How To Prepare For Devops Interview

What Is Nagios Log Server

Nagios Log Server simplifies the process of searching the log data. Nagios Log Server is the best choice to perform tasks such as setting up alerts, notifying when potential threats arise, simply querying the log data, and quickly auditing any system. With Nagios Log Server, we can get all of our log data in one location with high availability.

What Does It Mean By A Branching Strategy In Devops

Branching is a method implemented for code isolation. It creates a copy of the source code to make two versions that are separately developed. Various kinds of branching are available. Thus, the DevOps team should make a choice based on application requirements. Correspondingly, the choice is referred to as a branching strategy.

Interview Questions About Cloud

Cloud adoption is increasing every year. Thatâs especially true now that public cloud providers are more enterprise-friendly, letting customers have hybrid environments with on-premise infrastructure. Iâve seen that many companies are looking for people to have working experience with AWS, Azure, or Google. AWS is the most common one, but it also depends on the company youâre applying. These are the types of questions you might get about the cloud:

Question: How would you create a highly available application and keep costs low?

Preparation: Thereâs an excellent paper from AWS about this.

Question: What is chaos engineering?

Preparation: Not many companies are using it, but itâs useful if you have at least an idea about the topic.

Question: What is immutable infrastructure?

Preparation: Youâll need to explain why itâs better to recreate environments than to fix them. Read more about immutable infrastructure here.

Question: How would you create a cloud-native application?

Preparation: Thereâs a book dedicated to this topic that you might want to read.

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Devops Interview Questions: How To Prepare

On LinkedIn, there are more than thirty thousand U.S.-based DevOps positions. That number may not be as high as it is for software developers, but itâs still higher than sysadmins or systems engineers.

Maybe this demand has you interested in switching career paths, or maybe you want to change jobs. If thatâs the case, youâre in luck. Todayâs post will present some common interview questions that youâll probably get when interviewing for a DevOps position. Iâll also include some guidance on how to prepare in advance and plenty of links so you can do your research.

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If youâre interviewing for a DevOps job, itâs vital that you realize that the industry has changed, and itâs crucial that you can adapt to the new way of delivering software. So letâs start with the first category of questions you may be asked.

Why Has Devops Gained Prominence Over The Last Few Years

Before talking about the growing popularity of DevOps, discuss the current industry scenario. Begin with some examples of how big players such as are investing in DevOps to automate and accelerate application deployment and how this has helped them grow their business. Using Facebook as an example, you would point to Facebooks continuous deployment and code ownership models and how these have helped it scale up but ensure the quality of experience at the same time. Hundreds of lines of code are implemented without affecting quality, stability, and security.

Your next use case should be Netflix. This streaming and on-demand video company follow similar practices with fully automated processes and systems. Mention the user base of these two organizations: Facebook has 2 billion users while Netflix streams online content to more than 100 million users worldwide.

These are great examples of how DevOps can help organizations to ensure higher success rates for releases, reduce the lead time between bug fixes, streamline and continuous delivery through automation, and an overall reduction in manpower costs.

We will now look into the next set of DevOps Interview Questions that includes – Git, Selenium, Jenkins.

Free Course: Getting Started with Jenkins

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How To Create A Docker Container

A user has two options either he will build a docker image or pull an existing docker image from docker hub. Now, docker will create a new container MySQL and container layer of the read-write filesystem will also be created on the top of the image layer.

• Run this command to create docker container: Docker run -t i MySQL
• Now list down the running containers with this command: Docker ps

Q1 What Is Meant By Continuous Integration

I will advise you to begin this answer by giving a small definition of Continuous Integration . It is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early.I suggest that you explain how you have implemented it in your previous job. You can refer the below given example:

In the diagram shown above:

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The Need For Qualified Devops Job Candidates Continues To Grow As More Companies Adopt The Methodology Review These Devops Questions And Answers To Prepare For An Interview

• Robert Sheldon

DevOps is gaining momentum in organizations of all types and sizes, resulting in a growing need for qualified individuals to fill various DevOps roles. But breaking into the DevOps field is no small feat, and it inevitably means having to interview for one or more positions. During those interviews, candidates will likely be asked an assortment of questions, and they should be able to respond to them confidently and knowledgably.

