36 practice questions with answers for DevOps interviews in Visakhapatnam.
DevOps jobs in Visakhapatnam
Visakhapatnam (Vizag) has a developing IT market with delivery centres, start-ups and IT parks around Rushikonda. Many local candidates also apply to Hyderabad and remote roles, so a mix of service and product styles is common.
Below are 36 questions that match the mix of service, product and domain employers hiring junior devops engineers in Visakhapatnam.
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01
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.
02
The application cannot connect to an RDS database. What do you check?
Confirm the endpoint, port, username and password. Check that the RDS security group allows inbound traffic on the database port from the application's security group, and that both are in reachable subnets of the same VPC or peered networks. Test with nc -zv endpoint 5432 from the app host. Also check the instance status, max connections and SSL requirements.
03
A production deployment failed halfway. What do you do?
Assess impact quickly using monitoring and error rates. If users are affected, roll back to the last good version, which should be a single pipeline action redeploying the previous artefact. Communicate status to stakeholders. Then check pipeline logs and application logs to find the cause, fix it in a branch and redeploy. Afterwards, hold a blameless review and add a check to catch it earlier.
HEAD normally points to a branch name. In detached HEAD, it points directly to a commit, for example after git checkout <hash> or checking out a tag. You can look around and even commit, but new commits belong to no branch and can be lost when you switch away. To keep them, create a branch with git switch -c new-branch.
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.
06
A developer accidentally pushed an AWS access key to a public repository. What do you do?
Treat the key as compromised immediately: deactivate and rotate it in IAM, then check CloudTrail for misuse. Removing it from history comes second, using git filter-repo or BFG and a force push, and asking everyone to re-clone. Then prevent repeats with secret scanning in CI, pre-commit hooks like gitleaks and storing secrets in a vault or secrets manager instead of code.
07
What is the difference between git merge and git rebase?
Merge joins two branches with a merge commit and keeps the true history, including when work happened in parallel. Rebase replays your commits on top of the target branch, giving a clean linear history but new commit hashes. Rebase local feature branches to stay current, but never rebase commits others have already pulled, because it rewrites shared history.
08
How do you squash your last three commits into one?
git rebase -i HEAD~3
# in the editor, keep the first line as pick
# and change the other two to squash (or s)
pick a1b2c3 Add login API
squash d4e5f6 Fix typo
squash 789abc Add tests
# alternative without the editor
git reset --soft HEAD~3
git commit -m "Add login API with tests"
If the branch was already pushed, update it with git push --force-with-lease.
09
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.
10
What is the difference between kill, kill -15 and kill -9?
kill sends SIGTERM (15) by default, which asks the process to stop so it can close files, finish requests and clean up. kill -9 sends SIGKILL, which the kernel enforces immediately; the process cannot catch it, so data may be lost and temp files left behind. Always try SIGTERM first and use SIGKILL only when the process does not respond.
11
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.
12
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.
13
What is the difference between count and for_each in Terraform?
count creates N copies indexed by number, such as aws_instance.web[0]. Removing an item in the middle shifts indexes and can destroy and recreate resources unexpectedly. for_each iterates over a map or set of strings and keys each instance by name, such as aws_s3_bucket.b["logs"], so adding or removing one item affects only that item. Prefer for_each for named collections.
14
Explain stdin, stdout, stderr and what 2>&1 means.
Every process gets three file descriptors: 0 is stdin, 1 is stdout and 2 is stderr. > redirects stdout to a file, 2> redirects errors, and 2>&1 sends stderr to wherever stdout currently points. So command > out.log 2>&1 captures both normal output and errors in one file. Order matters: 2>&1 placed before > out.log would still print errors to the terminal.
Lambda runs functions without servers, billed per request and duration, ideal for event-driven tasks with short runtimes up to 15 minutes. ECS is AWS's simpler container orchestrator, good when you want containers without Kubernetes complexity, often with Fargate. EKS is managed Kubernetes, chosen for portability, a rich ecosystem and existing Kubernetes skills, but it needs more operational knowledge.
16
How do you prioritise when several teams ask you for infrastructure work at the same time?
