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1016+ DevOps Interview Questions — Free Samples with Answers

These are free interactive samples with explained answers. The full bank of 1016+ questions — plus daily challenges, XP, streaks and a global leaderboard — is free once you sign in. Start now →

☸️ Kubernetes (5 free samples of 50)

• A pod is stuck in 'Pending' state. Which command gives the most useful diagnostic info?
• How does a Readiness probe differ from a Liveness probe?
• What is the role of the Kubernetes API server?
• Which Kubernetes Service type provisions a cloud load balancer with an external IP?
• What is a Kubernetes ServiceAccount?
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🌊 Docker (5 free samples of 50)

• Does the EXPOSE instruction publish the port to the host?
• What does docker inspect <container> return?
• What is Docker Buildx used for?
• What does docker run -p 127.0.0.1:8080:80 myapp do?
• What is the difference between CMD and ENTRYPOINT in a Dockerfile?
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🌊 AWS (5 free samples of 50)

• What is the difference between ECS and EKS?
• When should you use AWS Fargate vs EC2 launch type for ECS/EKS?
• What is Amazon EventBridge?
• Which AWS service should you use to store application secrets like database passwords?
• What does AWS CodeDeploy do in the AWS DevOps stack?
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🌊 Linux (5 free samples of 50)

• What is the correct crontab syntax to run a script every day at 2:30 AM?
• What does iostat -xz 1 show?
• How do you make an environment variable available to child processes in Bash?
• What does ln -s /path/to/original /path/to/link create?
• What does the chmod 755 command set on a file?
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🌊 CI/CD (4 free samples of 49)

• What is SonarQube used for in a CI pipeline?
• What are conventional commits?
• What is a GitHub Actions composite action?
• What is Time to Restore Service (MTTR) and how do you improve it?
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🔀 Git (6 free samples of 50)

• What is the key difference between git rebase and git merge?
• What is the practical difference between merge and rebase?
• What is the difference between an annotated and a lightweight Git tag?
• What does git worktree add ../hotfix hotfix-branch give you?
• On a Git server, how does the update hook differ from pre-receive?
• How do you configure Git to sign commits with an SSH key instead of GPG?
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🌊 Terraform (4 free samples of 50)

• What are Terraform data sources?
• What is Terraform Cloud and what does it add over local Terraform?
• What is the terraform_remote_state data source used for?
• What is sensitive = true on a Terraform variable or output?
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🌊 SRE (6 free samples of 47)

• What is a Service Level Indicator (SLI)?
• What is alert fatigue and how do you combat it?
• What does the PromQL rate() function calculate?
• How does on-call rotation scheduling work in SRE?
• What is load testing and how does it differ from stress testing?
• What is the difference between MTTD (Mean Time To Detect) and MTTF (Mean Time To Failure)?
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📈 Monitoring (5 free samples of 50)

• What kind of database is Prometheus at its core?
• What is the difference between blackbox and whitebox monitoring?
• Why is rate(metric[1m]) risky when the scrape interval is 30s?
• What are Alertmanager inhibition rules for?
• What is the difference between relabel_configs and metric_relabel_configs?
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🔌 Networking (5 free samples of 50)

• What is the fundamental difference between TCP and UDP?
• What does the TLS handshake accomplish?
• What is the difference between a recursive resolver and an authoritative name server?
• What is the difference between TCP keepalive and HTTP keep-alive?
• What is a CNI plugin responsible for in Kubernetes?
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🌊 Google Cloud (5 free samples of 50)

• What is the gcloud CLI used for?
• How does GCP's Global HTTP(S) Load Balancer differ from regional load balancers?
• What is Dataflow (Apache Beam) used for?
• What is Google BigQuery used for?
• What is GCP Filestore?
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🌊 Ansible (5 free samples of 50)

• How do host_vars and group_vars work in Ansible?
• What is the Ansible template module?
• What is the difference between ignore_errors and failed_when?
• What is an Ansible inventory file?
• How do you encrypt individual variables with ansible-vault?
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🔐 DevSecOps (5 free samples of 50)

• What is Trivy most commonly used for?
• What does the principle of least privilege dictate?
• What makes cosign "keyless" signing keyless?
• What do gitleaks and TruffleHog specialize in?
• Why can permission to create pods in the kube-system namespace amount to full cluster compromis…
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🚀 GitOps (4 free samples of 40)

• In ArgoCD, what does an Application custom resource define?
• What is the ArgoCD 'app of apps' pattern?
• How do Bitnami Sealed Secrets enable storing secrets safely in Git?
• Which Sealed Secrets scope allows a sealed secret to be decrypted in any namespace under any na…
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⎈ Helm (4 free samples of 40)

• In Helm terminology, what is a 'release'?
• helm install runs with values.yaml in the chart, a -f custom.yaml file, and --set image.tag=v2.…
• What does the --atomic flag do on helm upgrade?
• Which mechanism lets a parent chart share one value, such as an image registry, with all of its…
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🔭 Observability (4 free samples of 40)

• What information does the W3C traceparent HTTP header carry?
• What is the main job of the OpenTelemetry Collector?
• Why do structured logs beat plain-text logs once they reach an aggregation system?
• In the USE method, what does saturation measure?
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🔷 Azure (4 free samples of 40)

• What is a key difference between kubenet and Azure CNI networking in AKS?
• Why are Managed Identities preferred over Service Principals with client secrets? (AWS analogy:…
• Which factor typically drives Log Analytics cost the most for a busy AKS cluster?
• In an availability set, what does an update domain control?
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⚡ Serverless (3 free samples of 30)

• For asynchronous Lambda invocations with an on-failure destination configured, what happens to…
• What do Durable Functions add on top of regular Azure Functions?
• What does setting reserved concurrency = 50 on a Lambda function do?
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🗄️ Databases (4 free samples of 40)

• What is the key difference between partitioning and sharding?
• Your backups run nightly and always report success. What is still the biggest risk?
• You must pick a shard key for a multi-tenant system. Which property matters most?
• How do gh-ost and pt-online-schema-change alter huge MySQL tables without long locks?
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🐍 Scripting (4 free samples of 40)

• In a standard crontab entry, what is the correct order of the five time fields?
• What does trap cleanup EXIT accomplish in a bash script?
• Your Python deploy script calls an API that occasionally returns 503. What is the robust approa…
• A wrapper forwards its arguments with child.sh $* and breaks when arguments contain spaces. Wha…
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📐 System Design (4 free samples of 40)

• A hot cache key expires and 5,000 concurrent requests simultaneously hammer the database to reb…
• Which requirement most strongly favors a relational database over a document store?
• One misbehaving downstream dependency exhausts the shared connection pool and takes down unrela…
• With DNS-based failover between two regions, why can users keep hitting the dead region for a w…
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🧰 Platform Engineering (3 free samples of 30)

• Which set correctly lists the four key DORA metrics?
• What characterizes a "paved road" CI/CD pipeline offered by a platform team?
• What is the core idea behind Backstage TechDocs?
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🕸️ Service Mesh (3 free samples of 30)

• What does an Istio VirtualService control?
• In an Istio route with retries, what is the difference between timeout and perTryTimeout?
• What problem does an Istio ServiceEntry solve?
• 🔒 +27 more Service Mesh questions — sign in free to practice them →