A good way for candidates to prepare for an interview is to review example DevOps interview questions in advance. This can guide them to the type of information they need to know, as well as prepare them for answering questions about a range of topics. To help candidates with this process, this article provides 30 interview questions and their possible answers.

Candidates should keep in mind that DevOps is a broad field that requires a wide breadth of skills and knowledge. These 30 questions offer a good representation of the types of information that’s important for DevOps candidates to understand and can help them prepare for an interview.

Interview Questions About Software Development

Even though in a DevOps role you wonât be programming in the same way developers do, you still need to have some development in your background. Why? First, the intention is that you understand how developers work so you can make their lives easier when they request something of the operations folks. Second, youâll be automating a lot of things, and itâs a good idea to implement some of the practices from software development. So youâll get these type of questions:

Question: Why is version control so crucial in a DevOps environment?

Preparation: Know that source control will become the only source of truth for everything.

Question: What is trunk-based development? And why is it a recommended practice for continuous integration?

Preparation: You can do a deep dive into this by visiting the site dedicated to the topic.

Question: What are feature flags? What do feature flags enable you to do?

Preparation: Remember that, by using feature flags, youâll be able to ship uncompleted code and avoid blocking the path for any upcoming working feature or bug fix. Feature flags are why a company can do several deployments per day.

Question: What is your experience in programming languages like Python, Go, or Ruby?

Preparation: Know that most scripts are developed in one of those languages. For example, if you want to extend the use of Chef, itâs easier if you know Ruby.

Question: What is continuous testing? How much effort should the team invest in testing?

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What Is Branching In Git

When you want to add a new feature into an existing software application then you need to create a new branch and add the new features on that branch. Consider the following important things:

• Circles on the branch representing several commits made on the branch
• Once all changes are done, you can commit to merge your code in the master branch

Why Use Version Control In Devops

A follow-up question might test your knowledge of the advantages of version control in DevOps. To answer appropriately, provide several examples of benefits achieved when version control is applied to DevOps.

Example:”Using a version control system, teams can work independently on specific parts of a project and merge them easily when completed. These systems also package all previous versions. This is convenient if you need to revert to a previous version.”

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Q5 Why Is Continuous Testing Important For Devops

You can answer this question by saying, Continuous Testing allows any change made in the code to be tested immediately. This avoids the problems created by having big-bang testing left to the end of the cycle such as release delays and quality issues. In this way, Continuous Testing facilitates more frequent and good quality releases.

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Q18 Differentiate Between Continuous Deployment And Continuous Delivery

And, thats it!

I hope these questions help you crack your DevOps interview. If you have any more questions for us, do mention them in the comments section and we will get back to you.

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Can You Explain The Architecture Of Jenkins

Jenkins follows the master-slave architecture. The master pulls the latest code from the GitHub repository whenever there is a commitment made to the code. The master requests slaves to perform operations like build, test and run and produce test case reports. This workload is distributed to all the slaves in a uniform manner.

Jenkins also uses multiple slaves because there might be chances that require different test case suites to be run for different environments once the code commits are done.

Q15 Explain The Difference Between A Centralized And Distributed Version Control System

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Questions About Your Devops Experience And Background

The following questions provide examples of what interviewers may ask to assess your background and experience using DevOps:

• Describe a time when your integration of DevOps did not fit the project. How did you handle it?

• What do you do to help teammates evaluate their work and resolve errors?

• How do you set communication parameters in a DevOps environment?

• Have you ever completed a project using component-based development?

• What do you consider when working in paired programming environments?

• How do you approach each phase of the DevOps life cycle?

• Explain how DevOps can benefit business operations.

• What role does configuration management have in your DevOps projects?

• How does infrastructure as code relate to configuration management?

• When would you use imperative approaches to system configuration in IaC?

• What instances call for declarative configuration in IaC?

• Why would you integrate continuous monitoring? How would you do it?

• What are some effective network monitoring tools you have experience using?

• What approaches do you take to handle version control?

• What role does automation have in continuous deployment?

