DevOps Interview Questions for Indian Engineers 2026

CI/CD is the foundation of DevOps and is tested at every level. Continuous Integration: automatically building and testing code on every commit. Continuous Delivery: automatically deploying to staging environments; manual gate before production. Continuous Deployment: automatically deploying to production. Tools: Jenkins (most common at Indian enterprise), GitHub Actions (most common at product companies and startups), GitLab CI, CircleCI, Azure DevOps. Pipeline stages: Lint and code quality check (ESLint, SonarQube), Unit tests, Integration tests, Build (Docker image), Push to registry (ECR, GCR, Docker Hub), Deploy to staging, E2E tests, Manual approval gate, Deploy to production. Blue-green deployment and canary releases: zero-downtime deployment strategies: expected knowledge at senior DevOps level.

Docker is foundational: tested in almost every DevOps interview. Core concepts: Image vs container (image is blueprint, container is running instance). Dockerfile: FROM (base image), RUN (execute during build), COPY/ADD (add files), ENV (environment variables), EXPOSE (document port), CMD/ENTRYPOINT (run on container start). Multi-stage builds: separate build and runtime images to reduce final image size. Docker Compose: multi-container applications, service dependencies, volumes, networks. Docker networking: bridge (default, container-to-container on same host), host (container uses host network), overlay (multi-host Swarm). Volume types: bind mounts vs named volumes. Best practices: don't run as root, minimise layers, use .dockerignore.

Kubernetes is the dominant container orchestration platform: heavily tested at senior DevOps and SRE roles. Core objects: Pod (smallest deployable unit: one or more containers), Deployment (manages ReplicaSet, rolling updates), Service (stable network endpoint: ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer), ConfigMap (non-sensitive config), Secret (sensitive config, base64 encoded), Namespace (logical cluster separation). Ingress: routing external HTTP/HTTPS traffic to services. HPA (Horizontal Pod Autoscaler): scales pods based on CPU/memory metrics. PVC/PV: persistent storage. Rolling updates and rollbacks: kubectl rollout history, rollout undo. Common interview scenario: a deployment is not starting: how do you debug? kubectl describe pod, kubectl logs, kubectl get events.

Terraform: the dominant IaC tool in Indian cloud DevOps roles. Core concepts: providers (AWS, GCP, Azure), resources, data sources, variables, outputs, state file (terraform.tfstate), remote state (S3 backend + DynamoDB for locking), modules (reusable Terraform code). Terraform commands: init, plan, apply, destroy, import. Ansible: configuration management and agentless automation via SSH, YAML playbooks, roles. Monitoring stack: Prometheus (metrics collection, PromQL), Grafana (dashboards), Alertmanager (alert routing). ELK/EFK stack: Elasticsearch (storage), Logstash/Fluentd (ingestion), Kibana (visualisation). SLI, SLO, SLA: Service Level Indicators (what you measure), Objectives (targets), Agreements (contractual). Error budgets: 99.9% SLO leaves 8.7 hours/year of downtime budget.