Real DevOps and Cloud Interview Questions: Prepare for DevOps, SRE, Cloud & Data Engineering Related Roles #1

Below is a curated list of real candidate experiences, shared directly via LinkedIn. A big thank you to everyone who contributed their real DevOps interview experience and questions and provided valuable insights. LinkedIn post links are included for reference. This page is intended to support the community—especially those preparing for DevOps/SRE/Cloud &Data Engineering related interviews or considering a job change.

List of all of our interview experience and questions can be FOUND HERE

Real DevOps interview experience and questions

Experience #1: Posted on 24 June, 2025 (GlobalLogic)

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7343574426329702400

One of my students recently appeared for Round 1 of the DevOps Engineer interview at GlobalLogic.
This round focused on practical skills, cloud-native tooling, automation strategies, and incident troubleshooting in an Azure-centric environment.
Here’s a new and relevant question set from the interview:

🚀 Azure DevOps & CI/CD Workflows
✅ How do you dynamically pass secrets and tokens across pipeline stages securely in Azure DevOps?
✅ What are environment checks and how do they help in managing gated deployments?
✅ How would you handle rollback in a multi-stage YAML pipeline if stage 3 fails but stage 1 & 2 succeeded?
✅ How do you implement reusability across pipelines for 15+ microservices?

🚀 Kubernetes & Container Platform
✅ How do you manage Kubernetes secrets securely without exposing them in Git or CI logs?
✅ A new deployment shows no logs and isn’t reachable — walk me through your end-to-end debug strategy.
✅ What is the difference between Init containers and sidecars — and where have you used both in real projects?
✅ How do you perform rolling updates with zero downtime in AKS?

🚀 Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / Bicep)
✅ How do you structure Terraform for large teams managing different environments (dev/stage/prod)?
✅ What’s the role of lifecycle blocks in Terraform and how do you use them for resource protection?
✅ How would you import existing Azure resources into Terraform without overriding them?
✅ How do you securely manage Terraform backend and remote state?

🚀 GitOps & Deployment Automation
✅ How does ArgoCD detect drift and what are your sync policies for production?
✅ What happens if someone bypasses Git and makes a manual change on the cluster?
✅ How do you separate application-level values from environment-specific ones in GitOps deployments?
✅ Explain the concept of Progressive Delivery and how you’ve implemented it.

🚀 Monitoring & Incident Handling
✅ How would you detect memory leaks in a Node.js container running in production?
✅ What tools would you use for distributed tracing in microservices deployed on AKS?
✅ Describe your alerting strategy to reduce noise while ensuring critical incidents are not missed.
✅ What’s your process for handling a Sev-1 outage caused by a failed DNS resolution in the cluster?

Experience #2: Posted on 24 June,2025

Linkedin Post: rb.gy/k8h2vs

Here are some questions which was asked during my interview phase.

AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, CloudFront):
What is EC2? How does it differ from traditional servers?
What is an S3 bucket? How is it used in DevOps pipelines?
Explain IAM roles and how they are used with EC2 and Lambda.
What is Lambda? How is it different from EC2?
Explain the lifecycle of an EC2 instance and how to automate it using user data.
How does versioning work in S3 and why is it important for DevOps?
What is CloudFront and how does it improve performance in deployment?
How would you build a serverless web app using Lambda, S3, and CloudFront?
How do you automate S3 backup and EC2 snapshot policies in a DevOps pipeline?
Design a CI/CD pipeline to deploy code to Lambda with version control and rollback.

Terraform:
Why Terraform is more popular tool in IAC? How is it different from CloudFormation and ARM Templates?
What are providers and resources in Terraform?
Explain the purpose of terraform init, plan, apply, and destroy.
What are Terraform state files? Why should they be stored securely?
How do you use variables and outputs in a Terraform project?
Explain the concept of workspaces in Terraform.
How do you manage multiple environments (dev, staging, prod) in Terraform?
Write a basic Terraform configuration to deploy an EC2 instance and differnec between tfvars and .tf ?
How do you implement remote state locking with Terraform?
Design a Terraform module for creating VPC, subnets, and EC2 instances with reusability.

