Top 15 DevOps Interview Questions to Prepare for in 2022 (And How to Answer Them)
A DevOps interview evaluates a candidate’s understanding of DevOps as a delivery approach, strategy, and work culture.
DevOps is among the most in-demand developer jobs in 2022, and senior DevOps engineers can earn six-figure salaries, indicating a promising career in the field. This article discusses the top 15 questions that may be asked during a DevOps interview and how to answer them. It also shares some helpful tips for candidates.
DevOps Interview Questions to Prepare for in 2022
DevOps engineer is among the hottest jobs in 2022. A senior DevOps engineer in the U.S. can make anywhere between $106,504 and $135,927 annually, as per Salary.com (as of February 2022).
CodinGame’s 4th Annual Report published in 2021 revealed that DevOps engineer was the most in-demand developer job, ahead of data scientists or software developers. The survey of 15,000+ developers and HR professionals also found that 43% of companies struggle to fill DevOps roles. This suggests that candidates applying for DevOps roles in 2022 have a promising career, aided by market demand and a scarcity of supply.
For those applying for a DevOps role, the interview process is typically a mix of conceptual and technical questions. Employers evaluate a candidate’s understanding of the concept, its driving principles, and strategic importance to an organization.
DevOps is not a standalone technical skill. It involves a work culture and delivery strategy based on close collaboration, continuous improvement, and automated tools. Candidates appearing for a DevOps interview should be familiar with these aspects of the job.
See More: What Is DevOps Lifecycle? Definition, Key Components, and Management Best Practices
Top 15 DevOps Interview Questions to Prepare for in 2022
Here are the top questions you can expect when applying for a DevOps role, arranged in the order of seniority. The first five questions are most commonly asked during entry-level DevOps interviews. The next five questions deal with topics relevant for mid-level roles, and the last five questions are strategic, most likely to be asked during interviews of senior DevOps professionals.
Let’s first look at the entry-level questions.
1. Why are you interested in a career in DevOps?
This question provides candidates with an opportunity to discuss their broad interest in the topic and stand out against the competition. Interviewers also assess a person’s soft skills, personality, and ability for logical reasoning when they ask a subjective, non-technical question like this. There are several reasons to pursue a career in DevOps in 2022, including excellent job prospects, high demand, and the fact that DevOps plays a central role in software development lifecycles (SDLC) today.
Candidates can answer this question with one or more of the following reasons:
- Chance to learn cross-functional skill sets: Being a successful DevOps professional is as much about strategy and best practices as it is about knowing the technical aspects of development. A job in DevOps sets a person up for a futureproof career trajectory, with the ability to transition into more specialized roles like DevSecOps.
- Collaboration: A DevOps role is more collaborative than a traditional developer, programmer, or IT administrator. It gives you the chance to work with and learn from experts in IT operations, in addition to veteran programmers and project managers.
- Opportunity to contribute to business outcomes: The DevOps team contributes to product success by ensuring product quality, release timelines, and an agile delivery workflow. DevOps professionals are crucial to business success as they cut across organizational silos between operations and development.
2. Explain what DevOps is in two or three sentences.
This question is frequently asked when interviewing for entry-level roles. A company could even ask experienced professionals to unbox the foundational concept of DevOps to test logical and communication skills.
DevOps refers to a collaborative approach to an application or software development lifecycle. The development team works closely with the operations team in simultaneous workflows to launch, maintain, and improve a product within tight timelines.
The development, testing, deployment, and operational stages occur in a single, connected workflow. The success of DevOps hinges on the teams’ ability to communicate, collaborate, and work together towards a shared objective.
3. DevOps is the amalgamation of Dev and Ops – what does each of these components entail?
DevOps doesn’t just bring together two different teams. Within Dev and Ops, a company may have multiple functions and sub-functions to keep the entire SDLC running seamlessly. The candidate must know precisely what each of these functions is and how it contributes to the larger DevOps roadmap, even if they are interviewing for an entry-level position.
