How to prepare for cloud and DevOps interview questions

Interviewers rarely want a memorised definition. They want to hear why: why you would run a plan first, why a pod is not getting traffic, why a CI job should not hold long-lived keys. Prepare by practising the reasoning.

Updated 2026-10-17 · Venture Lab 10

1. Practise questions that come with explanations

For every practice question, read why the right answer is right and why the others are wrong. If you cannot explain a wrong option, you have found something to study.

The free 10-question practice quiz works this way: score your answers, then read the explanation for each one. It has an English cloud fundamentals track and a Hebrew DevOps track.

2. Know the core topics from the source

• Terraform plan before apply. terraform plan creates an execution plan, so you can preview changes before applying them.
• Terraform state. HashiCorp warns that local state is a plaintext file that can include secret values, and should be treated as sensitive. State locking, where the backend supports it, stops two writers from corrupting it.
• Kubernetes probes. Readiness probes decide when a container is ready to accept traffic. Liveness probes decide when to restart it. Know the difference.
• Debugging CrashLoopBackOff. kubectl describe pod shows the last state and exit code. kubectl logs --previous shows the logs of the instance that crashed.
• CI credentials. GitHub documents OIDC as a way to avoid storing long-lived cloud secrets. The workflow requests a short-lived token from the cloud provider instead.
• Least privilege. Grant the minimum permissions needed, for example a read-only GITHUB_TOKEN by default.
• HTTP 429. RFC 6585 defines "Too Many Requests": the client sent too many requests in a given time, which is rate limiting.
• SLOs. The Google SRE book defines an SLO as a target value or range for a service level, measured by an SLI.

3. Answer in a structure

For scenario questions ("a deploy is failing, what do you do?"), say what you would check first and why. Then say what you would change, and how you would confirm the fix. A clear order counts for more than naming every tool.

4. Practise again

Retake the quiz a few days later. Questions you get right twice can move to the back of the queue; the rest go to the front.

The questions were written for this product. They are not real exam questions, and the quiz is not affiliated with any cloud vendor or certification body.

Venture Lab 10 is independent. Other product and service names are used only to describe compatibility or for comparison, and are trademarks of their owners.

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