Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About Amazon hiring for DevOps roles
Amazon is a global technology company spanning e-commerce, cloud computing through AWS, devices, advertising and streaming. In India it runs large engineering, operations and analytics teams supporting both Amazon.in and global businesses. It hires for software development engineers, SDETs, quality assurance engineers, business intelligence engineers, data engineers and data scientists.
For DevOps roles, this Amazon practice set focuses most on Kubernetes (5), Linux and Shell Scripting (5), Docker and Containers (4), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and Ansible) (4). It has 1 easy, 21 medium, 8 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Company type
Product
Headquarters
Seattle, USA
Main India offices
Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Gurugram
Amazon DevOps interview process
Online assessment (coding + work style survey)
Technical round 1 (DSA)
Technical round 2 (DSA or system design)
Bar raiser round
Hiring manager round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
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01
A pod is stuck in Pending state. What could be the reasons?
Pending means it has not been scheduled or its volumes are not ready. kubectl describe pod shows the scheduler's reason. Common causes are insufficient CPU or memory on nodes for the requests, node selectors, affinity or taints that no node satisfies, a PersistentVolumeClaim that cannot bind, or a resource quota being exceeded. Fix the spec or add nodes with the cluster autoscaler.
02
How do you create a Secret and use it as an environment variable in a pod?
docker run -d --name api \
--memory=512m --memory-swap=512m \
--cpus=1.5 \
--restart=unless-stopped \
myapp:1.0
# change limits on a running container
docker update --memory=1g --memory-swap=1g api
If the process exceeds the memory limit it is OOM killed, so set application heap sizes below the limit. --cpus caps CPU time rather than reserving cores.
04
How do you perform a rolling update and roll back a Deployment?
# update the image
kubectl set image deployment/api api=registry.example.com/api:1.5.0
kubectl rollout status deployment/api
# history and rollback
kubectl rollout history deployment/api
kubectl rollout undo deployment/api
kubectl rollout undo deployment/api --to-revision=3
# pause or restart
kubectl rollout pause deployment/api
kubectl rollout restart deployment/api
In GitOps setups, you change the image tag in Git instead and let Argo CD apply it.
05
Your Docker image is 1.5 GB. How do you reduce its size?
Switch to a slimmer base image such as a slim or distroless variant. Use a multi-stage build so compilers and build caches stay out of the final image. Combine package installs and clean caches in the same RUN layer. Add a .dockerignore to exclude .git, node_modules and test data. Then inspect remaining layers with docker history or the dive tool.
A role is a standard folder structure that packages tasks, handlers, templates, files, variables and defaults for one purpose, for example a nginx or postgres role. Playbooks then just list roles for host groups, keeping them short and reusable across projects. Roles can be shared through Ansible Galaxy or collections, and tested with Molecule.
07
You need to bring existing manually created cloud resources under Terraform. How?
Write the resource blocks in code, then import the real resources into state. Since Terraform 1.5 you can declare import blocks with the resource ID and run plan; terraform plan -generate-config-out can even draft the configuration. Older versions use the terraform import CLI command. Run plan until it shows no changes, which proves code matches reality.
08
How do you use stored credentials inside a Jenkins pipeline?
pipeline {
agent any
environment {
SONAR_TOKEN = credentials('sonar-token')
}
stages {
stage('Push') {
steps {
withCredentials([usernamePassword(credentialsId: 'docker-hub',
usernameVariable: 'USER', passwordVariable: 'PASS')]) {
sh 'echo $PASS | docker login -u $USER --password-stdin'
}
}
}
}
}
Jenkins masks these values in console output. Use single quotes in sh so Groovy does not interpolate the secret.
A DaemonSet makes sure one copy of a pod runs on every node, or on a selected group of nodes. When a node joins the cluster, the pod is added automatically. It is used for node-level agents such as log collectors like Fluent Bit, monitoring agents like the Prometheus node exporter, and CNI or storage plugins.
10
When do you use a StatefulSet instead of a Deployment?
Use a StatefulSet for stateful workloads such as databases, Kafka or Elasticsearch that need stable identity. Pods get fixed names like db-0 and db-1, start and stop in order, and each gets its own PersistentVolumeClaim that follows it after rescheduling. A headless service gives each pod a stable DNS name. Deployments treat pods as interchangeable, which suits stateless apps.
11
An application logs 'Too many open files'. How do you fix it?
