Real DevOps and Cloud Interview Questions: Prepare for DevOps, SRE, Cloud & Data Engineering Related Roles #2

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 July 4, 2025 (HCL)

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7346831978962305024

HCL DevOps interview questions: Part 1😊

✅ 1. Technical Round

This round usually lasts 45–60 minutes, and covers a mix of practical, scenario-based, and conceptual questions from core DevOps tools and cloud services.

1. Explain your CI/CD pipeline design. Which tools did you use and why?

2. How do you create a Jenkins pipeline for multi-environment deployment (dev/stage/prod)?

3. What’s the difference between freestyle and pipeline jobs in Jenkins?

4. How do you handle Jenkins pipeline failures? Give a real-time issue and how you solved it.

5. Have you integrated code quality tools like SonarQube? How do you do it?

6. How do you write a production-ready Dockerfile? Any best practices?

7. Difference between CMD and ENTRYPOINT in Docker?

8. What is Docker Compose and where have you used it?

9. Explain how container orchestration works and why it’s important.

10. What are pods, deployments, and services in Kubernetes?

11. How do you perform a rolling update in Kubernetes using a YAML file?

12. What’s a ConfigMap vs. Secret? How do you use them in k8s deployments?

13. How do you handle resource limits and requests in Kubernetes?

14. Which cloud provider have you worked with? What DevOps services did you use?

15. How do you manage infrastructure using Terraform in Azure/AWS?

16. What is the use of Terraform backend? Have you used remote state with locking?

17. How do you securely store secrets in cloud pipelines? (Azure Key Vault, AWS Secrets Manager)

18. Explain how you set up an auto-scaling group in cloud using Terraform.

19. How do you manage role-based access control in Jenkins or Kubernetes?

20. How do you rollback a faulty deployment using Git and CI tools?

21. Explain Gitflow and how your team used branching strategies in DevOps.

22. What is your approach to setting up logging and monitoring for infrastructure and apps?

23. Have you implemented DevSecOps practices? Share an example.

✅ 2. HR Round

Usually a 10–15 minute conversation, focusing on:

1. Brief intro and your career journey so far.

2. Why are you looking to move from your current organization?

3. Are you comfortable with rotational shifts or on-call support?

4. Are you willing to relocate/work in hybrid mode (if applicable)?

5. What is your current CTC, expected CTC, and notice period?

6. Do you have experience working with client-facing roles or global teams?

7. Where do you see yourself in the next 2–3 years?

Experience #2: Posted on July 4, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7346742510125256705

Position: DevOps Engineer

𝐑𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝟏 & 𝟐 – 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐃𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐃𝐢𝐯𝐞
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 Pod Disruption Budget (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 #3: Posted on July 4, 2025 (Accenture)

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7346567842537926657

✅ Day-to-day DevOps activities (𝘔𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘰𝘳, 𝘐𝘮𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘦, 𝘚𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵, 𝘛𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘵)
✅ NAT Gateways (private subnet outbound traffic)
✅ Kubernetes upgrades (Backup, Drain, Check, Test)
✅ Pod Disruption Budgets
✅ VPC design (CIDR, subnets, NAT, IGW, routing)
✅ CI/CD pipelines with security tools (Vault, SonarQube, Trivy)
✅ Multi-stage Docker builds
✅ Ansible Vault & Roles
✅ Highly available K8s clusters
✅ Monitoring with Prometheus & Grafana
✅ IAM, S3, Terraform, and more

Experience #4: Posted on July 3, 2025 (Accenture)

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7346385117503746048

Accenture Interview Experience
Compensation: 16L
Position: DevOps Engineer

Experience #5: Posted on July 3, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7346556141356666882

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 #6: Posted on July 2, 2025 (PWC)

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7346530668501221377

PWC Interview experience for DevOps Engineer role

✅ Round 1: Screening Round (30 minutes)
– Walk me through your current project architecture and your role in it.
– Which DevOps tools have you worked with in the last 2 years?
– What AWS services have you used in production?
– How do you expose a Kubernetes application to external traffic?
– What is the purpose of a NAT Gateway?
– How do you check running processes in Linux?
– What command would you use to find files larger than 100MB?
– What is the difference between Deployment and StatefulSet in Kubernetes?
– What is a ConfigMap, and how is it different from a Secret?
– How do you check network connectivity between two servers?
– Describe your experience with CI/CD pipelines.