The development component of DevOps includes:
- Source code creation: Writing or assembling the code that will be tested and passed on to build
- Coverage: Selecting the code that automated tests will cover
- Unit testing: Testing individual units of source code together with data, usage procedures, etc.
- Code packaging: Preparing source code to share with other developers
The operations component of DevOps includes infrastructure management tasks like:
- Provisioning: Setting up IT infrastructure to make it available for code deployment
- Configuration: Setting up hardware and software systems so that software functions smoothly
- Deployment: Deploying code to the production environment while collaborating with Dev
- Collaboration: Simultaneously running regression tests and integration tests before deployment
4. What are the prerequisites for DevOps implementation?
Candidates must be familiar with the prerequisites necessary for DevOps to start on the right foot. Knowledge about the prerequisites also lets the interviewer know that you have prior experience in DevOps operations, do’s and don’ts, and best practices.
There are two types of prerequisites for DevOps implementation – technical and strategic. Some technical prerequisites are version control software, testing automation, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools, and pair programming tools for remote workers. These must be supported by a DevOps aligned project roadmap, communication and collaboration workflows, and leadership buy-in across the organization.
5. What is the difference between DevOps and agile?
Since agile teams often follow a DevOps model, the two terms are sometimes (erroneously) used interchangeably. That’s why this is a common question during DevOps interviews. The employer will want to make sure that you know exactly which job you are signing up for, its expectations, and the skills required – and not confuse it with a related but different concept.
Agile bridges the customer and the development team gap, while DevOps bridges the gap between the IT operations and the development team. The two concepts are different and may be used side by side or independently. A DevOps model aims to streamline software delivery by connecting development and ITOps workflows so that the software is constantly improved, deployed, and monitored cyclically. On the other hand, an agile model breaks down software development into short sprints and regularly incorporates customer feedback to improve the software with every sprint.
These five questions cover the topics most likely to be asked during an entry-level DevOps interview with up to three years of experience.
See More: DevOps vs. Agile Methodology: Key Differences and Similarities
Let us now explore the topics relevant for mid-level roles.
6. What are some of the most important DevOps KPIs?
DevOps teams need a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure performance and ensure that all processes are on track. Even if the candidate isn’t in charge of orchestrating the entire DevOps blueprint, they should know about the DevOps KPIs and metrics that they are looking to achieve. Some of the most important KPIs to measure include:
- Failed deployment rate: This KPI measures how often deployments lead to failures or outages. It indicates issues in the code’s alignment with the infrastructure.
- Mean time to failure recovery: If a build fails, the DevOps team must quickly course-correct, find the root cause, and run a successful deployment.
- Lead time for change: It measures the time taken to initiate a change and then implement it until final deployment. Lead time should be short but not so quick that it causes change failure.
- Defect volume: Some defects are expected in every software deployment, and teams should not approach this with a negative outlook.
- Defect escape rate: This KPI reflects the number of defects that are not detected during testing (either at the development or operations stage) and are passed onto the end-user.
7. Name a few popular DevOps tools. Which one(s) do you prefer?
As an experienced DevOps professional, the candidate should know about all the leading tools available and have hands-on knowledge of at least one or two tools. When the interviewer asks this question, it is advisable to answer with a comprehensive list of tools in the market and then elaborate on the benefits of the tool you have used. The top DevOps tools that should be on your radar include:
- Git: It is a free and open-source version control system with an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI).
- Ansible: It is an open-source provisioning and configuration management tool useful for operational teams, which runs on a variety of Linux distributions.
- Docker: It is a feature-rich platform as a service (PaaS) product that enables containerization. It is compatible with a wide variety of environments and public clouds.
- Puppet: Like Ansible, it is a tool for Ops teams, available in both commercial and open-source versions. It requires limited programming knowledge.
- Jenkins: It is an open-source automation server that streamlines development, testing, and deployment to facilitate CI/CD. It is a versatile tool.
