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
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