The process has hit its file descriptor limit. Check usage with ls /proc/<pid>/fd | wc -l and the limit in /proc/<pid>/limits. Raise it through LimitNOFILE in the systemd unit or /etc/security/limits.conf, then restart. But also look for a leak: sockets or files not closed in code keep growing and will hit any limit. Raising the limit alone only buys time.
12
A production server is very slow. How do you troubleshoot high CPU usage?
Start with uptime and top or htop to see load and which processes use CPU. Check whether it is user, system or iowait time, and use pidstat or ps -eo pid,pcpu,cmd --sort=-pcpu for detail. For a Java process, take thread dumps; for others, use perf or strace. Correlate with recent deployments, cron jobs or traffic spikes before deciding to scale, roll back or fix code.
13
Tell me about a time you automated a repetitive manual task.
Situation: our team manually cleaned old build artefacts on shared servers every week, which took two hours and sometimes deleted the wrong files. Task: I offered to automate it. Action: I wrote a bash script with dry-run mode, logging and a retention rule, tested it on staging and scheduled it with cron. Result: zero manual effort and no more full-disk alerts for six months.
14
Builds fail randomly because of flaky tests. How do you handle it?
First identify flaky tests by tracking which tests fail and pass on the same commit. Quarantine them into a separate non-blocking job so the main pipeline stays trustworthy, and raise tickets with owners. Common causes are timing assumptions, shared test data, order dependence and external services. Blind automatic retries hide real bugs, so use them only briefly while fixing the root cause.
FROM nginx:1.27-alpine
COPY site/ /usr/share/nginx/html/
HEALTHCHECK --interval=30s --timeout=3s --start-period=10s --retries=3 \
CMD wget -qO- http://localhost/ || exit 1
# check status
docker inspect --format '{{.State.Health.Status}}' web
Docker marks the container healthy or unhealthy. Compose can wait on it with condition: service_healthy. Kubernetes ignores HEALTHCHECK and uses its own probes.
16
What is a multi-stage Docker build and why use it?
A multi-stage build uses several FROM instructions in one Dockerfile. Early stages contain compilers and build tools to produce the artefact; the final stage starts from a small runtime image and copies only the built output with COPY --from. The result is a much smaller image with fewer vulnerabilities, because build tools, source code and caches never reach production.
17
Write a bash script that checks whether a service is running and restarts it if not.
#!/bin/bash
set -u
SERVICE="nginx"
if ! systemctl is-active --quiet "$SERVICE"; then
echo "$(date) $SERVICE down, restarting" >> /var/log/svc-check.log
systemctl restart "$SERVICE"
if ! systemctl is-active --quiet "$SERVICE"; then
echo "$SERVICE failed to start" | mail -s "ALERT" ops@example.com
fi
fi
Run it from cron every few minutes; a real setup would rely on systemd Restart= plus monitoring.
18
Tell me about a blameless post-mortem you were part of.
Situation: a certificate expired and our API was down for 40 minutes. Task: I wrote the post-mortem. Action: I built a timeline from logs and chat, and we focused on why the system allowed it rather than who forgot: renewal was manual and nothing alerted. Result: we automated renewal with cert-manager, added expiry alerts 21 days ahead, and tracked actions to closure.
19
Tell me about a production deployment that went wrong and how you handled it.
Situation: a release passed staging but caused payment timeouts in production because a new connection pool setting was wrong. Task: as release owner, I had to restore service. Action: I triggered the rollback job within ten minutes, updated stakeholders, then found the config difference between environments. Result: service recovered quickly and we added config validation and a canary stage to the pipeline.
20
You pushed a broken commit to the shared main branch and the build is failing. What do you do?
First restore a green main quickly: run git revert <hash> and push, which adds an undo commit without rewriting history that others have pulled. Tell the team in the channel. Then fix the issue on a branch with a proper pull request and tests. Avoid git reset with force push on main; branch protection rules should block it anyway.
21
df shows the disk is 100 percent full but du does not find large files. What is happening?
Usually a large file was deleted while a process still holds it open, so the space is not released. Run lsof +L1 or lsof | grep deleted to find the process and file. Restarting or reloading that process frees the space; if you cannot restart, truncate the file through /proc/<pid>/fd/<n>. The fix is proper log rotation with copytruncate or a reopen signal.