- Chef.io: Chef is ideal for DevOps professionals conversant in Ruby. It includes multiple automation, delivery, compliance, and remediation tools in one stack.
- Nexus: Nexus is an open-source repository that helps DevOps teams organize, distribute, and store the components they need for software development.
- Bitbucket: Bitbucket is a collaborative coding platform that is useful for version control. It is powered by Atlassian, a project management software company.
See More: Top 10 Must-Have DevOps Tools in 2021
8. Do you like working in a DevOps culture?
This interview question can be slightly complex to answer and requires prior experience of working in a DevOps team. In addition to determining the workflows and tools you use, DevOps also shapes the work environment and the overall culture in a company. Ensure that you honestly acknowledge the shortcomings of a DevOps culture while emphasizing its benefits for employees.
Respond to this question with “Yes, I enjoy working in a DevOps culture,” and then elaborate on why. A DevOps-driven work environment makes it easier to get support when resolving issues, and team members are not left alone to fix the urgent problems by themselves. This alleviates work pressure and, over time, enables hands-on learning. DevOps also drives better business outcomes and greater end-user satisfaction, resulting in recognition of team efforts.
However, one possible drawback of such an environment is that one person’s flaws impact the whole team, and there can be occasional conflicts. Interviewees should speak candidly about such issues to demonstrate their experience with a DevOps culture.
9. Explain the term infrastructure as code in the context of DevOps.
The term infrastructure as code (IaC) is crucial for the operations aspect of DevOps. It allows the DevOps team to manage configurations, deployment, and provisioning through software code instead of manual configurations. Some of the tasks one can perform using IaC include:
- Automating source code provisioning through reusable IaC
- Managing data centers through definition files instead of hardware configurations
- Orchestrating cloud computing environments to fetch DevOps infrastructure
With the rise of the cloud, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has also become crucial for DevOps pipelines. It provides teams with the infrastructure needed to deploy builds and support CI/CD at an affordable monthly fee.
10. How would you leverage pair programming to drive DevOps while working remotely?
Managing software development remotely can be a challenge, and it is even more complex when you are working with a DevOps team. DevOps, by definition, relies on close collaboration between team members and across organizational silos, which typically requires in-person interactions. This is why pair programming now plays a central role in DevOps workflows.
In a pair programming environment, one programmer is the driver, assembling the software code. The other person is the observer, who monitors progress, checks for quality, adds comments, etc. The person acting as the driver may switch to the observer’s role at any point in time, making pair programming so effective. It combines two DevOps professionals’ diverse perspectives, expertise, and experiences to minimize quality issues. Tuple, Microsoft Visual Studio, Codepen, and Codeanywhere are some of the top tools for distributed DevOps teams.
Next, let us discuss the questions that are most likely to be asked during interviews for senior-level roles.
See More: Why Managed Kubernetes as a Service Should Be a Part of Your DevOps Strategy
11. Explain what you understand by a “shift left” strategy.
“Shift left” is a software development strategy commonly employed to improve the quality of deliverables among DevOps teams. The DevOps pipeline comprises different steps such as development, build, test, staging, and production, with testing taking place only after the build is complete.
A “shift left” strategy suggests that DevOps professionals move the testing stage towards the earlier (or left) phases of the pipeline and incorporate rigorous testing even before the software code is wholly developed. The team can leverage unit testing to test specific portions or blocks of code during development. Unit tests can run parallelly with the build stage, and even during staging or production, DevOps professionals can run performance tests, user acceptance tests, and system tests.
Essentially, shifting left requires DevOps engineers to test as early and as frequently as possible to detect errors and fix them early on in the DevOps pipeline. This will minimize the number of changes required and reduce the risk of build failures.
12. What are the common DevOps antipatterns you have come across that hold back success?
DevOps interviewees – especially at mid-career and senior levels – should be familiar with the idea of antipatterns in DevOps. Antipatterns refer to rules of thumb or supposed best practices that may be useful for efficiency in the short term but get in the way of long-term success. Some of the common antipatterns observed in DevOps pipelines and work environments include:
- The hero antipattern: A particular individual or small group is perceived to have above-average talent and is regularly assigned urgent or complex tasks. However, the individual or group may resort to substandard methods to meet deadlines that eventually compromise quality.
