DevOps Engineer Interview Questions
372 questions across 38 categories
The bulk of a working DevOps engineer's day-to-day: hands-on tooling, common troubleshooting, and the practical judgment calls that come up once you're actually operating systems.
Two containers on the same Docker host can't talk to each other over the network, even though both are running. How would you debug the connection?
BeginnerDocker8 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
What's the actual difference between a Docker named volume and a bind mount, and when does choosing wrong cause a real problem?
BeginnerDocker6 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
Why is granting a GCP Editor or Owner basic role considered dangerous, and how do predefined and custom roles fix that?
BeginnerGCP6 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
A browser-based app can list bucket contents but fails to upload directly to Cloud Storage with a CORS error — how do you fix the bucket's CORS configuration?
IntermediateGCPCloud Storage6 min
How would you choose between a dual-region and a multi-region Cloud Storage bucket for a workload needing regional resilience?
IntermediateGCPCloud Storage6 min
How would you design Cloud Storage lifecycle rules to automatically reduce cost as objects age, without risking premature deletion of data still in use?
IntermediateGCPCloud Storage7 min
A large file upload to Cloud Storage keeps failing partway through on an unreliable network — what does a resumable upload actually solve here?
BeginnerGCPCloud Storage6 min