Top 85 DevOps Interview Questions and Answers in 2023

Brief Introduction On DevOps

Dev Ops is a mechanism that was introduced in the fast-paced IT sector for better engineering practices, application availability, and reliability.

As the term suggests, ‘DevOps’ is a compound word united by ‘Development’ and ‘Operations’. Traditionally, development and operations were different areas where the prime role of an engineer was to write the code and the operations team was responsible to deploy the code into production, live site maintenance, application health monitoring.

In the modern engineering world, Dev Ops is a single entity where the engineer not only writes the code but also deploys and monitors it. It’s a mindset and method of working to make the overall process hassle-free.

Developing one product or service requires an immense amount of coordination between the development and operations teams. It is a prime responsibility of a Dev Ops expert or manager to maintain a sync between both teams so that the product will be deployed and delivered smoothly to the end-user.

A Dev Ops expert has to be a jack-of-all-trades. If you belong to the IT industry and have an interest to work in software development, you must know DevOps processes.

How To Become a DevOps Expert?

If you belong to the IT industry where your work is related to software/application development and deployment, you must have in-depth knowledge of the DevOps Management System. Traditionally, developers used to learn about it while working on it and getting hands-on experience and knowledge of DevOps working systems but now it has been recognized as a mandatory qualification to survive in the IT industry.

If you possess a good knowledge of DevOps lifecycle with a certification or degree, your chances of getting hired are increased manifold times.

Online certification courses and training programs are quite helpful to equip you with the necessary knowledge on DevOps required to work effectively in the industry.

DevOps Certification Training Course by Henry Harvin is such an online platform that can help you to learn various aspects of DevOps from planning to deployment of an application, multiple tools used in DevOps, learning on DevOps working platforms, creating CI/CD pipelines, and many more. Beginners and IT professionals can attend such online courses online for knowledge and hands-on experience by working on various case studies, practical sessions, and projects.

Now, let’s go through the following top DevOps interview questions and answers. They will be really helpful if you are preparing to crack a “DevOps Expert” interview. So, get ready to increase your knowledge bank with these relevant questions.

Top 85 DevOps Interview Questions

 1. What is your understanding of DevOps?

The answer here should be precise, encircling its significance in today’s IT industry. Tell about the entire application lifecycle and how DevOps plays a key role in coordinating and collaborating functions of various isolated teams like IT operations, development, quality assurance, security, and system administrators to produce more effective and reliable products. Discussing DevOps culture, organizations can achieve their business goals quickly by responding to the customer’s needs in a better way.

  2. What are the parts of the DevOps application lifecycle?

 An application lifecycle consists of six phases which and each phase relies on another. DevOps influences this whole cycle as these phases are not role-specific. Each role has to contribute to some extent in each phase. They are: –

• Planning
• Development
• Testing
• Delivery
• Release
• Monitoring

 3. Why do we need a DevOps expert in an organization?

DevOps experts quickly detect and fix bugs in the processes. They are responsible for coordination and communication between teams so that the product can be delivered to the client smoothly.

 4. What are the principles behind DevOps?

Principles of DevOps are: –

1. Steady Deployment of code or application

2. Infrastructure as code

3. Automation to reduce human assistance

4. Monitoring the entire development process

5. Security in each phase of the DevOps cycle for proper deployment

5. How are DevOps and Agile different from one another?

DevOps is a work culture that focuses on customer satisfaction by bringing together the actions of the development and operations team together resulting in steady development, continuous testing, seamless integration, effective deployment, and maintenance of the product.

Agile methodology is a constant iteration of the process of application development and its testing with a focus on customer feedback. It works on the principle of dividing the task into small increments with a steady process of scanning and prioritizing, which makes the team adaptable and flexible to changes.

The other differences are:

1. Address Gaps – Agile focuses to fill in the gaps between customer and developer. DevOps, on the other hand, focuses on filling in the gaps between developers and the operations team to deliver the product smoothly to the end-user.
2. Size of team – Agile Methodology works well in small teams but DevOps perform better in big teams.
3. Communication – In Agile, the communication is simple and easy but in DevOps, the communication is a bit complex because of the presence of two teams.
4. Documentation – Agile gives preference to work than keeping documentation. In DevOps, documentation is of utmost importance. It’s a priority to mention everything by maintaining automated documents as the software will be deployed by the operations team.

