$ cat interview-prep.md
Top 50 DevOps Interview Questions and Answers for 2026
Ace your DevOps interview with these real questions on CI/CD, Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, monitoring, and incident response.
Key Takeaways
- ▹Know the difference between CI, CD, and CT
- ▹Understand GitOps and infrastructure as code
- ▹Be ready to explain Kubernetes architecture
- ▹Know how to design a monitoring stack
CI/CD Questions
Q1: CI vs CD? CI builds and tests on every commit. CD automates deployment to staging (manual production) or production.
Q2: GitOps? Git as single source of truth. Changes via PRs, automated to cluster.
Kubernetes Questions
Q3: Pod vs Deployment vs Service? Pod = smallest unit (containers). Deployment = manages Pods, scaling, updates. Service = network exposure.
Q4: Handle secrets? Use Kubernetes Secrets, Vault, or AWS Secrets Manager.
AWS Questions
Q5: High availability design? Multiple AZs, auto-scaling, ELB, RDS Multi-AZ, Route53.
Q6: IAM best practices? Use roles instead of keys, least privilege, enable MFA.
Terraform Questions
Q7: plan vs apply? plan = preview changes. apply = execute changes.
Q8: Manage state? Use remote state (S3 + DynamoDB locking), never commit to Git.
Monitoring Questions
Q9: Monitoring stack design? Prometheus (metrics) + Grafana (visualization) + Alertmanager + Loki (logs).
Q10: SLO vs SLA vs SLI? SLI = actual metric (latency). SLO = target. SLA = contractual.
Incident Response
Q11: Handle production incident? Detect → Respond → Mitigate → Resolve → Post-mortem.
Tips
Practice explaining concepts with real examples. Know your projects inside out. Be ready for scenario questions.