Important DevOps Interview Questions and Answers in 2021
Introduction
DevOps is currently a hot topic in IT and development circles. Almost everybody in IT wants to scale up the DevOps peak and so do a good number of developers. As you can make out, DevOps lies somewhere between IT ops and development, working towards faster and efficient delivery of IT resources for development. While there are a lot of openings for DevOps engineers, the interviews for DevOps can be quite tough and cover a whole gamut of subjects. Here we explore a few of those challenging DevOps interview questions to help you sail through the interview.
List of Interview Questions
- What is your understanding of DevOps role?
- What do you have to say about Agile methodology in the context of DevOps?
- What DevOps tools are you aware of?
- What phases are you aware of in DevOps?
- What benefits does DevOps bring to the table?
- What will be your approach to a project that plans to implement DevOps?
- What according to you, is the crucial difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment?
- How does software configuration management fit in DevOps?
- In what ways does monitoring help in maintaining the entire architecture?
- How does AWS contribute to DevOps?
1. What is your understanding of DevOps role?
DevOps is an approach that is a synergy between IT Ops and the development team, with the final goal to accelerate delivery of software products with a high success rate. This synergy starts right from the design through the product lifecycle up until full deployment.
2. What do you have to say about Agile methodology in the context of DevOps?
Both DevOps and Agile are working towards faster delivery of software products, but are fundamentally different. DevOps is a workplace culture bringing together IT Ops and development and smooth out any hurdles in the way of faster delivery of software. Agile methodology is pure methodology focusing on rapid, small, incremental and iterative software releases with customer feedback loop in. it removes most of the blind spots in the process of development for the customer and aligns the product better to the requirements.
3. What DevOps tools are you aware of?
There is a string of DevOps tools that are quite popular, and they are Puppet, Chef, Selenium, Git, Ansible, Jenkins, Docker.
4. What phases are you aware of in DevOps?
Phases in the DevOps lifecycle are
- Planning
This phase deals with the initial blueprint of a software product.
- Coding
This phase involves code development based on the software requirements outline and the planning phase results.
- Build
All code requirements outlined in the previous phases are used to build the software product.
- Testing
The testing phase takes the product through the paces to ensure it meets all industry-standard testing requirements and is of the highest quality.
- Integration
In the integration phase, code from multiple teams is integrated to form a single product.
- Deployment
The final product at the end of the development and testing cycle is delivered in the deployment phase, ensuring changes do not impact the current operations.
- Operations
Business As Usual operations is performed on the deployed code in this phase.
- Monitoring
The performance of the newly deployed software is monitored to ensure conformance to user and business requirements.
5. What benefits does DevOps bring to the table?
Some of the essential benefits that DevOps offers are
- Continuous and ongoing software delivery
- Stable environments for development and deployment
- Faster software delivery
- Quicker resolution of problems that aren’t as complex as in a non-DevOps scenario
- Early error detection and mitigation, bringing down development costs.
- Improved collaboration and communication among teams.
6. What will be your approach to a project that plans to implement DevOps?
A good approach will be to break the development into stages or phases.
Phase1-Assess the existing system for a limited period of about 2 or 3 weeks and identify areas of opportunity while also mapping them to business requirements.
Phase 2- A PoC of Proof of Concept will help in bringing most of the people on board, if not already. Once approved, a team can start implementing by building a project plan.
Phase 3-It will be now that DevOps can swoop in with version control/unit testing/integration/deployment/monitoring attempt to delivery software of the highest quality in quick time.
7. What according to you, is the crucial difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment?
In continuous deployment, code that passes automated tests is automatically deployed to production, while continuous delivery ensure that code is ready to be safely deployed into production. Continuous Delivery is a safer approach where existing business applications are at the least risk of disruption. Continuous Deployment, on the other hand, focuses o faster processing and delivery.
8. How does software configuration management fit in DevOps?
Software Configuration management is a significant part of DevOps which,
- Enables the system to handle rapid and continuous changes.
- Standardizes resource configurations that help in the efficient management of information technology infrastructure.
- Assists with administration of multiple servers helping to maintain integrity across the infrastructure.
9. In what ways does monitoring help in maintaining the entire architecture?
In DevOps, continuous monitoring is the practice of detection, identifications and reporting of errors, faults or threats across the IT infrastructure. Monitoring thus helps in,
- Ensuring that all applications, services and resources are reliably running across the infrastructure.
- Availability of servers increases with early detection and quick fixes because of continuous monitoring.
10. How does AWS contribute to DevOps?
AWS has an important role to play in DevOps, with multiple features coming into play.
- Simple and quick setup- Almost as easy as plug and play AWS services help in quick tooling for the development team.
- Scalability – AWS can scale your existing business from a single, couple or a few servers to thousands in a matter of hours.
- Automation- AWS wields the power of automation to automate repetitive tasks and give you back valuable time for further innovation.
- Security- AWS is highly secure with its Identity, Access Management tools. You can implement strict security policies across the enterprise.
- Extensibility with partner ecosystem- AWS allows a large ecosystem of partners, which is a great way to extend the already enormous offerings of AWS services.
Conclusion
DevOps is a huge field dominated by multiple tools. To gain a significant advantage over your competitors, we recommend you to go through a quick course on DevOps, helping you touch base with almost all tools that are prevalent in DevOps.
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