 6. What are the technical benefits of DevOps?

        Technical Benefits of DevOps are –

1.     Faster software release
2.     Quick bugs detection and fixing
3.     Agile environment

7. What are the business benefits of DevOps?

Benefits to business are –

1.     Faster resolutions to issues
2.     Steady environment for application
3.     Frequent feature updates

8. What are the different stages of a DevOps process?

    The step-by-step phases of a DevOps process are –

• Planning – In this step, the development team plans the structure of the application to be deployed. Discussion about the type of product to be built, required resources, and timeline are done to get a brief idea.
• Coding – Once planning happens, the next step for a developer is to write the code for the desired application.
• Building – Coding is done in multiple parts by various developers. Once it is done, a developer is required to build the application by proper integration of all the codes together.
• Testing – The application needs to be properly tested many times before moving further. In testing, loopholes are found out and fixed to improve the product’s quality.
• Integration – After testing all the codes, they are merged into one.
• Deployment – This is the most critical phase, where the development and operations teams set a time to make the application go LIVE on cloud servers and
• Monitor – Once the application is deployed, it is continuously monitored for its performance. The necessary change is made according to the end-user requirements.

  9. What are the different DevOps tools?

        The famous and commonly used DevOps tools are: –

• Bugzilla
•   GIT
•   VSTS
•   Jenkins
•    Docker
•    Ansible

10. What are different version control (Source Code Management) tools?

Various tools for Version Control are:-

• Git
• VSTS
• SVN
• Perforce

11. Can you explain the difference between Git fetch and Git pull?

Git Fetch: – In the Git fetch process, code is downloaded from the remote repository to the local system but it didn’t integrate those changes with the current branch.

Git Pull: – In the Git pull process, code is downloaded as well as integrated from the remote repository into the local system.

12. What are the different Bug management control tools?

Different bug management control tools are:-

•     Bugzilla
•     JIRA
•     VSTS

13. What are the main elements of DevOps?

The key elements of DevOps are –

•       Steady Integration
•       Regular testing
•       Effective and continuous deployment
•       Monitoring

14. What Scripting Tools are commonly used in DevOps?

The most common Scripting Tools used in DevOps are Python and Ruby.

15. What are some cloud platforms for DevOps Implementation?

Some cloud platforms for DevOps are –

1.     Microsoft Azure
2.     Google Cloud Service
3.     Amazon Web Service (AWS)

 16. What are the important KPIs of DevOps?

There are 3 main KPIs of DevOps:

1.     Deployment frequency – Number of times delivery takes place
2.     Rate of failed deployments – Percentage of failure that happens in delivery.
3.     Average time of failure recovery – Mean time taken to recover from a failed deployment.

  17. What is the meaning of the term “DevOps Pipeline”?

A DevOps pipeline is a set of programmed processes that enables DevOps experts and developers to efficiently and effectively plan, build, test, integrate and deploy their codes to deliver the application to the end-user.

18. What do you understand about the process of building in DevOps?

The building is a phase in the DevOps lifecycle, which is the integration of multiple codes developed by various developers. The DevOps Expert brings together all the coding and builds it in one application to make it work as a single unit. In the Building phase, the source code is tested, compiled, integrated, and deployed.

19. Why do we need “Infrastructure as Code”?

Infrastructure as Code (Isaac) refers to the flexibility of IT infrastructure by making sure that it is programmable and is adaptable to any other code. It is an idea of making IT infrastructure more reliable, customizable and agile. Isaac helps different teams to make quick and easy changes to the application while maintaining up-to-date documentation.

20. What does Continuous Integration (CI) mean to you?

Continuous Integration is a process in software engineering where various developers merge their code changes in a single repository several times a day. It offers a strong ecosystem by speeding up the project release, cloud compatibility, trouble-free deployment, integration option with other tools, and safety for the project data.

 21. What is your understanding of Continuous Delivery (CD)?

CD is a process in software engineering that divides the service releases into small sets thereby performing continuous tests on all code, which results in faster delivery. It is an automated practice that ensures that the software is always ready to be deployed in the production environment. There is no waiting time for deployment in CD.

22. What are the advantages of Continuous Delivery?

By deploying Continuous Delivery, the benefits are: –

1.     Undetectable Zero downtime deployment
2.     Quick updates to the software
3.     Early bug detection and fixing
4.     Value product to the end-user

 23. Can you share some DevOps misconceptions?

Following are some misconceptions of DevOps –

1.   DevOps is a specific role – No, it is present in both the development and operations department working towards collaboration, improvement, delivery, and maintenance of the product.
2.     DevOps is a single process – No, DevOps is customizable to every team, big or small, enabling steady growth of processes, people, methods, and tools.

