Advanced DevOps Interview Questions
12 questions
How do you control the order Argo CD applies resources within a single Application, e.g. making sure a database migration Job completes before the Deployment that depends on it rolls out?
AdvancedArgo CDKubernetes8 min
You inherit an EC2 workload that authenticates to AWS using an IAM user with AdministratorAccess. How would you migrate it to least-privilege access without causing an outage?
AdvancedAWSIAMEC212 min
A security scanner just flagged one of your production S3 buckets as publicly readable. Walk through how you'd respond in the first hour and prevent a repeat.
AdvancedAWSS3Security10 min
Your AKS cluster is under CPU pressure and pods are stuck Pending, but the cluster autoscaler isn't adding nodes. How would you troubleshoot it?
AdvancedAzureKubernetesAKS10 min
A team wants zero-downtime deploys with fast rollback for a high-traffic payments API. Would you recommend blue-green or canary deployment, and why?
AdvancedCI/CDKubernetes10 min
What's the actual difference between designing for high availability across Availability Zones versus across Regions, and when do you actually need multi-region instead of just multi-AZ?
AdvancedAWS8 min
How do you safely add a NOT NULL column to a large production table without locking it for the duration of a slow backfill?
AdvancedPostgresql9 min
Design a migration from long-lived AWS access keys stored as GitHub Actions secrets to OIDC-based short-lived credentials, for an organization with 40 repositories deploying to production.
AdvancedGitHub ActionsAWSOIDC12 min
Your on-call team is getting paged 40+ times a week and starting to ignore alerts. How would you redesign the alerting strategy to fix that without missing real incidents?
AdvancedPrometheusMonitoring10 min
How do you decide what belongs on a golden path / internal developer platform versus what teams should just be free to do themselves?
AdvancedPlatform Engineering8 min
A developer just committed a live database password directly into a public GitHub repository. It's been merged and pushed. What do you do, in order?
AdvancedSecurityGitHub10 min
terraform plan shows a production RDS instance will be destroyed and recreated after a change you thought was trivial. What would you investigate before running apply?
AdvancedTerraformAWS10 min