntermediateDocker6 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
How does Docker's DNS-based service discovery actually work under the hood for containers on a user-defined network?
IntermediateDocker6 min
How would container-to-container networking troubleshooting change once these containers move to Kubernetes, where networking works differently from plain Docker?
IntermediateDockerKubernetes7 min
A Docker host's disk usage keeps growing even though containers are regularly removed — how do anonymous volumes cause this, and how do you clean them up?
IntermediateDocker6 min
How do you actually back up and restore a Docker named volume, given that the data lives inside Docker-managed storage you can't directly browse from the host?
IntermediateDocker6 min
A container was recreated to deploy a new image version, and all its data disappeared — what went wrong with the volume configuration?
IntermediateDocker6 min
Two containers need to share the same data — one writes, another reads. How would you design this safely with Docker volumes?
IntermediateDocker6 min
When would you use a tmpfs mount instead of a regular volume, and why does it matter for handling sensitive data like decrypted secrets?
IntermediateDocker6 min
What's actually different between Cloud Functions Gen 1 and Gen 2, beyond just a version number?
IntermediateGCPCloud Functions6 min
A Cloud Function's p99 latency is dominated by cold starts under bursty traffic — how would you mitigate this, and what's the actual cost trade-off?
IntermediateGCPCloud Functions7 min
A Pub/Sub-triggered Cloud Function occasionally processes the same message twice — is this a bug, and how do you actually fix it?
IntermediateGCPCloud FunctionsPub/Sub7 min
A Cloud Function has been silently failing for days with no alert firing — what's typically missing in the observability setup, and how do you fix it?
IntermediateGCPCloud Functions6 min
How would you decide between Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, and GKE for a new workload, beyond just 'serverless is simpler'?
IntermediateGCPCloud FunctionsCloud Run7 min
A Cloud Function works perfectly with the Functions Framework locally but fails immediately in production — how do you systematically narrow down why?
IntermediateGCPCloud Functions7 min
How would you grant a contractor temporary access to a GCP project that automatically expires, without manually revoking it later?
IntermediateGCP6 min
A service account in Project A needs to read from a Cloud Storage bucket in Project B — how does IAM actually handle this cross-project access?
IntermediateGCP6 min
How would you design least-privilege IAM for a Cloud Function that reads from Pub/Sub and writes to a specific Cloud Storage bucket?
IntermediateGCP6 min
A project has correct IAM roles, but you still need to guarantee no VM ever gets a public IP — is that an IAM problem, or something else?
IntermediateGCP6 min
A GKE workload needs to call a GCP API — should it use Workload Identity or a mounted service account key file, and why?
IntermediateGCPGKE7 min