DevOps Interview Questions and Answers

1. What do you know about DevOps?

DevOps is a combination of two words: Development and Operations. DevOps is a set of software development practice that focuses collaboration between Development and Operations Team to deliver software product faster and lower failure rate of new releases. The aim of this methodology is to bridge the gap between development team and the operations team and increase an organization's speed to deliver applications and services.  

2. What are the core operations of DevOps in terms of development and infrastructure?

Core operations of DevOps in terms of development are:

• Code building
• Code coverage
• Unit testing
• Packaging
• Deployment

Core operations in terms of infrastructure are

• Provisioning
• Configuration
• Orchestration
• Deployment

3. Which are some of the most popular DevOps tools?

The more popular DevOps tools include:

• Selenium
• Puppet
• Chef
• Git
• Jenkins
• Ansible
• Docker

4. Is there a difference between Agile and DevOps? If yes, please explain.

• Agile software development methodology focuses on the development of software but DevOps is responsible for development as well as deployment of the software.
• Agile addresses gaps in Customer and Developer communications whereas DevOps addresses gaps in Developer and IT Operations communications.
• The agile team doesn't not care what happens to the software once it is developed and released. DevOps widens Agile’s principles, it ensures software fully delivered to the customer.
• JIRA, Bugzilla, Kanboard are some popular Agile tools. Puppet, Chef, AWS are popular DevOps tools.

5. What is the role of AWS in DevOps?

AWS provides services that help you practice DevOps at your company. It supports many DevOps principles and practices that businesses can capitalize on to improve the agility of their business. AWS helps you automate manual tasks so you can build products faster and more efficiently.

6. Which are the top DevOps tools?

The most popular DevOps tools are mentioned below:

Git : Version Control System tool
Jenkins : Continuous Integration tool
Selenium : Continuous Testing tool
Puppet, Chef, Ansible : Configuration Management and Deployment tools
Nagios : Continuous Monitoring tool
Docker : Containerization tool

7. What is Puppet?

Puppet is among the most used open source DevOps configuration management and deployment tool.  It is used in deploying, configuring and managing multiple servers. It helps system administrators to control and enforce consistency across infrastructure.

8. What is Chef?

It is a powerful automation platform that converts infrastructure to code.  In this tool, you can write scripts that are used to automate processes. This feature enables Chef to manage and configure multiple systems with ease.

9. What is a version control system?

Version Control System (VCS) is a software that helps software developers to work simultaneously and maintain a complete history of their work. It records changes over time so that you can revert files or entire project back to a previous state. It also lets you know who last modified that caused an issue and when. Using VCS, you can analyze how your project evolved between versions.

10. What is Git? What is GitHub?

Git is an open source Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) that can manage a project's source code history. It is a tool developers install locally to manage source code.

GitHub is a cloud based platform to which developers who use Git can connect and upload or download resources.

11. What is a repository in Git?

Git is a program that tracks changes made to files. The Git repository tracks all changes made to files in your project, building a history over time. It is stored in the same directory as the project itself, in a subdirectory called .git. If you delete the .git/ folder, then you delete your project’s history.

12. What is SubGit?

SubGit is a software tool used for migrating SVN to Git. It is stable and provides stress-free migration experience.

11. What is Jenkins? What are the advantages of Jenkins?

Jenkins is an open source continuous integration tool which is written in Java language.

Jenkins accelerates the software development process by building and testing your software projects continuously and thus, making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project.

Advantage of using Jenkins

• It is an open source tool with great community support.
• Installation is easier.
• It provides a very large numbers of plugin support.
• It leads to frequent new software releases. Every commit made in the source code is built and tested. So, developers needn't check the entire source code.
• It is built with Java and hence, it is portable to all the major platforms.

13. What is Ansible? Why Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source tool that provides IT automation, Configuration management and Automatic deployment. It is mainly used in IT infrastructure to manage or deploy applications to remote nodes. It also does IT orchestration, where you have to run tasks in a sequence and creates a chain of events happening on several different servers or devices.

Why Ansible?

• Ansible is free and Open Source.
• Ansible is very simple to set up and use. No special coding skills are necessary
• Ansible is agentless. You don’t need to install any other software on the client systems you want to automate
• Ansible uses YAML language which is very easy to learn.

14. What is Docker?

Docker is a containerization technology that packages your application and all its libraries and other dependencies together in the form of Containers to ensure that your application works quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.