✅ Round 2: Technical Round (60 minutes)
– You have an application in Account A that needs to access an S3 bucket in Account B. How would you configure this?
– Write a Dockerfile for a Node.js application with multi-stage builds.
– How do you handle Terraform state file corruption?
– Your EC2 instance in a private subnet needs to download packages without NAT Gateway. What alternatives exist?
– How do you debug a container that has exited?
– You need to import an existing AWS VPC into Terraform. What are the steps?
– How would you implement blue-green deployment in Kubernetes?
– How do you manage secrets in Terraform without hardcoding them?
– What’s the difference between COPY and ADD commands in Dockerfile?
– How would you implement cross-account resource provisioning using Terraform?
– How would you handle secrets in a Docker container for a PHP application connecting to MySQL?
– An S3 bucket was created via Terraform, but someone manually added a policy. How do you handle this drift?
– How do you implement network policies to restrict pod-to-pod communication in Kubernetes?
– Write a Python script to backup all files older than 30 days from a directory.
– Your company’s cloud costs are increasing rapidly. – How would you approach cost optimization without impacting performance?
– How would you set up geolocation-based routing using AWS services?
– A critical production Kubernetes cluster is experiencing multiple issues. Pods are stuck in ImagePullBackOff, some pods are being evicted, and users are reporting 503 errors from the application. What troubleshooting process will you follow, and how can to avoid this in the future?

✅ Round 3: Behavioral Round
– How do you handle a situation where you’re asked to work on a technology you have no experience with?
– Describe a time when you had to work with tight deadlines and limited resources.
– Tell me about a mistake you made in production and how you handled it.
– Describe the most challenging technical problem you’ve solved in your career.
– How would you convince stakeholders to adopt a new technology or process?
– Tell me about a time when you had to learn a new tool quickly to solve a business problem.

Experience #7: Posted on July 1, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7345438189085503488

DevOps Interview Experience – Key Questions I Faced.

Interview Questions:

1. Can you give a brief self-introduction?
2. What are your daily activities as a DevOps engineer?
3. What is a Jenkinsfile.
4. Which AWS services have you worked with?
5. What is Amazon EKS, and can you explain your experience with it?
6. Have you worked with monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, How do you configure them?
7. Write Terraform code to create any resource and modularize it.
8. Write a Docker Compose file for a multi-container setup.
9. Write an Ansible playbook for automation.
10. What’s the difference between Git merge and Git rebase?
11. Have you worked with Linux?
12. How do you configure Docker in a Jenkins pipeline?
13. What is an Ansible inventory file, and how is it used?
14. Are you comfortable writing shell scripts? Any examples?
15. What kind of issues or challenges do you typically encounter in your role?
16. Which Git branching strategies have you used?
17. What deployment strategies have you worked with?

Experience #8: Posted on June 20, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7341103233584541696

🚀 Cloud Engineer Interview – Questions I Was Asked!
I recently attended an interview for a Cloud Engineer role and wanted to share the questions I faced — they covered a solid mix of AWS, Linux, Networking, Python, and Troubleshooting.
📌 Interview Questions
✅ What is VPC Peering and where do we use it?
✅ Explain Transit Gateway and how it differs from VPC peering.
✅ How does Amazon Route 53 work? Name some routing policies.
✅ What’s the difference between TCP and UDP?
✅ Walk me through the OSI Model — layer by layer.
✅ If your website is slow, what steps would you take?
✅ What are tuples in Python and how are they useful?
✅ IP: 150.150.150.150 — identify the class.
✅ What is CIDR and how does it relate to IP address classes?
✅ How do you install packages in Linux without internet access?
✅ Explain the types of Load Balancers in AWS and their use cases.
✅ Which Linux version are you using in your project, and how do you check it?.

Experience #9: Posted on 20 June, 2025

Linkedin Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7341283610055856129

Interview Questions I Faced in the Last 10 Months – Cloud/DevOps Roles (Part 1)

Hi All,

Over the last 10 months, I’ve attended around 13–14 interviews for Cloud Engineer and DevOps Engineer roles. It’s been a great learning experience, and I thought of sharing some of the real interview questions I faced — this might help others preparing for similar roles.

But remember almost every interviewer starts asking the questions based on the introduction what you gave and on your resume — so be confident with everything you’ve mentioned in it!

