Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About Freshworks hiring for DevOps roles
Freshworks is a software-as-a-service company founded in Chennai that builds customer service, IT service management and sales software such as Freshdesk, Freshservice and Freshsales. Its India offices host most of its product and engineering teams. It hires for software engineers, QA engineers, data engineers and analysts.
For DevOps roles, this Freshworks practice set focuses most on Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and Ansible) (5), Docker and Containers (5), Kubernetes (4), CI/CD Pipelines (4). It has 3 easy, 17 medium, 10 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Company type
Product
Headquarters
San Mateo, California, USA
Main India offices
Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad
Freshworks DevOps interview process
Online coding assessment
Technical round 1 (DSA)
Technical round 2 (design or domain)
Hiring manager round
HR round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
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01
What is Infrastructure as Code and what are its benefits?
Infrastructure as Code means defining servers, networks, databases and other resources in version-controlled files instead of clicking in a console. Benefits are repeatable environments, code review for infrastructure changes, history and rollback through Git, fewer manual mistakes, faster provisioning and easy disaster recovery. Common tools are Terraform and OpenTofu for provisioning and Ansible for configuration management.
02
Pods are running but the service is not reachable. How do you debug it?
Run kubectl get endpoints <svc>; if empty, the service selector does not match the pod labels or pods are not ready. Check that the service targetPort matches the container port. Test from a debug pod with curl svc-name.namespace:port to separate DNS from app issues. Then check network policies blocking traffic and, for external access, the ingress rules and load balancer health checks.
A module is a reusable folder of Terraform files with input variables and outputs, for example a vpc module or an eks-cluster module. The root module calls child modules with different values for each environment. Modules reduce duplication and enforce standards across teams. They can come from local paths, Git or the Terraform Registry and should be pinned to versions.
04
What is the difference between volumes and bind mounts?
A volume is storage managed by Docker under its own directory, created with docker volume create and referenced by name; it is portable and is the recommended way to persist data such as databases. A bind mount maps a specific host path into the container, which is handy for local development hot reload but depends on host directory layout and permissions.
05
Write a multi-stage Dockerfile for a Java Spring Boot application.
FROM maven:3.9-eclipse-temurin-21 AS build
WORKDIR /src
COPY pom.xml .
RUN mvn -B dependency:go-offline
COPY src ./src
RUN mvn -B package -DskipTests
FROM eclipse-temurin:21-jre-alpine
WORKDIR /app
COPY --from=build /src/target/*.jar app.jar
RUN adduser -D appuser
USER appuser
EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT ["java", "-jar", "app.jar"]
The final image has only the JRE and the JAR, not Maven or source.
06
What are Ansible handlers and how do you use them?
Handlers are tasks that run only when notified by another task that reported a change, and they run once at the end of the play even if notified many times.
tasks:
- name: Update app config
ansible.builtin.copy:
src: app.conf
dest: /etc/app/app.conf
notify: Restart app
handlers:
- name: Restart app
ansible.builtin.service:
name: app
state: restarted
This avoids restarting services when nothing changed.
Prometheus pulls, or scrapes, metrics over HTTP from targets that expose a /metrics endpoint, either apps instrumented with client libraries or exporters such as node exporter. Targets come from static config or service discovery, for example Kubernetes. Data is stored in a local time-series database and queried with PromQL. Alert rules fire to Alertmanager, which groups, silences and routes notifications. Grafana visualises the data.
08
How do you handle pressure when a release is blocked close to a deadline?
Situation: a security scan blocked our release one day before a client demo. Task: ship without ignoring the risk. Action: I checked the finding, confirmed it was a real vulnerable library, upgraded it, ran the full test suite and kept the product manager updated every few hours. Result: we released on time, and I added weekly dependency scans to avoid last-minute surprises.
09
The host disk is filling up because of Docker. How do you clean up and prevent it?
Check usage with docker system df. Remove stopped containers, dangling images and unused networks with docker system prune, and old build cache with docker builder prune; be careful with the volumes flag. Container logs are a common culprit, so configure log rotation with max-size and max-file in daemon.json. In CI agents, schedule regular pruning jobs.
Idempotency means running the same playbook many times gives the same result without unwanted changes. Modules check current state first: the apt module installs a package only if missing and reports ok instead of changed. The shell and command modules are not idempotent by default, so use creates, removes or changed_when conditions, or prefer a dedicated module.
11
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.
12
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.
13
How would you plan disaster recovery for a complete AWS region failure?
Start from business RTO and RPO. Options range from backup and restore, which is cheapest and slowest, to pilot light, warm standby and multi-region active-active. Replicate data with S3 cross-region replication, Aurora Global Database or DynamoDB global tables, keep infrastructure in Terraform so it can be rebuilt, use Route 53 failover routing and rehearse failover drills.
14
Compare blue-green, canary and rolling deployments.
