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?
- RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
- Network Policies
- Secrets Management
- Pod Security Policies
- Image Scanning
How would you handle a production failure in a CI/CD pipeline?
- Identify the failure (logs, monitoring tools)
- Rollback the last stable version
- Fix and test the issue
- Redeploy the fixed version
- 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?
- Distributed Tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin)
- Centralized Logging (ELK, Loki)
- Metrics (Prometheus, Grafana)
- 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?
- Kubernetes Secrets
- Vault by HashiCorp
- AWS Secrets Manager
- External Secrets Operator
- Sealed Secrets
How do you optimize Kubernetes performance?
- Pod Auto-scaling (HPA, VPA)
- Resource Limits & Requests
- Efficient Networking
- Node Affinity & Anti-affinity
- Cluster Autoscaling
How do you ensure compliance in DevOps pipelines?
- Automated Policy Enforcement (OPA, Kyverno)
- Audit Logging
- Access Control & Role-Based Permissions
- Compliance as Code
- 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?
- Blue-Green Deployments
- Canary Releases
- Rolling Updates
- Session Draining
- Traffic Management
What are the best practices for managing multi-cloud infrastructure?
- Use a common IaC tool (Terraform)
- Standardized security policies
- Cross-cloud monitoring
- Cost optimization
- Service abstraction
How do you secure container images?
- Use minimal base images (Alpine, Distroless)
- Scan images for vulnerabilities (Trivy, Clair)
- Sign and verify images
- Use private registries
- Regular updates and patching
How do you manage Kubernetes upgrades with zero downtime?
- Rolling Updates
- Node Drain & Replace
- Backup & Disaster Recovery Plan
- Canary Testing
- 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?
- kubectl describe pod
pod-name
- kubectl logs
pod-name
- kubectl get events
- Service mesh tracing
- 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?
- Backup etcd
- Cluster snapshots
- Multi-region deployments
- Regular DR testing
- 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
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