I list the requests with their business impact and deadline, and check which are blocking production or a release. Production issues and security fixes come first. For the rest I agree priority with my lead and the requesting teams openly, give realistic timelines and share progress. Where requests repeat, I build self-service templates so teams are not waiting on me.
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.
18
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.
I enjoy both writing code and understanding how systems run in production, and DevOps sits between the two. In my projects I set up a CI pipeline and Docker deployment and liked seeing a change go from commit to live in minutes. I want to keep learning cloud, Kubernetes and automation, and help teams release faster with fewer failures.
20
Write a Prometheus alerting rule for a high error rate.
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.
22
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.
23
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.
An SLI is a measured indicator, for example the share of requests served under 300 ms. An SLO is the internal target for it, such as 99.9 percent over 30 days. An SLA is the external contract with penalties, usually looser than the SLO. The error budget is the allowed unreliability, 0.1 percent here; while budget remains teams ship features, and when it runs out they focus on reliability.
AWS is responsible for security of the cloud: physical data centres, hardware, the network and the hypervisor. The customer is responsible for security in the cloud: IAM, data encryption, OS patching on EC2, security groups and application code. The split shifts with the service; for managed services like RDS or Lambda, AWS handles more of the underlying patching.
26
A pod is in CrashLoopBackOff. How do you troubleshoot it?
The container starts and keeps crashing, and Kubernetes waits longer between restarts. Run kubectl describe pod to see events and exit codes, and kubectl logs <pod> --previous for the crashed container's output. Common causes are missing environment variables or secrets, bad config, failing database connections, a wrong command, an aggressive liveness probe, or exit code 137 meaning OOM kill.
27
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.
28
How do you run stages in parallel in a Jenkins declarative pipeline?
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.
30
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.
31
Explain Linux file permissions and what chmod 755 means.
Every file has read (4), write (2) and execute (1) bits for three classes: owner, group and others. chmod 755 gives the owner 7 (read, write, execute) and gives group and others 5 (read, execute). It is typical for scripts and directories that everyone may run or enter but only the owner may change. Use ls -l to see permissions.
32
What is the difference between an Ingress and a Service?
A Service exposes a set of pods at layer 4. An Ingress is a layer 7 HTTP routing resource that maps hostnames and paths to services, for example api.example.com to the api service and /admin to another. It needs an ingress controller such as NGINX or a cloud controller to work. One Ingress with one load balancer can serve many services, and it handles TLS termination.
33
What is load average in Linux and how do you read it?
Load average is the average number of processes running or waiting for CPU (and uninterruptible I/O) over 1, 5 and 15 minutes, shown by uptime or top. Compare it with the number of CPU cores: a load of 4 on a 4-core machine means full use, while 12 means work is queuing. A high load with low CPU use often points to disk or network I/O waits.
set -e exits the script when any command fails, set -u treats unset variables as errors, and set -o pipefail makes a pipeline fail if any command in it fails, not just the last. Together they stop a script from silently continuing after an error, which matters in CI and deployment scripts. Commands that may fail on purpose need explicit handling such as || true.
35
What is the difference between a hard link and a soft link?
A hard link is another directory entry pointing to the same inode, so the data survives until every hard link is deleted; it cannot cross file systems or point to directories. A soft (symbolic) link is a small file that stores a path to the target; it can cross file systems and point to directories, but it breaks if the target is moved or deleted.
36
How do you define variables and outputs in Terraform?
Which companies hire DevOps professionals in Visakhapatnam?
Companies with large offices in Visakhapatnam include many IT services and product firms. Use their company pages below to practise employer-specific sets.
Are DevOps interviews in Visakhapatnam different from other cities?
The questions depend more on the company than the city. Visakhapatnam's mix of employers decides the style: Many local candidates also apply to Hyderabad and remote roles, so a mix of service and product styles is common
How do I find DevOps jobs in Visakhapatnam?
Shortlist companies with Visakhapatnam offices, keep your CV focused on DevOps projects, apply on company career pages and job portals with the Visakhapatnam filter, and practise the questions on this page before each interview.