Practical Interview Questions — All Categories
131 questions across 30 categories
Hands-on, command-driven questions testing whether you can actually operate these tools, not just discuss them.
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 design a zero-downtime, safely-rollback-able release process for an App Service using deployment slots?
AdvancedAzureApp Service8 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
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
How would you keep a fleet of self-hosted Azure Pipelines agents consistent over time as tool requirements evolve, instead of them slowly drifting apart?
AdvancedAzure Pipelines7 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
You have near-identical build logic copy-pasted across 15 Azure Pipelines YAML files. How would you use templates to share it, and what are the different template types actually for?
IntermediateAzure Pipelines7 min
A new project is choosing between Blob Storage's Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive tiers for its data. How would you actually decide, and what's the risk of getting it wrong?
BeginnerAzureBlob Storage6 min
A blob was accidentally overwritten with bad data, not deleted. Both soft delete and versioning are enabled on the account. Why doesn't 'undelete' bring back the good version, and what actually will?
IntermediateAzureBlob Storage6 min
A provisioning script failed halfway through, and re-running it from the top caused errors because some resources already existed. How do you make it safely re-runnable?
IntermediateBash6 min
What does 'set -euo pipefail' actually do at the start of a Bash script, and why is it considered close to mandatory for production scripts?
IntermediateBash7 min
A deployment script creates a temporary lock file at the start, but if the script fails partway through, the lock file is left behind and blocks every future run. How would you fix this?
IntermediateBash6 min
A script needs cloud CLI credentials (like AWS/Azure/gcloud auth) that are normally provided by an interactive session's environment. How do you handle that for a cron-scheduled script?
IntermediateBashAWS7 min
How would you design the metrics and thresholds that gate automatic canary promotion versus automatic rollback?
AdvancedKubernetes8 min
An audit finds most of your EC2 instances are running at under 15% average CPU utilization. How would you approach rightsizing them without risking a performance incident?
IntermediateAWS6 min
What would you do differently for a large-table backfill migration if the table were actively receiving high write throughput during the migration window?
ExpertPostgresql8 min
How would you monitor a batched backfill in production to know it's progressing safely, not falling behind, and not causing replication lag?
AdvancedPostgresql7 min
How do you safely add a NOT NULL column to a large production table without locking it for the duration of a slow backfill?
AdvancedPostgresql9 min
Your database backups have been running successfully every night for two years, but nobody has ever actually restored one. Why is that a real risk, and how would you fix it?
IntermediateDatabases6 min
How would you measure whether engineers are actually acting on security scan findings, versus just dismissing them to unblock their PR?
IntermediateDevSecOps6 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 would you further reduce a Docker image's size if the runtime still needs native binary dependencies, beyond what a multi-stage build alone achieves?
AdvancedDocker7 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