25 DevOps Engineer Interview Questions

Walk me through your ideal CI/CD pipeline for a production microservices application.

How do you manage infrastructure drift in a Terraform-managed environment?

Describe your approach to zero-downtime deployments.

How would you design a disaster recovery plan for a critical production system?

What's your strategy for managing secrets across multiple environments?

How do you implement autoscaling — what metrics do you watch and what are the thresholds?

Describe how you'd migrate a legacy on-prem application to the cloud.

How do you approach cost optimization in a cloud environment?

What's your philosophy on monitoring — what should always trigger a page?

How do you structure Kubernetes namespaces and RBAC for a multi-team organization?

Describe a production incident you led. How did you communicate and resolve it?

What's your approach to container image security and vulnerability scanning?

How do you handle blue-green vs. canary deployments — when would you use each?

Describe your experience with service mesh technologies like Istio or Linkerd.

How would you implement distributed tracing across 10+ microservices?

What's your strategy for database backups and point-in-time recovery?

How do you manage configuration across dev, staging, and production environments?

Describe how you'd set up centralized logging for a distributed system.

How do you approach on-call rotation and runbook documentation?

What's your experience with GitOps workflows?

How would you reduce the time it takes to provision a new developer environment to under 10 minutes?

Describe your approach to network security and traffic isolation in Kubernetes.

How do you ensure high availability for a stateful application?

What's your experience with FinOps — how do you give teams cost visibility?

How do you measure and improve deployment frequency and lead time for changes?