Senior DevOps Engineer Interview | MNC L1 Round | AWS, Terraform, k8s, CI/CD, Helm, Troubleshooting

Interview Summary

The video is a senior DevOps interview covering the candidate’s experience and practical scenarios across CI/CD, Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, AWS, databases, monitoring, and security.

Candidate Background and Tools

The candidate described roughly five years of IT experience, including four years in DevOps. Tools and technologies mentioned included:

• Source control: Git, GitHub, Bitbucket
• CI/CD and delivery: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Argo CD
• Containers and infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible
• Quality and security: SonarQube, Trivy
• Monitoring and logging: Prometheus, Grafana, Zabbix, ELK, AWS CloudWatch
• Artifact storage: Nexus, JFrog, AWS ECR, S3
• Cloud: Primarily AWS, with some GCP, Alibaba Cloud, and Azure
• Databases: RDS and self-managed MariaDB, MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL

The candidate also described responsibilities including repository and access management, resolving build issues, provisioning infrastructure, managing branches, writing Jenkins pipelines and Kubernetes manifests, supporting migrations, preparing monitoring reports and cost estimates, and onboarding teammates.

Interview Topics and Answers

• Helm troubleshooting: The candidate suggested checking whether Helm is installed, whether the release exists, environment-specific values, image-pull permissions, and Kubernetes events and logs. For separate environments, they described using files such as dev-values.yaml and prod-values.yaml to configure databases, deployments, and images.
• Zero-downtime Kubernetes deployments: The candidate named blue/green and canary approaches, but also mentioned recreate deployments. The answer did not explain the mechanics of maintaining availability.
• Scaling applications during Helm deployments: The response mentioned running Helm installation and applying Kubernetes deployments, but did not clearly explain how to set replica counts or use autoscaling.
• Production troubleshooting: The candidate’s sequence was to check URL accessibility and HTTP errors, inspect pod status and logs, then investigate services and AWS load-balancer routing. They gave an example in which correcting a mismatch between deployment and service labels resolved the issue.
• Terraform across cloud accounts and environments: The candidate proposed separating environment code by branches or using modules and Jenkins build parameters to select an environment. They did not clearly describe how account-specific credentials or provider configuration would be selected.
• Application access from outside Kubernetes: The candidate distinguished ClusterIP as internal to the cluster and cited NodePort, a load balancer, or an ingress controller, including NGINX, for external access.
• Database operations: The candidate described taking database dumps before releases or patching and using dump-and-restore during regional migration. They said they had not worked with licensed enterprise database editions.
• Monitoring and logging: The candidate reported end-to-end use of Prometheus and Grafana, including dashboard design, as well as AWS CloudWatch experience. Their ELK experience was limited mainly to installation and configuration.
• Security: Practices cited included deploying workloads and databases in private subnets, using Systems Manager Session Manager instead of opening SSH port 22, restricting security-group ports, and using GuardDuty and CloudTrail.
• Automation: The candidate described CI/CD pipelines, shell scripts for environment deployments, Ansible for package management and small deployments across multiple VMs, and Terraform for infrastructure automation. They had not used AI agents.

Role Priorities

The interviewer said the role particularly called for experience with enterprise databases—especially backup and recovery and replication—along with Kubernetes, Helm, and strong troubleshooting skills. The interviewer was unsure of some role details and suggested checking with HR.

Main Speakers

• Interviewer: Freddy
• Candidate: Sheikh Malladi, also addressed as Malladi in the interview