Easy interview questions in DevOps & Cloud, page 3
Node, Pod, and Container relationship
A Node is a machine, a Pod is the smallest deployable unit wrapping one or more containers that share network and storage, and the Pod abstraction enables co-location and lifecycle management.
What is Pipeline as Code and its benefits over GUI configuration?
Tests whether you treat delivery pipelines as versioned code. Strong answers define PaC as pipeline definitions in source control, citing branch automation, peer review, audit trails, and single source of truth.
Security Groups vs NACLs
A security group is stateful and attached to instances or NICs; a NACL is stateless and applied at the subnet.
Core control plane components
Api-server as the front door, etcd as state store, scheduler placing pods, and controller-manager running reconciliation loops, plus cloud-controller-manager.
Declarative vs scripted pipeline syntax: when to choose each?
This tests Jenkins Pipeline trade-off judgment. Contrast Declarative's opinionated blocks and guardrails with Scripted's raw Groovy flexibility; prefer Declarative for new projects unless complex flow control is needed.
Minimal objects to expose a stateless app
A Deployment to run and self-heal replicas plus a Service to give a stable endpoint, exposed externally via type LoadBalancer or NodePort, or an Ingress.
How should you manage sensitive data in a committed pipeline file?
Tests that committed pipeline YAML must never store secrets. Answer: fetch at runtime via native secrets manager integrations; if needed, use masked, hidden, protected CI/CD variables; use typed CI/CD inputs for parameters.
Core components of Prometheus
Server scrapes targets found via service discovery, stores samples in a local time-series database, with Alertmanager and exporters as helpers.
Choosing relational vs NoSQL managed databases
Choose relational for complex relationships, joins, flexible queries, and strong transactions; choose NoSQL for known access patterns needing massive horizontal scale.
Deployment, ReplicaSet, and Pod hierarchy
A Deployment manages ReplicaSets, each ReplicaSet keeps a set of identical Pods, and Deployments add rolling updates, rollback, and self-healing.
Read replicas in managed relational databases
A read replica is an async copy of the primary that serves read-only queries, offloading the primary and scaling read-heavy workloads; expect replication lag.
Create a Deployment with 3 replicas via kubectl
Kubectl create deployment webapp --image=my-app:1.0, then kubectl scale to 3 replicas, or use --replicas if supported.
What is IaC and its CI/CD benefits over manual provisioning?
Cover descriptive models, idempotency, and on-demand environments for repeatable CI/CD.
Symptom-based versus cause-based alerting
Symptom alerts fire on user impact like high error rate or latency; cause alerts fire on internal conditions like high CPU. Page on symptoms, treat causes as diagnostic.
How does caching reduce database load?
Cache-aside reads, RAM-speed lookups, TTL plus invalidation.
Debugging a Pod in CrashLoopBackOff
Kubectl describe pod for events, restarts, and last state; kubectl logs (with --previous) for the crashed container's output.
Explain the difference between declarative and imperative IaC.
Contrast Terraform with Bash or Ansible; note drift detection, idempotency, and state trade-offs.
First steps on a p99 latency page
Confirm scope and blast radius, check recent changes and deploys, then look at dependencies and resource saturation.
Describe the Terraform workflow from code to live
This tests Terraform workflows beyond local commands. A strong answer covers: version-controlled code, terraform plan for speculative validation, then terraform apply via remote runs with policies. Red flag: only local apply without reviews or remote state.
The cloud shared responsibility model
The provider secures the cloud (hardware, OS, runtime), you secure what runs in it (code, data, config, access).
We are hiring for this. Every open role lists the topics its interview covers, so you can prepare for the real thing rather than guessing.
See open roles