 24. What is pair programming in DevOps?

Pair programming is when the two developers work on the same system and same algorithm. In this, one developer can be the driver and the other one can be the observer who regularly monitors the project to identify the problems.

25. What is DevOps Automation?

Automation is a programming technology to reduce human inputs. Automated DevOps practices begin from the code generation, integration, deployment in the production environment to monitoring the application. DevOps automation increases speed, accuracy, reliability, and number of deployments as well.

26. How Infrastructure Code is carried out in AWS?

In AWS the Infrastructure code will be developed in easy JSON format, which will be arranged in different files called templates which further will be deployed on AWS DevOps as stacks. After this, the cloud formation service will perform various operations of creating, deleting, and updating code.

27. What do you know about GIT Bisect?

GIT Bisect is a tool in DevOps that enables the DevOps Expert to search the commit which launched a bug in code by using binary search.

28. Can you mention some Network Monitoring Tools?

Some of the Network Monitoring tools are –

•       Splunk
•       Icinga 2
•       Nagios
•       Wireshark
•       Open NMS

29. What is PTR in DNS?

PTR stands for Pointer Record which is used to reverse DNS lookup in DevOps.

30. What is the role of Scrum in DevOps?

Scrum is a practice that bisects an application in small chunks in the product development stage. There are three roles in Scrum which are team, product owner, and Scrum master.

31. What is the role of Scrum Master?

Scrum Master’s (SM) prime responsibility is to ensure the scrum process is followed by the team. SM continually looks out for how the team can improve, resolve impediments and other blocking issues.

32. What is the ideal duration of a Sprint?

The ideal duration for a Sprint should be 2 weeks. For some instances, it can be for 3 weeks.

33. What is the role of the Product owner?

The Product Owner (PO) is primarily responsible for bringing the work to the team. PO will explain to the team about the feature like what is the feature and why are we building it and how this will help the business. He keeps the backlog up-to-date and in priority order.

34. What should be the ideal team size in the scrum process?

The ideal size for a sprint team can be between 4-7 members.

35. What should be the time duration for a daily stand-up meeting?

An ideal time for a daily stand-up meeting is 15 min, where every team member will explain what they have done yesterday, what they are going to do today, and any blocking issue they are facing.

36. What is the Vagrant tool?

Vagrant is a DevOps tool that generates and manages an automated environment for testing and developing applications.

37. What are DevOps key operations with application development?

The main operations of DevOps with application development are –

• Building of code
•  Code coverage
•   Code testing
•   Integration and packaging
•   Deployment

38. What are the DevOps key operations with applications infrastructure?

The main operations of DevOps with application infrastructure are –

•   Provision
•   Configure
•   Orchestration
•   Deployment

39. What are the must-haves before implementing DevOps?

Below are the important prerequisites before implantation of DevOps –

1. There should be proper communication among all the team members.
2. There should be at least one version of control software present.
3. Automated testing should be there to boost the processes.
4. Automated deployment should be enabled for faster delivery

40. What do you know about the Jenkins tool of DevOps?

Jenkins is a software program that enables continuous integration (CI) by monitoring the execution of iterated tasks on the server.

41. Can you explain Docker?

Docker is an open platform that helps millions of developers to develop, build, share, run and deploy any application at any place. It is an open-source containerization platform that can package the code and applications in deployable standardized units called containers. The code is packed in units and can be shipped anywhere using a laptop or on the cloud for use in any environment.

42. What do you mean by repository?

A repository is a collection of the source code. It maintains the history/version of the code. DevOps experts always refer to the repository to troubleshoot any production issue.

43. What are the different ways to deploy an application on Microsoft Azure?

•       Visual Studio Code (C#, Java, etc.)
•       Command-line like PowerShell
•       ARM template

44. How to download any repository from GitHub to your system?

To download code from a remote repository, top the local system, we have to use the git clone command.

45. What is the git commit command?

Git commit command is used to commit the changes from the local system to the remote branch.

46. How is DevOps different from SRE?

DevOps Experts focus on solving the Production development pipeline problems.

Site Reliability Engineers focus on solving operational/scale/reliability problems.

47. What is Feature-Based Deployment?

Feature-Based Development (FBD) is a way to do feature-based development. In this approach, developers define the feature, work on it, test it, and verify the feature to compose and assemble it into a product.

48. What are the different types of HTTP requests?

The types of HTTP requests are: –

•  GET
•  PUT
•  POST
•  PATCH
•  DELETE

49. What is a Chef?

Chef is a powerful automation platform. In this tool, DevOps experts write scripts that are used to automate the deployment processes (Transforms infrastructure into code).