• If you determine a current project requires a DevOps approach, how would you implement AWS?

• How do you process infrastructure code in AWS?

• When would you suggest a centralised version control system?

• When would you use a distributed control system?

• What factors would you consider during the evaluation of a Linux-build system with low performance?

Why Are Ssl Certificates Used In Chef

• SSL certificates are used between the Chef server and the client to ensure that each node has access to the right data.
• Every node has a private and public key pair. The public key is stored at the Chef server.
• When an SSL certificate is sent to the server, it will contain the private key of the node.
• The server compares this against the public key in order to identify the node and give the node access to the required data.

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Q4 What Are Plugins In Nagios

Begin this answer by defining Plugins. They are scripts that can run from a command line to check the status of a host or service. Nagios uses the results from Plugins to determine the current status of hosts and services on your network. Once you have defined Plugins, explain why we need Plugins. Nagios will execute a Plugin whenever there is a need to check the status of a host or service. Plugin will perform the check and then simply returns the result to Nagios. Nagios will process the results that it receives from the Plugin and take the necessary actions.

How To Make Content Reusable/redistributable

Following are the different ways to make content redistributable or reusable:

• Roles are used to managing tasks in a playbook that can be shared via ansible-galaxy.
• include is used to add another file or submodule to a playbook and make it possible to add a single code into multiple playbooks.
• Import is the updated version of include and used to ensure that file is added only once. It is more suitable when a line is run recursively.

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What Is Pair Programming

Pair programming is an engineering practice where two programmers work on the same system, same design, and same code. They follow the rules of Extreme Programming. Here, one programmer is termed as driver while the other acts as observer which continuously monitors the project progress to identify any further problems.

Q13 How Do You Setup A Script To Run Every Time A Repository Receives New Commits Through Push

There are three ways to configure a script to run every time a repository receives new commits through push, one needs to define either a pre-receive, update, or a post-receive hook depending on when exactly the script needs to be triggered.

• Pre-receive hook in the destination repository is invoked when commits are pushed to it. Any script bound to this hook will be executed before any references are updated. This is a useful hook to run scripts that help enforce development policies.
• Update hook works in a similar manner to pre-receive hook, and is also triggered before any updates are actually made. However, the update hook is called once for every commit that has been pushed to the destination repository.
• Finally, post-receive hook in the repository is invoked after the updates have been accepted into the destination repository. This is an ideal place to configure simple deployment scripts, invoke some continuous integration systems, dispatch notification emails to repository maintainers, etc.

Hooks are local to every Git repository and are not versioned. Scripts can either be created within the hooks directory inside the .git directory, or they can be created elsewhere and links to those scripts can be placed within the directory.

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Q7 Mention Some Of The Useful Plugins In Jenkins

Below, I have mentioned some important Plugins:

• Maven 2 project
• Join
• Green Balls

These Plugins, I feel are the most useful plugins. If you want to include any other Plugin that is not mentioned above, you can add them as well. But, make sure you first mention the above stated plugins and then add your own.

Tooling Optimization And Tradeoffs

Low-level knowledge about programming and operating systems is important for the DevOps candidate to possess so they can make well-informed higher-level decisions, but in many DevOps roles, the candidate will not need to use these skills directly.

Instead, the core of many DevOps positions is to take a big-picture view of a company or system, and implement technical optimizations at the bottlenecks. But because of this focus on optimization, it’s common for DevOps engineers to want to optimize every system and process that they come into contact with.

Any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion.~The Phoenix Project

It’s important to check that your candidate isn’t obsessed with optimization to the point where they will be pushing to make optimizations in sections of systems that will not truly benefit from them. Or more generally, the candidate should be adept at making decisions involving trade-offs.

Finding inefficiencies in a large system is not difficult. Suggesting optimizations is similarly easy. Implementing the suggested optimizations is more useful, but still relatively straight forward in many scenarios.

The hard part of DevOps is often realising when some component is inefficient and yet good enough. Therefore, sometimes it’s more important to test that the candidate knows where to not optimize.

However, also listen out for the exceptions which the candidate will hopefully mention:

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