Azure DevOps:
What is Azure DevOps and what services does it include?
Explain the difference between Azure Repos, Pipelines, Artifacts, and Boards.
What are build and release pipelines?
How do you create a YAML pipeline in Azure DevOps?
What is the difference between Classic pipeline and YAML pipeline?
How do you implement approvals and gates in Azure release pipelines?
How do you integrate Azure DevOps with GitHub for automated builds?
What is the role of service connections in Azure DevOps?
How would you manage secrets in Azure DevOps pipelines?
Scenario: Design an end-to-end Azure DevOps pipeline for deploying an AKS-hosted application.

CI/CD Concepts:
What is CI/CD? Why is it important in DevOps?
What tools are commonly used for CI/CD?
Explain the stages in a typical CI/CD pipeline.
What is the difference between continuous integration, delivery, and deployment?
How do you manage rollbacks in CI/CD pipelines?
How do you automate tests in a CI pipeline?
What is blue-green deployment? How is it implemented?
How do you implement canary deployment in CI/CD?
What is pipeline as code and why is it beneficial?
Scenario: Design a CI/CD strategy for a multi-service application deployed in Kubernetes.

K8s Basics :
Elaborate k8s architecture and its components.

Experience #3 : Posted on 26 June,2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7343950304729583616

The moment you mention 𝗞𝘂𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘁𝗲𝘀 in a Devops interview, expect a deep dive

Here are 17 Kubernetes questions I was asked that dive into architecture, troubleshooting, and real-world decision-making:

1. Your pod keeps getting stuck in CrashLoopBackOff, but logs show no errors. How would you approach debugging and resolution?

2. You have a StatefulSet deployed with persistent volumes, and one of the pods is not recreating properly after deletion. What could be the reasons, and how do you fix it without data loss?

3. Your cluster autoscaler is not scaling up even though pods are in Pending state. What would you investigate?

4. A network policy is blocking traffic between services in different namespaces. How would you design and debug the policy to allow only specific communication paths?

5. One of your microservices has to connect to an external database via a VPN inside the cluster. How would you architect this in Kubernetes with HA and security in mind?

6. You’re running a multi-tenant platform on a single EKS cluster. How do you isolate workloads and ensure security, quotas, and observability for each tenant?

7. You notice the kubelet is constantly restarting on a particular node. What steps would you take to isolate the issue and ensure node stability?

8. A critical pod in production gets evicted due to node pressure. How would you prevent this from happening again, and how do QoS classes play a role?

9. You need to deploy a service that requires TCP and UDP on the same port. How would you configure this in Kubernetes using Services and Ingress?

10. An application upgrade caused downtime even though you had rolling updates configured. What advanced strategies would you apply to ensure zero-downtime deployments next time?

11. Your service mesh sidecar (e.g., Istio Envoy) is consuming more resources than the app itself. How do you analyze and optimize this setup?

12. You need to create a Kubernetes operator to automate complex application lifecycle events. How do you design the CRD and controller loop logic?

13. Multiple nodes are showing high disk IO usage due to container logs. What Kubernetes features or practices can you apply to avoid this scenario?

14. Your Kubernetes cluster’s etcd performance is degrading. What are the root causes and how do you ensure etcd high availability and tuning?

15. You want to enforce that all images used in the cluster must come from a trusted internal registry. How do you implement this at the policy level?

16. You’re managing multi-region deployments using a single Kubernetes control plane. What architectural considerations must you address to avoid cross-region latency and single points of failure?

17. During peak traffic, your ingress controller fails to route requests efficiently. How would you diagnose and scale ingress resources effectively under heavy load?

