Entry level · DevOps track · with diagrams
Ten DevOps interview questions with model answers: CI/CD, incidents, containers, infrastructure as code, observability, canaries, secrets, runbooks and ownership. Free, with diagrams, no account.
Continuous integration builds and tests every change automatically the same way; continuous delivery keeps every good build shippable, and deployment ships it. Same verification each time, so releases stop depending on who is awake. Build, test, ship: automatic and identical.
Roll back to the last known good version first, then investigate. Restore service with the reversible path, then learn: timeline, cause, fix, prevention. Rollback is a feature of the deploy design. Say the rollback before the root cause.
The same image runs identically on a laptop, in test and in production because the runtime ships with the code. The win is consistency across environments, not speed. Works-on-my-machine dies when the machine ships too.
Servers and networks defined in versioned files instead of clicked together by hand. Click-built infrastructure cannot be reviewed, repeated or rolled back; files in version control do all three. Review, repeat, roll back: the three verbs that justify it.
Three signals: logs for what happened, metrics for how much and how slow, alerts on symptoms customers feel. Alert on disk, latency and error rate before the customer complains. Machines complain first; that is the whole doctrine.
The new version goes to a small slice of traffic first while you watch error rate and latency. Small exposure bounds the blast radius: a bad canary affects a slice, a bad full release affects everyone. Use it whenever rollback alone feels thin.
In a secret manager or the platform's sealed store, never in git. Git history never forgets; secret systems give access logs and rotation. Chat messages, emails and code are not secret stores.
Same code plus different result means different context: compare versions, environment variables and secrets between the two. Environment parity is the first suspect; containers and lockfiles are the usual cure. Diff the environments, not the code.
A stranger can follow it at 3 a.m.: symptoms, checks, safe commands, escalation. If it does not help under stress it is not a runbook. Detection, escalation, recovery, in that order, each step copy-pasteable.
The team that writes a service owns its production behavior: on-call, dashboards, postmortems. Pain in production feeds back into design. It does not mean no sleep or no operations colleagues; it means no throwing over the wall.
Throw over the wall
You build it, you run it
Straight answers
Ten questions with model answers and diagrams. Read one, answer aloud, then compare with the model. There is no timer, no account and nothing recorded.
No. They are practice items written for learning and never appear in any job interview bank or certification exam. Scores and answers stay with you; nothing counts toward any assessment.
Study the matching free course for the questions you missed, then test yourself on the sibling practice exam. When both feel easy, look at the certification sittings on the pricing page.