DevOps interviews in Pune follow a fairly predictable pattern. Whether it is a service company in Hinjewadi or a product team in Baner, you will usually face a mix of Linux basics, a walkthrough of a pipeline you built, Docker and Kubernetes troubleshooting, and a few cloud and infrastructure-as-code questions.
The short answer: most DevOps interviews test whether you can troubleshoot, not whether you can recite definitions. Below are 25 questions that come up again and again, grouped by topic, with the kind of answer that works. Use them to find your gaps, then practise saying the answers out loud with an example from your own projects.
Linux and scripting
1. How do you find which process is using port 8080?
Use ss -tulpn | grep 8080 (or lsof -i :8080). Interviewers like it when you mention that you may need sudo to see the process name.
2. A server’s disk is 100% full. What do you check?
Run df -h to find the full filesystem, then du -sh /* | sort -h to narrow it down. Common culprits are old logs, Docker images and deleted files still held open by a process, which lsof +L1 reveals.
3. What is the difference between a hard link and a soft link?
A hard link is another name for the same inode, so it survives if the original name is deleted. A soft (symbolic) link points to a path and breaks if the target is removed.
4. How would you run a script every night at 2 a.m.?
Add a cron entry such as 0 2 * * * /opt/scripts/backup.sh, make sure the script uses absolute paths, and send its output to a log file so failures are visible.
Git
5. What is the difference between git merge and git rebase?
Merge joins two branches with a merge commit and keeps the full history. Rebase replays your commits on top of another branch for a straight-line history. Never rebase a shared branch that others have pulled.
6. You committed a password by mistake. What now?
Rotate the password first; assume it is already exposed. Then remove it from history with a tool such as git filter-repo, force-push with the team’s agreement, and add a secret scanner to the pipeline.
CI/CD
7. Walk me through a CI/CD pipeline you built.
This is the most common question. Describe it stage by stage: trigger, build, tests, scans, artefact storage, deploy to staging, checks, approval and production. Mention one problem you hit and how you fixed it.
8. What is the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment?
With continuous delivery every change is ready to release, but a person approves production. With continuous deployment every change that passes the pipeline goes to production automatically.
9. How do you keep secrets out of a Jenkins pipeline?
Store them in the Jenkins credentials store or an external vault, inject them with withCredentials, and make sure they are masked in the console log. Never put them in the Jenkinsfile.
10. A build passes on your laptop but fails in Jenkins. How do you debug it?
Compare the environments: tool versions, environment variables, file paths and permissions. Reproducing the build inside the same container image the agent uses usually finds the difference quickly.
Docker
11. What is the difference between an image and a container?
An image is a read-only template made of layers. A container is a running instance of an image with its own writable layer on top.
12. How do you make a Docker image smaller?
Use a slim or distroless base image, use multi-stage builds so compilers stay out of the final image, combine related RUN steps, and add a .dockerignore file.
13. CMD vs ENTRYPOINT?
ENTRYPOINT sets the command that always runs; CMD supplies default arguments that can be overridden at docker run. A common pattern is ENTRYPOINT for the binary and CMD for its default flags.
Kubernetes
14. A pod is stuck in CrashLoopBackOff. What do you do?
Run kubectl describe pod for events, then kubectl logs --previous to see why the last container exited. Typical causes are a bad config or secret, a failing liveness probe, or the app being OOM-killed.
15. What is the difference between a Deployment and a StatefulSet?
A Deployment manages interchangeable pods, which suits stateless apps. A StatefulSet gives each pod a stable name and its own persistent volume, which suits databases and clustered systems.
16. Liveness probe vs readiness probe?
A failing readiness probe takes the pod out of the Service so it stops getting traffic. A failing liveness probe restarts the container. Getting them mixed up causes restart loops during slow start-ups.
17. How does a Service find its pods?
Through label selectors. The Service matches pods whose labels fit its selector and keeps an up-to-date list of their IP addresses as endpoints.
Terraform and Ansible
18. What is Terraform state and why does it matter?
State maps your code to the real resources. Keep it in a remote backend such as S3 with locking so two people cannot apply at the same time, and never edit it by hand.
19. Terraform vs Ansible?
Terraform creates and changes infrastructure declaratively. Ansible configures what runs on servers. Many teams use Terraform to build the servers and Ansible to set them up.
20. What does idempotent mean in Ansible?
Running the same playbook twice leaves the system in the same state, with nothing changed on the second run. Modules such as apt and copy are idempotent; raw shell commands often are not.
Cloud and monitoring
21. Explain public and private subnets.
A public subnet has a route to an internet gateway. A private subnet does not; its instances reach the internet through a NAT gateway, so databases and app servers are not directly exposed.
22. How do you control cloud costs in a team?
Use tags for ownership, budgets and alerts, right-size instances, schedule non-production environments to shut down at night, and clean up unused volumes, snapshots and load balancers.
23. Users say the site is slow. Where do you start?
Check the dashboards for latency, errors, traffic and saturation, then narrow down by service. Look at recent deployments first; a large share of incidents follow a change.
24. Blue-green vs canary deployment?
Blue-green runs two full environments and switches all traffic from the old one to the new one at once, which makes rollback instant. Canary sends a small share of traffic to the new version first and increases it only if error rates and latency stay healthy.
25. What would you monitor for a web application?
Start with the four “golden signals”: latency, traffic, errors and saturation. Add alerts that point to user impact rather than every CPU spike, and make sure each alert has a short runbook so whoever is on call knows the first steps.
How to prepare in the last two weeks
- Rebuild one project from scratch without notes. If you cannot, you will struggle to explain it.
- Practise troubleshooting out loud. Break a pod, a pipeline or a Terraform plan and talk through the fix as if an interviewer were listening.
- Prepare three stories: a failure you fixed, an automation that saved time, and a disagreement you resolved.
- Read the job description line by line and make sure you can talk for two minutes on every tool it names.
- Do at least one mock interview with someone who will interrupt and ask “why?”.
If you are earlier in the journey, our DevOps roadmap for freshers shows what to learn before interviews, and the DevOps engineer salary guide for Pune helps you judge offers once they arrive. For Kubernetes-heavy roles, see our CKA vs CKAD comparison.
Interview preparation in our course
The final month of our DevOps training in Pune ends with a capstone project, resume reviews and mock interviews, so you practise these questions against your own work rather than memorising answers. You can join at our Pimple Saudagar centre or through the DevOps online training. Batches are always open; message us on WhatsApp for fees and timings.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in a DevOps interview in Pune?
It varies by company. A common pattern is an online or phone screen, one or two technical rounds with hands-on or scenario questions, and a managerial or HR round. Some product companies add a live troubleshooting exercise.
Do DevOps interviews include coding?
Usually scripting rather than algorithm puzzles. Expect to write or read a short Bash or Python script, a Dockerfile, a Jenkinsfile or a Terraform snippet.
What do freshers get asked most?
Linux commands, Git basics, how CI/CD works, Docker fundamentals and a detailed walkthrough of the projects on your resume. Interviewers dig deep into anything you list, so only list what you have built.