Experience #4: Posted on 26 June, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7343852836444651521

10 Terraform Scenario Questions Every DevOps Engineer Should Know.🧑‍💻

1) What happens if your state file is accidentally deleted?
Answer: Terraform loses track of all managed infrastructure. On the next apply, it will attempt to recreate everything from scratch, potentially causing conflicts with existing resources.

2) What happens if multiple team members run terraform apply simultaneously?
Answer: State file locking fails, risking corrupted state and inconsistent infrastructure. One process succeeds while others error out, potentially leading to drift if not managed properly.

3) What happens if a resource fails halfway through a terraform apply?
Answer: Terraform leaves successfully created resources running but marks the state as tainted. Subsequent apply operations will attempt to recreate failed resources, but you’re left in partial state.

4) What happens when AWS API rate limits are hit during a large terraform apply?
Answer: Operations fail with throttling errors. Terraform retries a few times then fails the apply. Resources created before the limit was hit remain, creating partial deployments.

5) What happens if terraform plan shows no changes but infrastructure was modified outside Terraform?
Answer: Terraform won’t detect the drift until you run terraform refresh or terraform plan -refresh-only. This can lead to unexpected behavior when making future changes.

6) What happens if you delete a resource definition from your configuration?
Answer: On next apply, Terraform will destroy that resource in your infrastructure unless you use terraform state rm to remove it from state first or use lifecycle { prevent_destroy = true }.

7) What happens if a provider API changes between Terraform versions?
Answer: You may encounter compatibility issues and failed plans/applies. Resources might need to be rebuilt or configurations updated to match new API requirements.

8) What happens if you have circular dependencies in your Terraform modules?
Answer: Terraform will fail to initialize or plan with dependency cycle errors. You’ll need to refactor your module structure to break the circular references.

9) What happens if you exceed AWS service quotas during deployment?
Answer: Resources will fail to create with quota exceeded errors. Terraform marks them as failed, and you’ll need to request quota increases before retrying the apply

10) What happens if you lose access to the remote backend storing your state?
Answer: All Terraform operations fail until access is restored. Teams can’t collaborate, and changes can’t be applied safely. This effectively blocks all infrastructure changes.

Experience #5: Added on 28 June,2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7344709102687744000

Here are the Some DevOps Questions that have been asked in an interview.

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. ⁠How your day to day activities as a DevOps Engineer.
3. ⁠What are NAT gateway?
4. ⁠What are pre-requisites to upgrade K8s cluster?
5. ⁠What in PDB in K8s?
6. ⁠Write a shell script on factorial of a number.
7. ⁠Tell me about the VPC structure setup in your project.
8. ⁠How is the CI/CD pipeline is setup in your project? What are the security tools integrated?
9. ⁠How do you manage them?
10. ⁠Write a rough pipeline script for microservices architecture.
11. ⁠What is multi stage docker build?
12. ⁠What are manifest files?
13. ⁠What is Ansible Vault?
14. ⁠How do we make a K8s cluster highly available?
15. ⁠What monitoring tools are setup ? Have you set the alerts and tell me some common errors you faced related to pod management..
16. ⁠Write a terraform script for VPC architecture for production.
17. ⁠How many objects can a S3 bucket can store?
18. ⁠What are IAM roles and policies?
19. ⁠⁠What are artifacts?
20. ⁠What are SATS and DATS?
21. ⁠How do you find errors in the pipelines?
22. ⁠What are Ansible Roles?

Experience #6: Added on 26 June,2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7343940463831269379

🕯 Interview Questions for Cloud & DevOps Engineer Role

L1 & L2 level questions related to AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, Git.

