What DevOps is? Why do we need it?

Example of answers:
Why do we need it?
Increase deployment frequency
Lower failure rate of new releases
Shortened lead time between fixes
Faster mean time to recovery in the event of new release crashing
What DevOps is?
CALMS
C – Culture (promotes collaborative and open culture between Dev and Ops)
A – Automation (automate wherever applicable)
L- Learning (continuous learning & experimentation)
M – Measure (Measure with shared metrics across the Dev and ops for better
management)
S – Sharing (Shared delivery process across Dev and Ops to build , deploy, maintain
and monitor product with mentality of One Team – One Goal)
What is the purpose of a post-mortem meeting?
What is meant by Continuous Integration?
What are the success factors for Continuous Integration?
Examples of answers:
Maintain a code repository
Automate the build
Make the build self-testing
Everyone commits to the baseline every day
Every commit (to baseline) should be built
Keep the build fast
Test in a clone of the production environment
Make it easy to get the latest deliverables
Everyone can see the results of the latest build
Automate deployment
What is Continious Delivery? Continious Deployment?
What is the difference between Continuous Integration, Continious Delivery and
Continious Deployment?
What’s the difference between git and github ? What about git and SVN ?
What is git rebase?
In Git how do you revert a commit that has already been pushed and made public?
What is puppet/chef/ansible used for? What are the advantages over shell scripts ?
What do you understand by “Infrastructure as code”? How does it fit into the DevOps
methodology? What purpose does it achieve?
How do you give your developers access to the production logs ?
Tell me about the worst-run/best-run outage you’ve been a part of. What made it
bad/well-run?
How do you monitor your application ? How do you make sure it is working ? How do
you get alerts when it stops working ?
What would be the availability and performance metrics for a key value store ? What
about for MySQL replication ?
What is caching ? Where should a large scale application cache, and what data
should be cached ?
SysOps
What is your favorite editor?
What is RAID? What is RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID10?
Describe the general file system hierarchy of a Linux system.
Describe what each of the following command line utilities do:
tee
awk
tr
cut
curl
tail
sed
Command line demo:
Search for "my konfu is the best" in all *.py files
Replace the occurrence of "my konfu is the best" with "I'm a linux jedi master" in
all *.txt files
Find all files which have been accessed within the last 30 days
What is the difference between virtual memory and swap ?
What is the difference between hardlinks and symlinks?
What is an inode and what fields are stored in an inode?
What are zombie processes ?
Can you have several HTTPS virtual hosts sharing the same IP?
What is the difference between processes and threads?
What is the difference between exec and fork?
How nginx can handle a lot of connections? What does it use inside?
Example of answer: Eventloop.
What is "nohup" used for?
What is an atomic operation?
I've added my public ssh key into authorized_keys but I'm still getting a password
prompt, what can be wrong?
How do you catch a SIGHUP ? What about SIGSEGV ? What about SIGKILL ?
What is the Linux Kernel OOM and how does it work ?
What's a chroot jail?
Describe the Linux boot process with as much detail as possible, starting from when
the system is powered on and ending when you get a prompt.
What's LD_PRELOAD and when is it used?
You ran a binary and nothing happened. How would you debug this?
When can a socket receive E_AGAIN ?
What is a dynamically/statically linked file?
A careless sysadmin executes the following command: chmod 444 /bin/chmod - what do
you do to fix this?
I've lost my root password, what can I do?
You have accidentally deleted a running script, how could you restore it ?
What load balancers have you used ?
AWS:
What is the difference between an AMI and an instance?
What’s EBS? What’s an EBS snapshot ? What is the real cost of having an EBS
snapshot?
What’s a VPC?
What’s the difference between a region and an availability zone?
What’s an ELB? ALB? NLB?
What’s S3? What are the features supported on S3?
NetOps/Networking
What is time synchronization? Why do we need it?
NTP
TLS certificates
ID generation in distributed systems
How does ping work ? What about traceroute ?
I type http://www.yahoo.com in my browser’s URL bar and I press enter. What happens
? (discuss at every OSI layer - Physical, data link, network, transport, session,
presentation, application)
DNS & anycast, IP, UDP, routing, BGP, TCP, HTTP, transparent proxy
What is BGP?
What’s a PTR in DNS? Why should we care?
What if I change from http://www.yahoo.com to https://www.yahoo.com ?
Public/private certificates, CAs, proxying, MiTM, etc.
What happens when I press the send button in my email client ?
How do we prevent bots crawling ? How would you deal with a syn flood ?
How many hosts in a /24 network? What about a /22 ?
What is the difference between DNAT and SNAT ? When do you use either ?
What is a virtual IP address? What is a cluster?
What is IPv6 ? Why should we care?
DBRE
What's ACID ? How is it implemented ?
What is row level locking ? Table level locking ?
How do you check which jobs are running?
Imagine you have a filesystem that supports snapshots - how do you take hot backups
using volume managers (LVM/EBS)?
What is the need for master/slave replication in MySQL ? What about master/master
replication ? How does replication work in MySQL ?
How would you handle DB migrations? How would you automate DB migration process?
What pros/cons could you tell about MySQL/PostgreSQL?
Which primary key is better - synthetic or natural one? Why?
SecOps/Security
What is the difference between authentication and authorization?
What is SSO? How does it work?
What about SCIM bridge? Why do we need to have SCIM bridge if we already have SSO?
On a newly installed linux machine, what would you change in /etc/ssh/sshd_config?
When would you use the TARPIT iptables target?
You notice that the 20 year old web application stores the user's passwords hashed
with MD5. How would you migrate to a new hash?
You know that a 3rd party website allows googlebot. How would you scrape this
website?
How to prevent being scraped when someone sets their X-Forwarded-For header to a
googlebot IP address?
What's the most important defense against security incidents?
An employee's password was leaked. Someone gained admin access on the website with
this password. How to deal with this situation? What steps would you take to
discover how was the password compromised? How to prevent it in the future?
Come up with a good question about iptables ESTABLISHED and RELATED conntrack
matches.
You would like to discover the password of someone else who is on the same WiFi
network. How would you do that? How could the user defend against this? How could
the WiFi owner defend against this?
What is OWASP?
What is PCI DSS?
What was the biggest or most interesting security issue you faced, and how did you
resolve it?
System design
DevOps: How would you deploy software to 5000 systems?
DevOps: How would you implement CI (continuous delivery) - end to end, including
source control, branches, tools, etc. ?
SysOps: Design a storage system for a database. Design a storage system for 30 TB
of images (to be served over http(s)).
NetOps: Let's design a fictitious aviation tracking system. We want our fleet of
airplanes to report their locations and other vital parameters once every 5
minutes. Let's say we had a choice to use TCP or UDP which one would you pick and
why?
Programming: You run a website that stores it’s web sessions in memcache; you get a
request to log off a user ID. How do you do it ?
DBRE: A developer asks if he should create an InnoDB or MyISAM database, what would
you recommend?
SecOps: You are creating a new web application and you have to store the user's
passwords in a database. How would you store the passwords?
General
What are some of the most common DevOps personality characteristics ?
References