9.9 KiB
DevOps Interview Questions
Table of Contents
Jenkins
beginner
- Explain what is Jenkins and what is it used for
- Explain each of the following in the context of nodes:
- Master
- Slave
- Executor
- Agent
- Label
- Explain each of the following in context of jobs:
- Job
- Build
- Test
- Artifacts
- Explain the architecture of Jenkins
- What are the different ways to trigger a build?
- How do you start a build automatically upon a change in a certain repository?
- What is a plugin?
- What plugins are you using in Jenkins? Which do you consider to most useful?
- Installation questions
- How to install Jenkins?
- How to install a plugin?
- How to install an agent?
Intermediate
- What type of jobs there are? what is the advantage of each type?
- What ways are you familiar with to notify users on build results?
Advanced
- Write a script to remove all the jobs which include the string "REMOVE_ME"
AWS
Global Infrastructure
- Explain the following
- Availability zone
- Region
- Edge location
S3 - beginner
- Explain what is S3 and what is it used for
- What is a bucket?
- True or False? a bucket name must be globally unique
- What objects in S3 consists of?
- Another way to ask it: explain key, value, version id and metadata in context of objects
- Explain data consistency
- Can you host dynamic websites on s3? what about static websites?
CloudFront
- Explain what is CloudFront and what is it used for
- Explain the following
- Origin
- Edge location
- Distribution
- What delivery methods available for the user with CDN?
- True or False? object are cached for the life of TTL
EC2 - beginner
- What type of instances have you created?
- How to increase RAM for a given EC2 instance?
Network
Network questions can be found here
Linux
beginner
-
Explain what each of the following commands does and given an example on how to use it
- ls
- rm
- rmdir (can you achieve the same result by using
rm
?) - grep
- wc
- df
-
How to change the permissions of a file?
-
What does the following permissions mean?:
- 777
- 644
- 750
-
How to add a new user to the system without providing him the ability to log-in into the system?
-
What commands are you using for troubleshooting issues? specifically:
- Disk issues
- Memory, CPU issues
- Networking issues
-
What is a Linux kernel module and how do you load a new module?
-
What is the different between a soft link and hard link?
hard link is the same file, using the same inode.
soft link is a shortcut to another file, using a different inode.
soft links can be created between different file systems while
hard link can be created only within the same file system.
- How to run a process in the background and why to do that in the first place?
You can achieve that by specifying & at end of the command.
As to Why? since some commands/processes can take a lot of time to finish
execution or run forever
- What signal is used when you run 'kill '?
The default signal is SIGTERM (15). This signal kills
process gracefully which means it allows it to save current
state configuration.
- What signals are you familiar with?
SIGTERM - default signal for terminating a process
SIGHUP - common usage is for reloading configuration
SIGKILL - a signal which cannot caught or ignored
To view all available signals run `kill -l`
Ansible
- Describe each of the following components in Ansible, including the relationship between them:
- Task
- Module
- Play
- Playbook
- Role
Task – a call to a specific Ansible module
Module – the actual unit of code executed by Ansible on your own host or a remote host. Modules are indexed by category (database, file, network, …) and also referred as task plugins.
Play – One or more tasks executed on a given host(s)
Playbook – One or more plays. Each play can be executed on the same or different hosts
Role – Ansible roles allows you to group resources based on certain functionality/service such that they can be easily reused. In a role, you have directories for variables, defaults, files, templates, handlers, tasks, and metadata. You can then use the role by simply specifying it in your playbook.
- Write a task to create the directory ‘/tmp/new_directory’
- name: Create a new directory
file:
path: "/tmp/new_directory"
state: directory
- What would be the result of the following play?
---
- name: Print information about my host
hosts: localhost
gather_facts: 'no'
tasks:
- name: Print hostname
debug:
msg: "It's me, {{ ansible_hostname }}"
When given a written code, always inspect it thoroughly. If your answer is “this will fail” then you are right. We are using a fact (ansible_hostname), which is a gathered piece of information from the host we are running on. But in this case, we disabled facts gathering (gather_facts: no) so the variable would be undefined which will result in failure.
