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DevOps / Cloud Engineer interview questions

DevOps and cloud interviews are hands-on. Expect questions on Linux, networking, CI/CD pipelines, containers and at least one cloud provider, plus scenario questions about outages. Interviewers value people who automate and who stay calm when things break.

11 questions with answer notes · 4 rounds · By the JOBSPOT 360 team

How the selection process usually works

  1. 1

    Screening or online test

    Linux commands, networking basics and scripting MCQs.

  2. 2

    Technical round 1

    Linux, Git, CI/CD, Docker and a scripting task in Bash or Python.

  3. 3

    Technical round 2

    Kubernetes, cloud services (AWS, Azure or GCP), Terraform and incident scenarios.

  4. 4

    Managerial / HR

    On-call experience, team practices and offer discussion.

Rounds vary between companies. Smaller teams often merge the technical and managerial rounds, while larger companies may add an extra technical round.

Skills to brush up on

  • Linux administration
  • Bash or Python scripting
  • Git and branching strategies
  • CI/CD (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI)
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • AWS, Azure or GCP
  • Terraform or another IaC tool
  • Monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch)

Technical questions

  1. 01 What is the difference between a container and a virtual machine?

    How to answer: VMs virtualise hardware and run a full guest OS; containers share the host kernel and isolate processes, so they start faster and use less memory.

  2. 02 How do you reduce the size of a Docker image?

    How to answer: Use a slim or distroless base image, multi-stage builds, a .dockerignore file, and combine layers while cleaning package caches.

  3. 03 Explain Pods, Deployments and Services in Kubernetes.

    How to answer: A Pod runs one or more containers. A Deployment manages replicas and rolling updates. A Service gives the Pods a stable network endpoint.

  4. 04 Walk me through a CI/CD pipeline you have built.

    How to answer: Trigger, build, test, scan, build the image, push to a registry, deploy to staging, approval, deploy to production, and how you roll back.

  5. 05 What is Infrastructure as Code, and why does Terraform keep a state file?

    How to answer: IaC means infrastructure is defined in versioned code. The state maps your code to real resources; store it remotely with locking for team use.

  6. 06 Blue-green or canary deployment: what is the difference?

    How to answer: Blue-green switches all traffic between two full environments. Canary sends a small percentage of traffic to the new version first and increases it gradually.

  7. 07 Which Linux commands do you use to check CPU, memory, disk and open ports?

    How to answer: top or htop, free -h, df -h and du -sh, and ss -tulpn or netstat. Mention journalctl and tail -f for logs.

  8. 08 How do you manage secrets in pipelines and clusters?

    How to answer: Never commit them. Use the CI secret store, a cloud secrets manager or Vault, and Kubernetes secrets with encryption at rest and RBAC.

Scenario questions

  1. 01 The website is down at 2 AM. What are your first five steps?

    How to answer: Confirm the impact, check monitoring and recent deployments, look at logs and resource usage, roll back if a deploy caused it, then communicate and write a post-mortem.

  2. 02 A Pod is stuck in CrashLoopBackOff. How do you debug it?

    How to answer: Run kubectl describe pod and kubectl logs --previous, then check the image, environment variables, config maps, probes and resource limits.

  3. 03 Disk usage on a production server hit 95%. What do you do?

    How to answer: Find the large directories with du, clear or rotate logs safely, check for deleted files still held open, then add alerts and log rotation so it does not recur.
Then comes the HR round Almost every interview ends with HR questions about you, your plans and your salary expectations. See the common ones and how to answer them.

Resume tips for this role

  • Show automation impact: deployment time cut from hours to minutes, or uptime improved.
  • List cloud services you have actually used (EC2, S3, RDS, EKS), not just the provider name.
  • Cloud certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect Associate or CKA carry real weight here.
  • Link a GitHub repo with Terraform or a CI pipeline you wrote.

This guide is written by the JOBSPOT 360 team from common interview patterns for this kind of role. It is not provided by any employer, and real interviews will differ. Read our editorial policy.