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Explain CI/CD, Kubernetes delivery, and troubleshooting

IBMSoftware Engineer · Onsite
EasySoftware EngineerOnsiteSoftware Engineering Fundamentals

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This question evaluates operational DevOps and cloud-native competencies, specifically CI/CD concepts and tools, GitOps delivery with Argo CD, Kubernetes deployment and troubleshooting (including Helm and StatefulSet vs Deployment), containerization rationale, Linux process and file inspection, network diagnostics, database deployment safety, and infrastructure concepts such as HPC and VPC. It is commonly asked in Software Engineering Fundamentals and DevOps interviews to measure production-readiness, troubleshooting ability, and tooling familiarity, emphasizing practical application while requiring underlying conceptual understanding of system behavior and reliability.

You are interviewing for a DevOps/SRE-style role. Answer the following practical questions:

  1. What is CI/CD? Which CI/CD tools have you used and why?
  2. How would you use Argo CD to deploy applications to Kubernetes (GitOps flow, sync, rollback)?
  3. How does Helm work? Describe the typical structure of a Helm chart in an application repo.
  4. How do you troubleshoot a Kubernetes Pod? Example: a Java/JDBC-based pod is in CrashLoopBackOff.
  5. What are HPC and VPC?
  6. Why containerize an application?
  7. What Linux command(s) can you use to inspect a process with PID 9003?
  8. What Linux command(s) can you use to find directories or files?
  9. What commands/tools have you used to troubleshoot network issues?
  10. How do you make database deployments safer (schema changes, rollbacks, minimizing downtime)?
  11. Compare Kubernetes StatefulSet vs Deployment (use cases and behavior).