50. How to measure DevOps success?

Ways to measure DevOps success are:-

• Less Deployment Time: – The time is taken for any task to deploy into the production environment.
• Bugs: – DevOps success can be measured by the number of bugs reported by the customer. Less number of bugs depicts the better DevOps process.
• Resolution Time: – The average time is taken to recover in case of a failure in the production environment.

51. How to check the health of the application in Azure?

Microsoft Azure provides application health insight details. You can check on the Azure portal. It will show the complete details like the number of requests, the number of errors with details, Input data, Output data, and a lot more.

52. How will you improve the performance of an application?

As DevOps experts, we can check the health of the application. In case there is a load on the application because of several requests received, we can scale the application as per the load.

53. What is Resilience testing?

Resilience Testing is a software process in which DevOps tests the application for uncontrolled and chaotic scenarios. This process will ensure that the data won’t be lost after encountering any failure.

54. What is Automation testing?

In Automation testing, DevOps experts write the scripts to replace the manual testing by automating it. This process can be run multiple times without manual intervention and helps the developer to deliver the features bug-free. 

55. Can you name the types of testing?

Following are the common types of testing used in the software engineering process: –

•   Unit Testing
•   Integration Testing
•   Regression Testing
•   Smoke Testing
•   System Testing
•   Stress Testing
•   Performance Testing

56. Difference between Unit and System Testing?

Unit Testing: – It involves the smallest unit of the software. In this programmer tests every method by giving sample inputs and expected results. The output of the method must match the expected result.

System Testing: – It involves the testing of the application functionality on different configurations like different operating systems, mobile, tablet, desktop, etc.  

57. What is Regression Testing?

In Regression Testing, the programmer tests the complete application again whenever a new feature is added to the program.

58. What is Smoke Testing?

Smoke Testing is the initial phase of the testing to make sure the software is in a stable state for further testing.

59. What is Alpha Testing?

Alpha Testing is the acceptance testing which is usually done by the Product Owner/QA team before releasing to the end customer. This is usually done internally in the organization.

60. What is Beta Testing?

Beta testing is done by end business users in a real-time environment. In this phase, the application is released only for limited users. 

61. What is Performance Testing?

Performance testing is done to measure the real-time performance of the application. This testing is usually done by injecting the maximum load on the application to check the performance of the application. This is also called Load testing.

62. What is the role of a DevOps Engineer?

The role of a DevOps Engineer is to understand the Software Development Lifecycle and automation tools for developing CI/CD pipelines. DevOps engineers make sure the production environment is always in a healthy state. 

63. What is the best way to learn DevOps?

There are many ways to learn DevOps like Online tutorials, Online courses from Henry Harvin, books, etc.

64. What is Azure DevOps?

Azure DevOps formerly known as Microsoft visual studio team services (VSTS) is a set of collaborative development tools built for the cloud. It is a platform that is made up of a few different products, such as:

• Test Plans
• Scrum Dashboards
• Code Repos
• Pipelines
• Artifact

65. How can we automate the application of health monitoring?

As a DevOps engineer, we can add Alerts on the pipeline/system which will notify in case of any failure.

66. What is your understanding of Load Balancing and how it is beneficial?

When there is high traffic on the group of backend servers, the function of a load balancer is to efficiently distribute this traffic load across all servers. It acts as a “traffic Police” which routes all the traffic of multiple client requests across all servers effectively thereby increasing the speed and capacity of each server. It ensures that no server is overloaded and their performance is up-to-mark.  Its benefits are: –

• Redundancy of load on servers
• Minimize downtime
• Scalable performance
• Flexibility in routing traffic
• Increased efficiency of servers.

67. What is the need for API Gateway?

Just like we need a gate for our house, similarly to protect our network from malware API gateway also acts as a “gate” between two networks with different protocols. All data comes in or out of the network through this API gateway which can be a router or a firewall. It is a management device that provides a connection client and various backend services.

68. What is a Contingency Plan?

For the effective development and deployment of software, DevOps experts are bound to make a contingency plan in case of any type of failure or emergency. A step-by-step guide is designed to identify all the potential, known, and unknown risks during the application lifecycle and also what steps should be taken to address them. A contingency plan includes all the necessary information to handle such risks.