Blue-green runs two full environments and switches traffic from old to new at once; rollback is instant but costs double capacity. Rolling replaces instances in batches with no extra environment, but old and new versions run together for a while. Canary sends a small share of traffic, say 5 percent, to the new version and widens it as metrics stay healthy, limiting blast radius.
15
How do you count unique client IP addresses in an nginx access log?
awk '{print $1}' /var/log/nginx/access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10
# total number of unique IPs
awk '{print $1}' access.log | sort -u | wc -l
The first field in the default log format is the client IP. uniq -c only collapses adjacent lines, so sort must run before it; the final sort -rn shows the busiest IPs first.
Situation: our dev and test AWS accounts cost almost as much as production. Task: my manager asked me to cut waste without slowing teams. Action: I tagged resources by owner, found idle instances and old snapshots, scheduled non-production instances to stop at night with a Lambda, and moved CI agents to Spot. Result: non-production spend fell about 40 percent within two months.
17
You are the incident commander for a major outage. What do you do?
Declare the incident, open a channel and bridge, and assign roles: someone to investigate, someone to communicate and a scribe. My job is to coordinate, not to debug. Prioritise mitigation over root cause, such as rollback, failover or feature flags. Post regular status updates to stakeholders. After recovery, confirm it is stable, close it and schedule a blameless post-mortem with action items.
A liveness probe checks whether the container is healthy; if it fails, the kubelet restarts it. A readiness probe checks whether it can serve traffic; if it fails, the pod is removed from service endpoints but not restarted. A startup probe gives slow-starting apps time to boot and holds off the other probes until it succeeds. Wrong liveness probes can cause restart loops.
19
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.
20
How do you use git bisect to find the commit that introduced a bug?
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.
21
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.
22
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.
23
How do you keep yourself updated with new DevOps tools and practices?
I follow official release notes for tools I use, such as Kubernetes and Terraform, and read a few engineering blogs and CNCF updates weekly. I learn by doing, so I try new tools in a small home lab or free cloud tier before suggesting them. I also prepare for certifications to structure my learning, and share short notes with my team.
24
Your CI pipeline takes 40 minutes. How would you speed it up?
Measure first: find which stages take longest. Then cache dependencies and Docker layers, run independent stages and test suites in parallel, split tests across agents, and run only affected modules in a monorepo. Move slow end-to-end tests to a later stage or nightly run while keeping fast unit tests on every commit. Use bigger or autoscaled agents if they are the bottleneck.
25
Write an IAM policy that gives read-only access to one S3 bucket.
The firmware (BIOS or UEFI) runs hardware checks and loads the bootloader, usually GRUB. GRUB loads the kernel and the initramfs, which contains drivers needed to mount the real root file system. The kernel then starts PID 1, which is systemd on most modern distributions. systemd mounts file systems and starts services in parallel according to unit dependencies and the default target.
27
You suspect a memory leak in a production service. How do you confirm and handle it?
Look at memory graphs over days: a leak shows steady growth that drops only on restart, often with OOM kills. Correlate the start with a deployment. Take heap dumps or profiles, for example jmap for Java or pprof for Go, and compare them over time. As a short-term fix, set memory limits and schedule restarts or roll back, then fix the code and add a memory alert.
28
What is the difference between COPY and ADD in a Dockerfile?
COPY copies local files and directories into the image and does nothing else. ADD can also download from a URL and automatically extracts local tar archives. Because that extra behaviour can be surprising, best practice is to use COPY by default and ADD only when you specifically want tar extraction. For downloads, use curl in a RUN step so you can verify checksums.
29
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.
30
Describe how you handled an on-call incident late at night.
Situation: at 2 AM I got an alert that checkout error rates crossed 10 percent. Task: restore service as on-call engineer. Action: I checked dashboards, saw a node pool had scaled down and pods were pending, scaled it manually, and posted updates in the incident channel. Result: errors cleared in 20 minutes, and next day I fixed the autoscaler settings and wrote the post-mortem.
Tips to crack the Freshworks DevOps interview
Use Freshdesk or Freshservice free trials to understand ticketing, SLAs and automation workflows.
Practise DSA and Ruby, Java or Python fundamentals, depending on the team's tech stack.
Read about Freshworks' journey from Chennai to a US-listed SaaS company and its focus on mid-market customers.
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; Freshworks interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the Freshworks DevOps interview?
Candidates usually go through 5 stages: Online coding assessment; Technical round 1 (DSA); Technical round 2 (design or domain); Hiring manager round; HR 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 Freshworks DevOps interview?
This practice set leans on Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and Ansible) (5), Docker and Containers (5), Kubernetes (4), CI/CD Pipelines (4). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most Freshworks interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at Freshworks?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in product interviews like Freshworks's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does Freshworks hire DevOps professionals in India?
Freshworks has large teams in Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad. Openings and locations change often, so check the Freshworks careers page and filter by city and experience.