💎 Level 1 –
1. cicd workflow, what kind of pipeline.
2. use of webhook
3. purpose of webhook
4. stages of pipeline…
5. shared libraries in jenkins?
6. how do we define shared libraries?
7. how are shared libraries written?
8. how do you define a pipeline and call it?
9. what kind of app you deploy on the pipeline?
10. basic structure, folder structure of helm?
11. what command are you using deployment in helm
12. in the Jenkins pipeline, the pipeline is running successfully but the build is not happening, what are the issues?
13. in kubernetes, what are the errors you are getting, why they come and how you resolve?
14. explain the crash loop back off,
15. image pull error?
16. command to go inside a pod?
17. how can you create the kubernetes class?
18. what are the steps to create the cluster?
19. what is the master node and other node?
20. code to create a cluster using terraform?
21. stages in docker images?
22. DB entry point, CMD
23. why do we use entrypoint, CMD
24. DB ec2, eks, ecs
25. command to connect ecs
26. which tool are you using for deployment?
27. which registry for storing the docker images?

💎 Level 2 –
1. Branching strategy?
2. your release branch will break, then how u will avoid this kind of issues, then how do you merge?
3. in production having some bugs, how will you resolve?
4. typical deployment flow?
5. cicd workflow?
6. how do we do a full quality check?
7. jenkins file, different stages…
8. shared libraries in jenkins file?
9. typical structure of shared libraries…
10. are you aware of security scanning tools?
11. how do you pass the environment variables on docker build command.
12. what services do you use for storing the images?
13. DB, how do you establish the connection?
14. how do you scan the images at the registry level?
15. any extension you are using for image scanning?
16. authentication of eks cluster?
17. storing the secrets?
18. how to create lambda function, how it’s taking the artifacts.
19. options on lambda to push the artifacts?
20. what is email signing and helm chart signing?
21. which tool for signing the helm chart?

Experience #7: Added on 28 June,2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7344508623164796928

🚀 Attended an interview for a Cloud DevOps Engineer role recently.
Sharing the questions I was asked — hope it helps others preparing too! 💻☁️💡

Experience #8: Posted on 25 June, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7343454137365200896

Interview Questions I Faced for Cloud DevOps Roles – Part 2

Hi All!

In my last post, I have shared some of the Networking, Linux, and AWS Cloud questions I encountered during interviews. In this post, I’ll cover some Docker and Kubernetes questions — which I faced most often since I usually introduced myself with these technologies.

🐳 Docker:

1. What is the difference between Virtual Machines and Containers?
2. Explain the Docker lifecycle.
3. Write some Docker commands. (I don’t remember the exact commands that were asked.)
4. Write a Dockerfile for one application. Explain each layer in it (any tech stack).
5. What is a docker-compose file? Explain what it does. Write one sample file if you can.
6. By default, which Docker network is present?
7. What is the purpose of a multi-stage Dockerfile? How does it reduce the image size?
8. Write the multi-stage Dockerfile for the same.
9. How does container-to-container communication happen? Explain it.
10. Mention some Docker network types and explain their real-world use cases.
11. What is the difference between CMD and ENTRYPOINT?
12. Where are Docker volumes stored?
13. What is the difference between COPY and ADD?
14. How many containers can we run in Docker exactly?
15. What happens to the data inside a container when you delete the running container?

Scenarios:

-> You’re running an app using docker-compose with low traffic. As traffic grows, how do you scale the application in AWS? What services will you choose — EKS, ECS or EC2? Why?

-> Application works via localhost but not over the web — how will you troubleshoot?

☸️ Kubernetes:

1. Why is Kubernetes considered over Docker? Mention the advantages of it.
2. Explain the architecture of Kubernetes. Mention each component’s role.
3. What are Services in Kubernetes? Explain.
4. What is a Namespace? What is its role?
5. What is Autoscaling and its types? When can we use vertical scaling?
6. What is the difference between StatefulSet and Deployment?
7. Difference between StatefulSet, DaemonSet, and ReplicaSet. Explain use cases of each with real-world examples.
8. Write a YAML file for a simple nginx pod.
9. Write an imperative command to create a deployment with image nginx and replica count of 3.
10. What does node affinity do? Mention its rules and what it does.

