30 Real-Time DevOps Interview Questions 2026
Design a deployment strategy that ensures zero downtime and can rollback within minutes when problems occur.
When should you use Blue-Green, Rolling, or Canary deployment? Trade-off of each type?
How to handle database migration without causing system downtime?
If after deploying, CPU spikes and response time increase 5 times, in what order do you debug?
What do you do to ensure today's deployed build is identical to production? (reproducible builds)
What stages should a standard CI/CD pipeline for a large traffic system have?
How to reduce build time from 20 minutes to 5 minutes?
How do you design the pipeline to fail fast?
How should Secrets in CI/CD be managed to avoid leak?
When should you separate multiple pipelines instead of one monolithic pipeline?
When should you choose containers instead of VM?
A system starts with 1 server, how do you scale to millions of users?
Vertical vs Horizontal scaling — choose according to criteria What?
How to design a high availability (99.9%+) system?
Is multi-region deployment worth it? When should you use it?
Pod keeps restarting — what do you check first?
When should you use HPA (Horizontal Pod Autoscaler) vs VPA?
How to deploy without dropping the active user's connection?
How do you optimize resource requests/limits to avoid waste?
If the cluster is full of resources, how do you handle it while production is running?
What metrics do you need to monitor to know if the system is “dying”?
Logging incorrectly can crash the system — why?
Which type of alert is a “meaningless alert”?
How to do it How to find the root cause in a microservices system?
How do you differentiate between metrics vs logs vs traces in real-life situations?
How do you protect infrastructure from DDoS?
How does the least privilege principle apply in the cloud?
How to rotate secrets without needing to downtime?
Production crashes at 3 am — what process do you follow?
If the entire cloud provider region is outage, how will your system survive?
Share
