2025 Comprehensive Operations Engineer Interview Questions (1000+ Q&A)

Operations Engineer Interview Questions (174)

What is operations engineering? What is game operations?

What does an operations staff member do when collaborating with product operations?

Given 300 servers, how would you manage them?

Explain the principles and characteristics of RAID0, RAID1, and RAID5.

What are the differences between LVS, Nginx, and HAProxy, and how do you choose among them?

What are the differences between Squid, Varnish, and Nginx, and how do you choose among them?

What are the differences between Tomcat and Resin, and how do you choose among them?

What is middleware? What is JDK?

Explain the purpose of Tomcat ports 8005, 8009, and 8080.

What is a CDN?

What is a gray release for a website?

Describe the DNS domain resolution process.

What is RabbitMQ?

Explain the working principle of Keepalived.

Describe the three LVS operating modes.

How does MySQL InnoDB locate lock issues, and how can MySQL reduce master‑slave replication lag?

How to reset the MySQL root password?

Advantages and disadvantages of LVS, Nginx, and HAProxy.

MySQL data backup tools.

How Keepalive works and performs health checks.

Analyze Nginx access logs to list the top ten IPs by page views.

Use tcpdump to capture traffic on host 192.168.1.1 port 80 and save output to tcpdump.log.

Redirect local port 80 traffic to port 8080 on host 192.168.2.1.

Explain RAID0, RAID1, RAID5 principles and characteristics.

What is your understanding of the role of an operations engineer?

Write the full command to capture and display real‑time TCP port 80 network data.

Step‑by‑step troubleshooting for a server that fails to boot.

How to handle viruses on a Linux system.

If a virus file reappears after deletion, how to resolve it?

Explain the OSI seven‑layer model.

Which Nginx modules do you commonly use and for what purpose?

List web server load‑balancing architectures you are familiar with.

How to view concurrent HTTP requests and their TCP connection states.

Use tcpdump to sniff port 80 traffic and identify the most frequent source.

Write a script to detect online IPs in the 192.168.1.0/24 network (ping‑based).

Given Apache logs stored daily under /app/logs, devise a solution to retain only the last 7 days due to disk space constraints.

General suggestions for optimizing a Linux system.

Extract the IP address of eth0 using cut (optional: also using awk or sed).

Explain the function of common SecureCRT shortcut keys.

Schedule a nightly backup of /var/www/html to /data with timestamped archive names.

Mount a Windows shared directory on Linux.

Repeat: view concurrent HTTP requests and TCP connection states.

Repeat: sniff port 80 traffic to find the top source.

Count files in /var/log directory.

Count connections per IP on the current system.

Generate a random 32‑bit password in shell.

Identify the top five IPs by request count in Apache access.log.

Kubernetes Interview Questions (128)

Briefly describe ETCD and its characteristics.

What scenarios are suitable for ETCD?

What is Kubernetes?

Explain the relationship between Kubernetes and Docker.

Define Minikube, Kubectl, and Kubelet.

Common deployment methods for Kubernetes.

How does Kubernetes achieve cluster management?

Advantages, suitable scenarios, and characteristics of Kubernetes.

Current drawbacks or limitations of Kubernetes.

Fundamental concepts of Kubernetes.

Kubernetes cluster components and RC mechanism.

Role of kube-proxy.

iptables principle of kube-proxy.

ipvs principle of kube-proxy.

Differences between ipvs and iptables in kube-proxy.

What is a static Pod?

Possible states of a Pod.

Main process of creating a Pod.

Pod restart policies.

Pod health‑check methods.

LivenessProbe common implementations.

Typical Pod scheduling strategies.

Init container concept.

Kubernetes Deployment upgrade process.

Deployment upgrade strategies.

Features of DaemonSet resources.

Automatic scaling mechanisms in Kubernetes.

Kubernetes Service types.

Backend distribution strategies for Services.

Headless Service definition.

Accessing cluster services from outside.

Ingress concept.

Image download strategies.

Load balancer options for Kubernetes.

Communication between Kubernetes modules and the API Server.

Scheduler role and implementation principles.

Two algorithms used by the Scheduler to bind Pods to nodes.

Function of kubelet.

Components used by kubelet to monitor worker node resources.

How Kubernetes ensures cluster security.

Admission control mechanisms.

RBAC features and advantages.

Purpose of Secrets.

Ways to use Secrets.

PodSecurityPolicy mechanism and enforceable security policies.

Network model of Kubernetes.

CNI model overview.

Network policy concepts and principles.

Role of Flannel.

How Calico implements networking.

Purpose of shared storage in Kubernetes.

Data persistence methods.

PersistentVolume (PV) and PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) concepts.