Networking Questions:

1. What happens in the background when you type www.google.com?
2. How does the internet work? (Explain in your perspective)
3. What is DNS and how does it work?
4. Explain the OSI model — what does each layer do?
5. Difference between TCP and UDP
6. What is the TCP 3-Way Handshake? Explain the process
7. Questions on IP addressing and CIDR

Linux Questions:

1. Why is Linux preferred over Windows in most organizations?
2. How would you troubleshoot the network connectivity issue on a Linux server?
3. What does the top command do? What about disk space management?
4. Linux file management questions
5. What is inside /etc, /var directories?
6. What is SSH? How does it work?
7. Commands: ping, dig, nslookup – troubleshooting-related

AWS Cloud Questions:

1. What is S3 versioning?
2. Difference between Internet Gateway and NAT Gateway? Why is NAT used?
3. Is S3 bucket region-specific or globally accessible?
4. What is an inline policy in AWS?
5. Difference between IAM Policies, Groups, and Roles
6. What is VPC Peering? What can be used if we need to connect to multiple VPCs?
7. Explain the steps to create a custom VPC manually
8. How to SSH into a private server from a public subnet without a bastion host?
9. Is CloudWatch configured by default with AWS services?
10. Difference between Security Groups and NACL (Which one is stateless?)
11. What is Lambda concurrency?
12. Advantages of Serverless architecture
13. Difference between EBS and EFS — explain with real-world use cases

Git & Version Control:

1. Difference between git rebase and git merge
2. What does git cherry-pick do?
3. General Git workflow and commonly used commands.

Disclaimer: I’ve misplaced the author names for the following LinkedIn posts. If any of them are yours, please let me know so I can give proper credit and add your post as a reference.

Experience #10: Posted in May, 2025

1. Introduce yourself ( the default one 😁 )
2. What were your daily tasks in your previous company?
3. What you have achieved in your short career so far?
4. What does containerization mean, and why is Kubernetes preferred?
5. How does data flow in a Kubernetes cluster? (K8s networking)
6. How are PV (Persistent Volume) and PVC (Persistent Volume Claim) related to storage in Kubernetes?
7. What health probes are available in Kubernetes? How does Kubernetes determine if a pod is ready?
8. What are the different types of Kubernetes services, and how does Ingress work?
9. How much experience do you have in handling the databases?
10. Difference between StatefulSet and Deployment in Kubernetes?
11. What does Kubernetes administration mean according to you?
12. How do you approach debugging errors in production environments?

This interview emphasized Kubernetes, container orchestration, networking, storage, and troubleshooting — along with my day-to-day experience and practical achievements.

Experience #11: Posted in May, 2025

1. Two employees work in different shifts (10 AM–5 PM and 6 PM–2 AM). How do you provide AWS access based on timing?
2. What is the default port number for DynamoDB?
3. What is Ingress in Kubernetes, and how can we access applications deployed on-premises?
4. What is the port range for NodePort mode?
5. Do LoadBalancers work in on-premises setups?
6. What’s the difference between ECS and EKS?
7. How do you store secrets in Jenkins and use them in pipelines?
8. Write a shell script to find prime numbers.
9. Terraform code to launch an EC2 instance.
10. Are you familiar with custom IAM policies? Can you write one?
11. What is PV and PVC in Kubernetes? Which one comes first, and why?
12. Explain RBAC – what is it, its uses, and how is it configured?
13. How can we expose on-premise applications?
14. What is the purpose of Jenkins shared libraries? Explain with steps.
15. What is VPC peering and how does it work?
16. Can we add storage to an existing EC2 instance and how, steps to add?
17. What are the core components of Kubernetes, and which are the most important?
18. Two users access the same application – one has low latency, the other high. How would you troubleshoot?
19. How do we connect services deployed on the cloud with those on-premises?
20. How do we know the entire process executed that we have mentioned in Jenkins? What are the possible ways to know this?
21. How can we configure GitHub in Jenkins using both Freestyle and Pipeline jobs?

