Development and operations are referred to as DevOps. It's a software engineering practice that focuses on bringing the development and operations teams together with the goal of automating the project at every level. This method facilitates the automation of project service management in order to support operational objectives and increase technological understanding. I have aggregated a list of top DevOps questions.

Top 10 DevOps Interview Questions

1. Our team has some ideas and wants to turn those ideas into a software application. Now, as a manager, I am confused about whether I should follow the Agile work culture or DevOps. Can you tell me why I should follow DevOps over Agile?

   Ans. According to the current market trend, instead of releasing big sets of features in an application, companies are launching small features for software with better product quality and quick feedback from customers, for high customer satisfaction. DevOps fulfils all these below requirements for fast and reliable development and deployment of software. Companies like Amazon and Google have adopted DevOps and are launching thousands of code deployments per day. But Agile, on the other hand, only focuses on the development of software. Now, to keep up with this, we have to Increase the deployment frequency in the safest and reliable way, Lower the failure rate of new releases and Shorten the bug resolution time.

2. How do you handle the merge conflicts in Git?

   Ans. In order to resolve the merge conflicts in Git, we need to follow three steps: Understand what happened: It could be because of the same line edit on the same file; it could be because of deleting some files, or also it could be because of files with the same file names. You can check everything by using ‘git status’. (2) Mark and clean up the conflict: When we open the files using mergetool, Git marks the conflicted area like this ‘<<<<< HEAD’ and ‘ >>>>> [other/branch/name]’. (3)Perform commit again and then merge the current branch with the master branch.

3. I want to move or copy Jenkins from one server to another. Is it possible? If yes, how?

   Ans. I would suggest copying the Jenkins jobs directory from the old server to the new one. We can just move a job from one installation of Jenkins to another by just copying the corresponding job directory. Or, we can also make a copy of an existing Jenkins job by making a clone of that job directory in a different name. Another way is that we can rename an existing job by renaming the directory. But, if you change the name of a job, you will need to change any other job that tries to call the renamed job.

4. Describe the difference between driver.close() and driver.quit().

   Ans. The driver.close command closes the focused browser window. But, the driver.quit command calls the driver.dispose method which closes all browser windows and also ends the WebDriver session.

5. I have 40 jobs in the Jenkins dashboard and I need to build them all at once. Is it possible?

   Ans. Yes, it is. With the help of a Jenkins plugin, we can build projects one after the other. If one parent job is carried out, then automatically other jobs are also run. We also have the option to use Jenkins Pipeline jobs for the same.

6. Sometimes, we use ad-hoc commands instead of Playbooks in Ansible. Can you tell me what’s the difference between Ansible Playbook and an ad-hoc command? Also, cite when to use them.

   Ans. Ad-hoc commands are used to do something quickly, and they are for, mostly, one-time use. Whereas, Ansible Playbook is used to perform repeated actions. There are scenarios where we want to use ad-hoc commands simply to perform a non-repetitive activity.

7. What is NRPE in Nagios?

   Ans. NRPE stands for ‘Nagios Remote Plugin Executor’. As the name suggests, it allows you to execute Nagios plugins remotely on other Linux or Unix machines.

8. Which file is used to define dependency in Maven?

   Ans. In Maven, we define all dependencies inside pom.xml so that all the dependencies will be downloaded and can be used within the project.

9. Have you heard about Ansible Galaxy? What does it do?

   Ans. Yes, I have. Ansible Galaxy refers to the ‘Galaxy website’ by Ansible, where users share Ansible roles. It is used to install, create, and manage Ansible roles.

10. What are Puppet Manifests?

    Ans. Every Puppet Node or Puppet Agent has got its configuration details in Puppet Master, written in the native Puppet language. These details are written in a language that Puppet can understand and are termed as Puppet Manifests. These manifests are composed of Puppet codes, and their filenames use the .pp extension.

For instance, we can write a manifest in Puppet Master that creates a file and installs Apache on all Puppet Agents or slaves that are connected to the Puppet Master.

Source: Intellipaat