Easy interview questions in DevOps & Cloud, page 7
How do you manage secrets for hundreds of services in centralized CI/CD?
It tests secret sprawl prevention and least privilege in CI/CD. Answer: use a secrets manager with RBAC, short-lived credentials, runtime injection, and audit logs. Red flag: secrets in Git, plain env vars, or one shared master key.
What is a Helm chart?
A chart is a templated, versioned bundle of manifests with a values file; it solves config duplication and reuse across environments.
What is the basic principle of GitOps?
Git holds desired state; a controller continuously reconciles the cluster to match it; benefits are auditability, rollback, and drift correction.
Explain the Well-Architected Framework pillars
Name the pillars, operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability, and explain each briefly.
Override Helm values at install time
Pass custom files with -f or --values, single keys with --set, and know precedence: defaults, then files, then --set.
Defining SLIs and an SLO for an auth service?
Pick user-centric SLIs like login availability and latency, measure good over valid events at the right boundary, then set an achievable SLO with a window.
Lift-and-shift versus replatforming migration
Rehosting moves apps unchanged for speed and low risk; replatforming makes targeted optimizations for cloud benefits; explain the speed-versus-value trade-off.
What is an error budget and how is it used?
The budget is the allowed unreliability (100 percent minus the SLO); track its burn, ship freely when budget remains, and freeze risky changes to focus on reliability when exhausted.
What is a Custom Resource Definition?
A CRD registers a new resource kind so the API server stores and serves it like built-ins; it lets you model domain concepts declaratively.
Core components of a Kubernetes Operator
A CRD defines the type, a controller watches instances via the API server and runs a reconcile loop, encoding operational knowledge to drive real state.
Creating an instance of a custom resource
Write a manifest with apiVersion (group/version), kind, metadata.name, and a spec matching the CRD schema, then kubectl apply -f it.
What a service mesh solves
It adds traffic management, security via mTLS, and observability at the network layer through sidecars, beyond what plain Kubernetes offers.
The sidecar proxy pattern in a mesh
A proxy container shares the pod, all in/out traffic is redirected through it, so policy and telemetry apply without code changes.
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