DevOps Engineer Mock Interview: 40 Cloud, CI/CD & SRE Questions
DevOps interviews tend to reward practical reasoning.
You may know
Docker Kubernetes CI/CD cloud platforms
But the interview often becomes
“What would you do when this system fails?” That is why scenario practice matters. Infrastructure
1. How would you design infrastructure for a new application?
2. What should be automated?
3. How do you manage infrastructure changes?
4. What is infrastructure as code?
5. How do you handle environment differences?
Containers
6. What problem do containers solve?
7. What happens when a container fails?
8. How do you build a reliable container image?
9. How do you manage secrets?
10. How do you troubleshoot a container that won't start?
Kubernetes
11. What problem does Kubernetes solve?
12. What happens when a pod fails?
13. How do you expose an application?
14. How do deployments and rollouts work?
15. How would you troubleshoot a failing deployment?
CI/CD
16. What should happen in a CI pipeline?
17. How do you design deployment stages?
18. How do you handle rollback?
19. How do you prevent a broken build from reaching production?
20. What should be automated before deployment?
Reliability and observability
21. What metrics would you monitor?
22. Logs vs metrics vs traces?
23. How would you investigate high latency?
24. How would you investigate high error rates?
25. What is an SLO?
26. How do you think about availability?
Incident response
- Tell me about a production incident.
- What is your first step during an outage?
- How do you communicate during incidents?
- How do you perform a root-cause analysis?
- How do you prevent recurrence?
- Tell me about a difficult infrastructure decision.
- Tell me about a failed deployment.
- Tell me about a disagreement with developers.
- What DevOps skill are you developing?
- What makes a deployment system reliable?
Security
32. How do you manage secrets?
33. How do you control access?
34. How do you secure CI/CD pipelines?
35. How do you think about least privilege?
Behavioral
Practice scenarios, not definitions
Instead of only practicing
“What is Kubernetes?”
practice
“A production service keeps restarting. Walk me through your investigation.”
That forces you to reason through
symptoms → evidence → hypothesis → test → mitigation → prevention That's much more useful interview preparation. [Run a DevOps mock interview with Mockly] DAYS 38–40 Mockly Days 38–40: Engineering Manager, Consulting and Product Manager Interviews