- Write a playbook to install ‘zlib’ and ‘vim’ on all hosts if the file ‘/tmp/mario’ exists on the system.
---
- hosts: all
vars:
mario_file: /tmp/mario
package_list:
- 'zlib'
- 'vim'
tasks:
- name: Check for mario file
stat:
path: "{{ mario_file }}"
register: mario_f
- name: Install zlib and vim if mario file exists
become: "yes"
package:
name: "{{ item }}"
state: present
with_items: "{{ package_list }}"
when: mario_f.stat.exists
-
Write a playbook to deploy the file ‘/tmp/system_info’ on all hosts except for controllers group, with the following content
I'm <HOSTNAME> and my operating system is <OS>
replace and with the actual data for the specific host you are running on
The playbook to deploy the system_info file
---
- name: Deploy /tmp/system_info file
hosts: all:!controllers
tasks:
- name: Deploy /tmp/system_info
template:
src: system_info.j2
dest: /tmp/system_info
The content of the system_info.j2 template
# {{ ansible_managed }}
I'm {{ ansible_hostname }} and my operating system is {{ ansible_distribution }
Containers
- How containers different from VMs?
- In which scenarios would you use containers and in which you would prefer to use VMs?
Docker
- What happens when you run
docker run hello-world
?
Docker CLI passes your request to Docker daemon.
Docker daemon downloads the image from Docker Hub
Docker daemon creates a new container by using the image it downloaded
Docker daemon redirects output from container to Docker CLI which redirects it to the standard output
-
How do you run a container?
-
What do you see when you run
docker ps
? -
What
docker commit
does? when will you use it? -
Explain what is Dockerfile used for and the content of the following Dockerfile
FROM registry.access.redhat.com/rhel7/rhel
RUN yum -y install httpd && yum -y update; yum clean all
EXPOSE 80
ENTRYPOINT [ "/usr/sbin/httpd" ]
CMD [ "-D", "FOREGROUND" ]
Answer:
Use the image 'rhel7/rhel' from the registry 'registry.access.redhat.com` to run httpd.
Befor running it, install the httpd package, update all packages and expose port 80.
- What is the difference between ADD and COPY in Dockerfile?
Python
beginner
- What data type supported in Python and which of them are mutable? What function can you use to show that a certain data type is mutable?
The mutable data types are:
List
Dictionary
Set
The immutable data types are:
Numbers (int, float, ...)
String
Bool
Tuple
The id function can be used to check if a given variable is mutable or not.
- What is PEP8? Give an example of 5 style guidelines
PEP8 is a list of coding conventions and style guidelines for Python
5 style guidelines:
1. Limit all lines to a maximum of 79 characters.
2. Surround top-level function and class definitions with two blank lines.
3. Use commas when making a tuple of one element
4. Use spaces (and not tabs) for indentation
5. Use 4 spaces per indentation level
Intermediate
- What _ is used for in Python?
1. Translation lookup in i18n
2. Hold the result of the last executed expression or statement
3. As a general purpose "throwaway" variable name. For example: x, y, _ = get_data() (x and y are used but since we don't care about third variable, we "threw it away").
- Sort a list of lists by the second item of each nested list
li = [[1, 4], [2, 1], [3, 9], [4, 2], [4, 5]]
sorted(x, key=lambda l: l[1])
- You have the following lists: [{'name': 'Mario', 'food': ['mushrooms', 'goombas']}, {'name': 'Luigi', 'food': ['mushrooms', 'turtles']}] Extract all type of foods. Final output should be: {'mushrooms', 'goombas', 'turtles'}
set([food for bro in x for food in bro['food']])
Prometheus
- Describe the following Prometheus components:
- Prometheus server
- Push Gateway
- Alert Manager
Prometheus server responsible for scraping the storing the data
Push gateway is used for short-lived jobs
Alert manager is responsible for alerts ;)
- What is an exporter? What is it used for?
Git
beginner
- What is the difference between
git pull
andgit pull
? - How do you resolve git conflicts?