Experience #9: Posted on 24 June, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7343148413254840320

Yesterday I gave one 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐱 𝐀𝐝𝐦𝐢𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 here he’s cover which are include From Linux 💻
𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐔𝐗 💻
🔷 What is 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐔𝐗 and why we use 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐔𝐗.
🔷 What is 𝐂𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐥 & why we use ??
🔷 What is 𝐋𝐕𝐌 explain it. 💿
🔷 Difference between 𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐗 & 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐔𝐗. 🚀
🔷 Tell me 𝑻𝒐𝒑 10 commands. 🔢
🔷 How to create a 𝗨𝘀𝗲𝗿 & 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗽 in Linux.
🔷 How to delete a 𝗨𝘀𝗲𝗿 & 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗽 in linux.
🔷 How to set a 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 on a file. 🚦
🔷 What is 𝐒𝐞𝐝 command do. ⚙️
🔷 How to find out a 𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗶𝘇𝗲 of a file in a given directory ⭕
🔷 I want to give a execute 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 in file.sh. ⌛

Experience #10: Posted on 26 June, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7343835417600798721

🚀 Most Asked DevOps Interview Questions (2–5 Yrs Experience)

📌 Preparing for interviews or just brushing up? Here are some commonly asked DevOps questions based on my experience and peer discussions:

🔧 CI/CD & Jenkins
What is the difference between Freestyle and Declarative pipelines?
How do you implement CI/CD using Jenkins and GitLab?
How do you trigger a pipeline on code commit?
🐳 Docker
What is the difference between CMD and ENTRYPOINT?
How do you create a multistage Docker build?
Explain Docker networking modes.
☸️ Kubernetes
What is the difference between Deployment and StatefulSet?
How does a Service work internally?
What are Taints and Tolerations?
🛠️ Terraform
What is the purpose of backend in Terraform?
Difference between terraform apply and terraform plan?
How do you manage secrets securely?
☁️ AWS/Azure
How do you configure auto-scaling in EC2?
What’s the use of IAM roles vs policies?
How do you integrate ECR with Jenkins?
📊 Monitoring
How do you set up alerts in Grafana/Prometheus?
Difference between ELK and EFK stacks?

Experience #11: Posted on 24 June, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7343234248834760704

Just wrapped up a DevOps interview — sharing my experience & questions

I recently attended an interview for a DevOps Engineer role, and it was a solid mix of real-world scenarios, troubleshooting, and tool-specific questions. If you’re preparing for DevOps interviews, these might help:

• What kind of Grafana dashboards are typically used in a DevOps environment?
• How do you configure Grafana dashboards?
• What is Node Exporter?
• How do you trigger email alerts from Grafana?
• What kind of alert conditions do you usually configure?

• What’s your Ansible experience in real projects?
• How do you manage sensitive data like passwords in Ansible?
• How do you securely run playbooks that use secrets?

• What is PM2 and how do you use it in Node.js deployments?
• How do you kill a process using PM2?
• How do you check running nodes?
• How do you kill a process in Linux?
• How to get the process ID (PID)?
• How to check system performance in Linux?
• What does chmod 555 mean?
• How do you give full permissions to a file or folder?
• Difference between a soft link and a hard link?

• How do you open the firewall in Linux?
• How to check which ports are running or open?
• What does netstat -ntlp do and how to use it?

• What is a cron job?
• How do you clear cache in Linux?

• How did you deploy SSL in your project?
• How do you resolve a merge conflict in Git?
• How to switch to a new branch?

• Finally, they asked about which AWS services/tools I’ve used and how I applied them in my project.