A VPC is your private network with a CIDR range like 10.0.0.0/16. It is split into subnets in each Availability Zone. Public subnets have a route to an Internet Gateway; private subnets reach the internet only through a NAT Gateway in a public subnet. Route tables control traffic, security groups and NACLs filter it, and VPC endpoints give private access to services like S3.
23
Your service has used its entire error budget halfway through the quarter. What happens next?
Following the agreed error budget policy, the team pauses risky feature launches and focuses on reliability work: fixing the top causes of failures from post-mortems, adding tests, improving rollbacks and canaries. Product and engineering leads review the plan together. Once the budget recovers in the rolling window, normal releases resume. If the SLO is unrealistic, revisit it with data.
24
Someone deleted a resource manually that Terraform manages, and the state is now out of sync. What do you do?
Run terraform plan; Terraform refreshes and sees the resource is missing, so it plans to recreate it, which is often right. If the resource should no longer exist, remove it from code, or use terraform state rm. If state itself is corrupted, restore a previous version from the versioned S3 bucket. Then find out why manual changes happened and tighten access.
25
How do you run stages in parallel in a Jenkins declarative pipeline?
git bisect start
git bisect bad # current commit has the bug
git bisect good v1.4.0 # last known good tag
# Git checks out a middle commit; test it, then mark it
git bisect good # or: git bisect bad
# repeat until Git prints the first bad commit
git bisect reset
# automate with a test script
git bisect run ./run-tests.sh
Bisect is a binary search, so 1000 commits need about 10 tests.
27
The on-call team gets dozens of alerts every night and is burning out. How do you fix it?
Collect alert data for a few weeks: which fired, how often, and whether anyone acted. Delete or downgrade non-actionable alerts, tune thresholds and add for durations, and group duplicates in Alertmanager. Fix the recurring root causes behind the top alerts and automate common fixes. Move to SLO-based alerts and make sure rotations are fair with follow-up time after bad nights.
28
Someone made an S3 bucket with customer files public. What do you do?
Immediately block public access on the bucket and remove the public policy or ACLs. Check S3 server access logs or CloudTrail data events to see whether objects were downloaded, and involve security if customer data was exposed. Then enable Block Public Access at the account level, use AWS Config rules to detect public buckets, and require bucket changes through reviewed IaC.
29
Tell me about a mistake you made in infrastructure work and what you learned.
Situation: I applied a Terraform change that renamed a security group, which forced replacement and briefly cut access to a staging database. Task: fix it and prevent repeats. Action: I restored access quickly, explained it openly to my lead, and then added plan review in pull requests plus lifecycle create_before_destroy rules. Result: no similar outage since, and I now read every destroy line in a plan.
30
An e-commerce site expects 10 times normal traffic during a festive sale. How do you prepare?
Load test beforehand to find bottlenecks. Pre-scale Auto Scaling groups or Kubernetes nodes with scheduled scaling, since reactive scaling may be too slow. Cache aggressively with CloudFront and Redis, add read replicas, and check service quotas. Use queues to absorb spikes in order processing, set up dashboards and alerts, freeze risky deployments, and keep an on-call war room ready.
Tips to crack the Amazon DevOps interview
Prepare STAR-format stories for each Amazon Leadership Principle, such as Customer Obsession, Ownership and Dive Deep.
Practise medium-level DSA problems on arrays, trees, graphs and dynamic programming, explaining time and space complexity aloud.
For BIE or data roles, practise SQL window functions and metric-driven case questions on e-commerce funnels and delivery operations.
Keep a one-minute story ready for every project on your CV: problem, your part, tools, result.
Practise the hard questions on this page aloud; Amazon interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the Amazon DevOps interview?
Candidates usually go through 5 stages: Online assessment (coding + work style survey); Technical round 1 (DSA); Technical round 2 (DSA or system design); Bar raiser round; Hiring manager round. The exact rounds change with the role, team, location and your experience, so confirm the process with the recruiter.
Which topics should I prepare for the Amazon DevOps interview?
This practice set leans on Kubernetes (5), Linux and Shell Scripting (5), Docker and Containers (4), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and Ansible) (4). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most Amazon interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at Amazon?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in product interviews like Amazon's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does Amazon hire DevOps professionals in India?
Amazon has large teams in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Gurugram. Openings and locations change often, so check the Amazon careers page and filter by city and experience.