- The continuous build antipattern: In line with CI/CD, the team sets up a constant build site parallel to every code cycle. However, in an attempt to push builds out fast, the team does not find time for unit tests or code cleanup.
- The dedicated DevOps antipattern: In a bid to adopt DevOps fast, companies often assemble their top developer and operations talent and form a dedicated DevOps team. However, this group ultimately ends up working in a silo, separate from the rest of the organization.
- The collaboration antipattern: While collaboration is definitely among the top benefits of a DevOps work culture, it does not mean that individuals aren’t accountable for their mistakes. The team should work closely before a mistake happens, not just to fix issues.
13. What is CAMS in DevOps?
CAMS distills the strategic and technical pillars of DevOps into a handy acronym. It stands for culture, automation, measurement, and sharing, which broadly encompasses what DevOps is. DevOps isn’t a tool – it characterizes the team culture and way of working. DevOps relies heavily on automation, particularly in testing and IT infrastructure management. DevOps metrics must be regularly measured to keep the pipeline efficient and quality-focused. Finally, sharing refers to disseminating knowledge and regular collaboration that must happen in a DevOps team.
14. Explain the use of containers in DevOps.
Since the goal of DevOps is to bridge the gap between the operations team and the development team, it is ideal that they work in an identical environment. Using containers, it is possible to set up two identical environments side by side without physically provisioning any resources. Containers offer a plethora of benefits like lower overheads, consistent operations, greater productivity, and fewer errors.
One of the most popular containerization tools is Docker, an open-source development platform that can run on any infrastructure, device, or cloud. To create a Docker container, users can run the following command: docker run -t -i <image name> <command name>
15. How would you set up a project using the DevOps methodology?
This is a commonly asked question for mid to senior-level professionals. It checks the candidate’s strategic understanding of DevOps, their ability to envision and manage DevOps projects, and their leadership capacity.
To prepare for a project using DevOps, one needs to:
- Create a roadmap: The first step is to plan the project, assess existing processes, review the goals, and identify the blind spots to be addressed by DevOps. At this stage, one can use project management tools like Trello and Asana to document the project’s requirements.
- Develop a proof of concept (PoC): A proof of concept or trial run takes a pragmatic look at the project and its complexities. The DevOps team is assembled during this stage, the tools and processes are out in place, and a feature or upgrade is singled out to run a dummy SDLC. Through the PoC, one understands architectural requirements, monitoring needs, automation opportunities, and much more.
- Execute DevOps: Finally, the project is executed as per DevOps principles, using tools and dashboards to track performance metrics. Processes like version control, CI/CD, and testing automation are implemented to ensure DevOps success.
See More: Top Factors Plaguing DevOps Evolution and Tips to Overcome the Challenges
Preparing for the DevOps Interview
While these 15 questions are most commonly asked during DevOps interviews, there are several other things candidates can do to prepare. Organizations may use digital platforms like HackerEarth, Mettl, Codility, DevSkiller, or HireVue to assess technical skills in addition to a face-to-face, video, or telephonic interview. Applicants should brush up on their coding skills, with a special focus on the tools most relevant to DevOps (see question seven).
The interviewer may also want to check the candidate’s knowledge about recent industry trends, particularly if they are interviewing for a senior DevOps role. One can follow Spotify podcasts like DevOps Radio, Adventures in DevOps, Simplifying DevOps, and Apple ones like The Humans of DevOps podcast series. Enterprise DevOps on Amazon Web Services is an excellent new book that aspiring DevOps professionals can read to prepare for their interview in 2022.
Are you preparing for a DevOps interview in 2022, or hiring for the role? Tell us if you’d like us to add any more questions to this list. Reach out to us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.
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