Experience #12: Posted on 24 June, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7343174785180319747

🎯 Real Interview Questions from Kubernetes Production Deployments (2025 Edition)
I’ve been collecting real interview-style questions from actual production incidents we’ve tackled. These aren’t textbook — they’re the kind that test how well you run Kubernetes under pressure. Here’s what I’ve learned 👇

✅ Latest Versions
Kubernetes: v1.32
Velero: v1.16.0 (Helm Chart v2.32.4)

1. Q: How do you drain a Kubernetes node without downtime?
A: We cordon the node, validate PDBs, monitor stateful apps like Kafka, and use tools like Karpenter and the Descheduler to safely rebalance pods.
2. Q: What causes pod crashes only on new autoscaled nodes?
A: Mostly EBS volume attach delays. We fixed it using EBS CSI driver, warm-pool nodes, and pre-caching images via ECR.
3. Q: How do you securely manage secrets across environments?
A: We use External Secrets Operator with IRSA. Each namespace maps to a dedicated IAM role, secrets are pulled from AWS Secrets Manager or Vault, and audit logging is enabled.
4. Q: HPA is not scaling under load. Why?
A: Missing CPU requests, misconfigured Metrics Server, or incorrect Prometheus Adapter setup. We’ve now adopted KEDA for event-driven autoscaling like Kafka consumers.
5. Q: How do you debug pod-to-pod network flakiness?
A: We use Cilium for observability, check MTU mismatches, monitor conntrack, and use dig inside pods to debug DNS.
6. Q: How do you isolate teams in a shared cluster?
A: Namespaces + RBAC, NetworkPolicies, ResourceQuotas, and OPA Gatekeeper. For noisy workloads, tainted nodes are used.
7. Q: What’s your strategy for backing up PostgreSQL/Kafka in K8s?
A: Velero v1.16 for YAMLs + PVCs. pgBackRest for PostgreSQL data with WAL. Kafka is mirrored using MirrorMaker2 across regions.
8. Q: What broke after a Kubernetes upgrade?
A: Ingress CRDs and deprecated APIs. We fixed it by updating Helm charts and validating manifests with kubectl explain. Always dry-run on a dev cluster!
9. Q: How do you prevent noisy neighbors?
A: Set resource requests/limits, use VPA in recommendation mode, and isolate ML jobs on tainted spot nodes. Alerts via Prometheus help catch early signs.
10. Q: Can you roll out config changes without restarting pods?
A: Yes. We use Reloader, apps listen on /reload, and we mount secrets via CSI driver for dynamic updates. Config maps are versioned.

🧠 These are not just for interviews — they’re daily survival strategies.
Which one have you faced recently? Or got a better answer to one of these?

Experience #13: Posted on 23 June, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7342842385929838592

🚨 Advanced Kubernetes Interview Questions You Should Be Ready For (If You Call Yourself a DevOps Engineer) 🚨

Here’s a set of real-world, high-signal questions that go beyond “kubectl get pods” — with my detailed notes from production war rooms, outages, and scaling lessons:

🔥 1. How does DNS work in a pod? What if service name resolution fails?
Kubernetes uses CoreDNS (via /etc/resolv.conf) to resolve names like my-svc.my-namespace.svc.cluster.local.
🧠 Troubleshoot with:
dig / nslookup inside the pod
Inspect CoreDNS logs + ConfigMap
Validate CNI, iptables, node DNS access

🔥 2. What’s the lifecycle of a Deployment rollout behind the scenes?
From declarative spec → DeploymentController → ReplicaSet → kube-scheduler → kubelet → readiness gates.
📊 Strategy matters: maxUnavailable, maxSurge, rollout pause/resume, and observed generation tracking.

🔥 3. What happens if Cluster Autoscaler tries to evict a pod with local storage?
It won’t. Local volumes (emptyDir, hostPath, local PV) block eviction.
⚠️ Mitigate with proper taints, avoid local volumes unless strictly needed.

🔥 4. You deployed an update, and latency spikes for 30% of users. No CrashLoops. Debug?
✅ Metrics: compare histograms
✅ Logs: filter by time window and pod label
✅ Network: check service routing, policies, and sidecars
✅ Use tracing + load testing to isolate faulty pods

🔥 5. How do you enforce runtime security in K8s?
🔐 Seccomp, AppArmor, RBAC, OPA Gatekeeper, and tools like Falco.
Block risky syscalls, deny root containers, audit policy violations in CI/CD.