69. What do you mean by a Fallout Plan?

A contingency plan is a primary risk response strategy, a fallout plan is secondary to it. It gets activated when contingency plans do not work out properly. When an unplanned event occurs, DevOps experts resolve fallout plans which were developed in case of contingency plans prove to be ineffective.

70. What is the role of Disaster Recovery (DR) in DevOps?

Disaster recovery is a documented plan which contains a set up designed procedures to encounter any threat or disaster posed towards an organization and its IT assets. DR broadly focuses on creating a plan to protect an organization’s software, hardware, networks, and data loss in case of any disaster incident.

71. What are the challenges in implementing DevOps?

Some of the common challenges in DevOps adoption are:

1.  Moving toward microservices from traditional infrastructure.
2.  Tools integration of various domains
3.  Making changes to well and pre-defined procedures into more efficient ones.
4.  Creating separate tools set for both development and operations teams.
5.  Adoption and working on new tools
6.  Resistance to change from employees

72. What are the measurement criteria for the return on investment (ROI) of DevOps?

DevOps ROI is based on the valuation of the quality of work delivered, the amount of time optimized, and the benchmarks achieved by the performance delivered. The State of DevOps 2019 report clearly states that the performance of deployment with DevOps is 208 times more than non-DevOps performance. Organizations that work with DevOps show almost 60% growth in revenue.

73. What do you know about the DevOps toolchain?

Certain processes are responsible for effective DevOps performance. They are Code, Build, Testing, Packaging, Configure, and monitoring along with Continuous Integration (CI) and Infrastructure as Code. All of them together are called a “DevOps Toolchain”.

74. How is DevOps Transformation beneficial for an organization?

The core benefits of DevOps Transformation for an organization are: –

•   Faster Deployment
•   Cost-saving
•   Fewer outages
•   Less manual interventions.

75. What are the benefits of CI?

Following is the list of major benefits of CI: –

•   Less number of bugs
•   Early detection and fixing of bugs
•   Less manual interventions
•   Faster delivery

76. What are the benefits of Continuous Delivery (CD)?

Following is the list of major benefits of CD: –

• Faster product delivery
• Frequent updates
• Automatic DevOps tools and technologies.

77. What is DevSecOps?

 DevSecOps aims to bring the security of the application. It ensures security in all stages of the software development lifecycle.

78. How DevOps’s role is different in IT vs Internet of Things (IoT)?

In IT DevOps plays the role to secure the software whereas in IoT DevOps has to take care of Hardware devices like sensors as well.

79. What’s the role of a Release Manager?

Release Manager (RM) manages the product delivery. RM is responsible for the product from development to deployment into production. RM creates/manages the scripts/automation for the product to be deployed into production.

80. What’s the role of an Automation Architect?

Automation Architect (AA) also known as Integration Specialist. AA’s role is to analyze the designs and improve the process and strategies to ensure continuous, smooth, and automated deployments.

81. Who is Quality Assurance (QA)?

QA engineers are the ones who make sure the product/application is delivered with the utmost quality. They make sure all the processes are followed during the Software Lifecycle Development.

82. Who are Experience Assurance Professionals (XAs)?

In Modern engineering, XAs is a new role in the IT industry. XA professional’s role is to make sure the quality product/application is delivered to the end-users. Along with quality assurance, they test the features and functionalities keeping in mind the end-user experience.

83. What’s the role of a Security Engineer?

A security engineer is a very critical and vital role for any organization. They work along with the developers during the SDLS to provide deep-dived recommendations on security. They are the sole ones responsible for any security-related threats. They make sure of the privacy and data of the end-users.

84. Why are Automation skills important for DevOps?

Automation skills are a must for any DevOps Engineer in modern engineering. DevOps experts create a database,  services,  patching on VMs, etc. Manual operation for all these tasks takes lots of time. DevOps engineers create scripts and run those using automation on all the VM’s to save manual efforts.

85. Why are Soft skills important for DevOps?

A DevOps Engineer has to collaborate with developers, testers, stakeholders, customers, and others regularly. Hence DevOps engineers must be good in coordination/collaboration skills for a smooth production run.

This concludes the list of the Top 85 DevOps Interview Questions and Answers. At the beginning of this article, we understood all about the concept of DevOps, its meaning, importance, necessity, processes, and the ways to implement it in the IT industry.

The above list is not only going to increase your chances of securing a decent DevOps job but also going to build a strong understanding of this concept and increase your current level.

But, going through this list of DevOps questions and answers is not just enough. We strongly recommend you to go through a DevOps training program from a renowned institution like Henry Harvin to get a certification in the field of DevOps and master its skills.