DevOps Interview Questions and Answer – Part 5

How does “technical debt” make it hard to become a software-driven company?

• Technical debt is paid off by business units that do not trust IT.
• Attention paid to existing investments prevents focus on new ones. (Ans)
• Too much technical debt means that you can’t automate systems.
• Technical debt cannot be paid off without support from commercial vendors.

According to the Puppet Labs State of DevOps Report, teams can increase deploys-per-day as they increase dev count.

• True (Ans)
• False

Why does the application team take responsibility for deciding how much work to take into a software sprint?

• So the application team knows the priorities of what needs to be done
• So that the team feels an obligation to complete the work (Ans)
• Because product owners aren’t adept at estimating level of effort

What’s one reason to regularly merge code into a master branch instead of using feature branches?

• Reduce integration and debugging waste later on (Ans)
• Reduce the number of broken builds each day
• Most source control systems don’t support branching.

Why should developers, operators, and support staff share a single ticketing system?

• It’s cheaper to run a single system.
• Support teams should choose the system used by the company.
• You can avoid losing data as customer information moves between systems. (Ans)

What’s the point of sending regular, structured team updates to executives?

• Show positive trends to justify the team’s existence
• Share core business metrics and delivery momentum (Ans)
• Demonstrate what new technologies the team is using

Which of the below is NOT a useful source of info for new engineers to learn about the application they deliver?

• Deployment pipeline
• Source code
• Team wiki
• Tribal knowledge (Ans)

Why is it useful to have a regular operations review with management?

• Track each application team using uniform measures
• Stay focused on customers while improving quality of entire organization (Ans)
• Focus on where each team is finding success
• Solve problems for a particular service experience issues

How can you use data to make decisions about resizing application teams?

• Marginalize the engineer who is responsible for the most production issues.
• Assess who writes the most lines of code and move that engineer among teams.
• Look at team velocity and understand expected impact of new team members. (Ans)

Why are relationships important within a DevOps team?

• Teams unite against common adversaries within the organization.
• You can create lasting friendships outside of the office.
• You can build trust that comes in handy during a crisis. (Ans)

DevOps is characterized by:

• Cultural norms and collaboration practices that enable the fast flow of high-quality work (Ans)
• Installing automation suites for testing and service management
• Developers with production access who regularly push their code to production
• Developers and Operators reorganized into the same department

In which way is an enterprise DevOps different from DevOps at a small company?

• More functional silos in place (Ans)
• Optimized for efficiency instead of raw throughput
• Smaller IT budget for new software
• Less focus on delivering all the way to production

Which of the below is the primary point of the daily team standup?

• Let developers demonstrate new features they are working on.
• Give team members an opportunity to deliver a status update.
• Orient the team on the most important issues of the day. (Ans)

Who should be part of an on-call rotation?

• Operators
• Developers, operators, and executives (Ans)
• Developers and executives
• Developers and operators

What is NOT a good way to patch infrastructure in a DevOps environment?

• Build “gold” images that are used to replace existing servers.
• Log into servers and run update scripts. (Ans)
• Use centralized configuration management tools to push updates.

Infrastructure-as-code refers to building virtual machines with languages like Java or C#.

• False (Ans)
• True

How does one conduct a “blameless postmortem”?

• By focusing on the facts of the incident, and focusing on fixing processes, technology (Ans)
• By identifying the party outside the team that caused the incident
• By considering how the incident would have gone differently by making different choices

A well-designed application team has no dependencies on other teams.

• True
• False (Ans)
  Ans:- 2. False

Why does product documentation need a new approach in DevOps?

• More frequent product changes result in out-of-date product docs. (Ans)
• Technical writers aren’t part of a DevOps organization.
• Typically developers wrote all the product docs, but now operators do.

How does a blue/green deployment work?

• While “blue” is serving production, “green” is updated and starts accepting production traffic. (Ans)
• The “blue” environment is production and “green” environment acts as a test bed.
• “Blue” and “green” both serve production traffic but only one is updated at a time.

What does NOT belong in the application package?

• Infrastructure scripts
• Instructions for post-deployment manual changes (Ans)
• Application binary or container
• Environment variable definition

Rajesh Kumar

I’m Rajesh Kumar, a DevOps, SRE, DevSecOps, Cloud, and Platform Engineering expert passionate about sharing practical knowledge, real-world experiences, and industry best practices. I have worked at Cotocus and regularly write about technology, travel, investing, health, product reviews, and digital marketing through my various platforms.

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