🔥 6. HPA vs VPA vs Karpenter – when to avoid each?
HPA: ✅ scale pods by metrics | ❌ not for stateful apps
VPA: ✅ tune limits/requests | ❌ avoid w/ HPA
Karpenter: ✅ dynamic nodes | ❌ not for fixed infra needs
🎯 Pro tip: Simulate HPA load in staging with kubectl run + stress-ng

🔥 7. Share an outage you helped debug. RCA and fix?
Our ingress had 502s but no pod failures.
📌 RCA: Nodes hit disk pressure → kubelet evicted pods → endpoints vanished.
✅ Fix: disk alerts + eviction thresholds + daemon for monitoring ephemeral storage.
Postmortem + learnings shared org-wide.

💬 These are the kinds of questions that separate senior engineers from the rest. If you’re preparing for high-bar SRE/DevOps roles, happy to connect and share notes.

Experience #14: Posted on 22 June, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7342563755978866688

🔥 Top 7 Brutal DevOps/Cloud Questions from a ₹37 LPA Interview

🚨 Not your average “what is CI/CD?” type questions.
These are real brain-twisters asked during an interview for a ₹37 LPA DevOps role. Only the best survive. Can you?
1. 🧠 VPC A is peered with VPC B and VPC B with VPC C. Can VPC A and C communicate?
Think VPC peering is just plug-and-play? This one goes deep into transitive routing limitations.
2. ⚙️ What happens behind the scenes when we run kubectl get po?
It’s not just listing pods. It’s about API server internals, kubelet interactions, and more. Do you know the full flow?
3. 🔐 How do you implement end-to-end security from Dockerfile creation to production Kubernetes deployment?
This isn’t just about scanning images. It’s a complete DevSecOps pipeline strategy.
4. ⚔️ SCA vs. SAST vs. DAST — explain the differences with examples.
Static or dynamic? Code or dependency? Real-life use cases separate juniors from pros.
5. 🧬 How do GenAI models work?
Forget buzzwords. This demands an understanding of tokenization, transformers, attention mechanisms, and model architectures.
6. 🔄 How to give an EC2 instance in Account A access to an S3 bucket in Account B?
Welcome to the world of cross-account IAM, roles, policies, and trust relationships.
7. 📦 What is the difference between Node Affinity and Taints & Tolerations in Kubernetes?
Both control pod placement — but how, when, and why?

Experience #15: Posted on 22 June, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7341368667751817216

🚀 I faced these real questions while interviewing for 50 LPA DevOps roles

If you’re aiming for senior DevOps/Platform Engineering roles in top-tier companies, be ready for deep-dive, real-world scenarios like these 👇

💥 1. “Why is the pod CrashLooping even though the image is valid?”

🧠 Real scenario:
The container pulls successfully, but the app crashes due to a missing DB_PASSWORD secret or failing DB connection.
✅ Fix: Checked kubectl logs, validated env vars from Secrets, and reviewed readiness/liveness probes.

💥 2. “How would you handle secrets across multi-region clusters?”

🧠 What I proposed:
Use AWS Secrets Manager + External Secrets Operator.
Each region (e.g., us-east-1, eu-central-1) has its own IAM-controlled sync to Kubernetes. Secrets are managed centrally, and synced locally per cluster with proper access control.

💥 3. “What’s the fastest way to rollback an Infra change in Terraform?”

🧠 Real-world approach:
A faulty security group update broke service access. I quickly reverted the Git commit and redeployed via Terraform.
Pro tip: Use terraform apply -target=resource.name for isolated rollback when needed.

💥 4. “How would you design a zero-downtime deployment with blue/green and traffic shifting?”

🧠 Production-grade method:
• Deploy v1 (blue) and v2 (green) in parallel
• Use Kubernetes service selector or Istio VirtualService
• Gradually shift traffic (10% → 50% → 100%)
• Rollback instantly by re-routing traffic if issues arise