Experience #12: Posted in May, 2025

1. tell me something about your self
2. what is kubernetes? Explain its Architecture
3. what do you understand by loadbalancer in terms of kubernetes
4. what do you understand by namespace in kubernetes?
5. why should i choose kubernetes as compare to Docker swarm.
6. what is operators in kubernetes
7. what are diffrence between .war file and .jar file they are interdependent each other
8. Tell me a process how to migrate database on eks cluster
9. can you explain me the deployment process of docarized app that is stored in git repo
10. there is a docker container now this docker container have sonarqube installed init and the the application is up and running everything is going fine.I restarted my docker container now the sonarqube is coming up but not sharing any data what went wrong over here
11. how do you integrate EBS volume if we have an pod
12. Your application increase traffic during peak how to set up autoscaling to recase cluster worker node

Experience #13: Posted in April, 2025

“How do you connect to a private instance in AWS from outside?”
“Could you please tell me about yourself?” (Always a classic! 😉)
“Could you also include the companies you’ve worked for in your response?”
“How would you explain your roles and responsibilities in your previous positions?”
“Could you describe what a typical day at work looks like for you?”
“Suppose I want to access an AWS service from outside the EKS cluster, how would I do that?”
“How do you integrate a service account with an IAM role?”
“Could you elaborate on how to annotate the service account?”
“If a deployment needs access to Route 53, how would you grant the pod access to Route 53?”
“What changes are necessary in the IAM role to allow pod access to Route 53?”
“What are the different types of services in Kubernetes?”
“Which type of service do you typically use, and in what scenarios?”
“Suppose you have to create 3 EC2 instances using different configurations; how would you approach that?”
“What resources can be provisioned using Terraform?”
“Have you used Terraform data sources in your work?”
“Can you describe your experience with Terraform modules, including their structure?”
“How do you handle deploying resources to various environments using Terraform?”
“Could you explain in detail how you manage different configurations for development (dev) and user acceptance testing (UAT) environments?”
“In Terraform, what is the distinction between tfvars files and workspaces, and how do you use them together?”
“What AWS resources have you worked with?”
“Have you used private hosted zones in AWS?”

Experience #14: Posted in April, 2025

In my recent DevOps interview, I was asked several practical and in-depth questions covering Linux, Kubernetes, CI/CD, SRE, Git, and monitoring. I’m sharing them here to help others who are preparing for interviews:

🔸 What are your roles and responsibilities?
🔸 How do you configure SSH access in Kubernetes and tell me the steps?
🔸 How do you add users in Linux?
🔸 What is CI/CD?
🔸 What is SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)?
🔸 How do you monitor using Prometheus and Grafana?
🔸 What is a critical issue you handled recently?
🔸 What is branching in Git?
🔸 How did you troubleshoot a recent production issue?
🔸 What is the difference between Monolithic and Microservices?
🔸 Do you know YAML scripting?
🔸 What did you do using YAML?
🔸 How do you troubleshoot if pods are not working?
🔸 Do you know MySQL?
🔸 Have you worked on any databases?
🔸 What is the ssh-keygen command in Linux and why is it used?

Experience #15: Posted in April, 2025

🔧 Linux & System Commands
How can you check if SQL or PL/SQL is installed on your system?
What is the netstat command used for in Linux?
What Linux commands do you use to monitor CPU and disk usage?
How do file permissions work in Linux and how do you modify them?

☁️ Cloud & Infrastructure (AWS)
How do you mount an EBS volume to an EC2 instance?
What are the different S3 storage classes and when do you use them?
If users A and B want to access the Linux server of C, how can you configure access?

🔁 Git & Version Control
What are the most commonly used Git commands in a DevOps workflow?

🐳 Docker & Containers
How do you write a basic Dockerfile?
What are some ways to reduce the size of a Docker container?
How can you access a web application after deploying it with Docker?

📦 Jenkins & CI/CD
What are the different types of Jenkins deployment jobs?

🔄 Monitoring & Troubleshooting
What are common HTTP error codes and how do you handle them in CI/CD?
How do you identify and act upon system or deployment errors?

🌐 Networking & Security
What are the 7 layers of the OSI networking model?
What is NAT and how does it work in a deployment context?

☸️ Kubernetes
What are the core components of Kubernetes?

🔹 Linux Essentials: Commands, file permissions, disk/CPU monitoring
🔹 Cloud Basics: Mounting EBS, S3 storage classes, networking
🔹 DevOps Tools: Jenkins deployment types, Git commands, Dockerfile writing
🔹 Containers & Kubernetes: Reducing Docker image size, exposing web apps, k8s components
🔹 Networking Concepts: NAT, netstat, OSI layers
🔹 Troubleshooting: Error codes, log analysis, server access setup

✅ Key Takeaway:

Solid hands-on practice and clear understanding of the fundamentals can take you a long way in interviews!