Mock interviews

Advanced Level

Expert-level DevOps interview questions and answers for senior professionals.

Advanced Level

This section covers expert-level DevOps concepts and questions commonly asked in interviews for senior professionals.

How do you secure a Kubernetes cluster?

  1. RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
  2. Network Policies
  3. Secrets Management
  4. Pod Security Policies
  5. Image Scanning

How would you handle a production failure in a CI/CD pipeline?

  1. Identify the failure (logs, monitoring tools)
  2. Rollback the last stable version
  3. Fix and test the issue
  4. Redeploy the fixed version
  5. Post-mortem analysis

What is GitOps, and how does it work?

GitOps automates infrastructure and app deployment using Git as the single source of truth. Benefits include:

  • Version Control for infrastructure
  • Automated Reconciliation
  • Audit Trail
  • Rollback Capability

How do you monitor microservices?

  1. Distributed Tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin)
  2. Centralized Logging (ELK, Loki)
  3. Metrics (Prometheus, Grafana)
  4. Service Mesh Monitoring (Istio)

How does service mesh improve microservices security?

A service mesh (e.g., Istio) provides:

  • mTLS (Mutual TLS)
  • Traffic control & observability
  • Access policies
  • Service-to-service authentication

What is Open Policy Agent (OPA)?

OPA enforces security policies in cloud environments:

  • Policy as Code
  • Kubernetes admission control
  • Microservices authorization

How do you manage secrets in Kubernetes?

  1. Kubernetes Secrets
  2. Vault by HashiCorp
  3. AWS Secrets Manager
  4. External Secrets Operator
  5. Sealed Secrets

How do you optimize Kubernetes performance?

  1. Pod Auto-scaling (HPA, VPA)
  2. Resource Limits & Requests
  3. Efficient Networking
  4. Node Affinity & Anti-affinity
  5. Cluster Autoscaling

How do you ensure compliance in DevOps pipelines?

  1. Automated Policy Enforcement (OPA, Kyverno)
  2. Audit Logging
  3. Access Control & Role-Based Permissions
  4. Compliance as Code
  5. Regular Security Scanning

What is Chaos Engineering, and why is it used?

Chaos Engineering tests system resilience by:

  • Simulating failures
  • Testing recovery procedures
  • Identifying weaknesses
  • Building confidence in system behavior

How do you implement zero-downtime deployments?

  1. Blue-Green Deployments
  2. Canary Releases
  3. Rolling Updates
  4. Session Draining
  5. Traffic Management

What are the best practices for managing multi-cloud infrastructure?

  1. Use a common IaC tool (Terraform)
  2. Standardized security policies
  3. Cross-cloud monitoring
  4. Cost optimization
  5. Service abstraction

How do you secure container images?

  1. Use minimal base images (Alpine, Distroless)
  2. Scan images for vulnerabilities (Trivy, Clair)
  3. Sign and verify images
  4. Use private registries
  5. Regular updates and patching

How do you manage Kubernetes upgrades with zero downtime?

  1. Rolling Updates
  2. Node Drain & Replace
  3. Backup & Disaster Recovery Plan
  4. Canary Testing
  5. Version Skew Policy

What is Policy as Code (PaC)?

PaC enforces policies using code-driven automation:

  • Infrastructure policies
  • Security policies
  • Compliance policies
  • Cost policies

How do you debug failed Kubernetes deployments?

  1. kubectl describe pod pod-name
  2. kubectl logs pod-name
  3. kubectl get events
  4. Service mesh tracing
  5. Node problem detector

How does eBPF enhance observability in Kubernetes?

eBPF provides:

  • Kernel-level tracing
  • Network monitoring
  • Security enforcement
  • Performance analysis

How do you handle disaster recovery in Kubernetes?

  1. Backup etcd
  2. Cluster snapshots
  3. Multi-region deployments
  4. Regular DR testing
  5. Recovery automation

What is progressive delivery, and how does it differ from traditional deployments?

Progressive delivery uses:

  • Feature flags
  • A/B testing
  • Dark launches
  • Gradual rollouts
  • Automated rollbacks

📢 Contribute & Stay Updated

💡 Want to contribute?
We welcome contributions! If you have insights, new tools, or improvements, feel free to submit a pull request.

📌 How to Contribute?

  • Read the CONTRIBUTING.md guide.
  • Fix errors, add missing topics, or suggest improvements.
  • Submit a pull request with your updates.

🌍 Community & Support

🔗 GitHub: @NotHarshhaa
📝 Blog: ProDevOpsGuy
💬 Telegram Community: Join Here