Top 8 DevOps & Cloud Interview Questions
DevOps and cloud engineering interview preparation for European companies. Infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and SRE practices used by companies like Delivery Hero, Adyen, and Klarna.
Explain the difference between containers and virtual machines.
Expert Tip: Focus on kernel sharing, resource efficiency, and isolation levels.
How would you design a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices architecture?
Expert Tip: Cover build, test, deploy stages. Discuss blue-green and canary deployments.
What is Infrastructure as Code? Compare Terraform and Pulumi.
Expert Tip: State management, plan/apply, modules, and real programming language benefits.
Explain Kubernetes architecture. What happens when you run kubectl apply?
Expert Tip: API server → etcd → scheduler → kubelet → container runtime.
How would you implement zero-downtime deployments?
Expert Tip: Rolling updates, health checks, readiness probes, connection draining.
Design a monitoring and alerting system for a production service.
Expert Tip: Prometheus + Grafana, SLIs/SLOs, alert fatigue, runbook automation.
Explain the 12-factor app methodology.
Expert Tip: Config via environment, stateless processes, port binding, logs as event streams.
How would you handle secrets management in a Kubernetes cluster?
Expert Tip: Sealed Secrets, HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, SOPS.
Recommended Resources
The Phoenix Project
Novel-format introduction to DevOps principles and culture.
Kubernetes Up & Running
Hands-on K8s guide — essential for European cloud roles.
AWS/GCP/Azure certifications
European companies value cloud certifications.