What does DevOps mean to you, and how is it different from a traditional operations team?
What the interviewer wants to hear
- Culture of shared ownership between development and operations
- Automation of build, test, deploy and infrastructure
- Small, frequent releases with fast feedback
- Measurement, for example DORA metrics
- Blameless learning from failures
Model answer
For me DevOps is mainly a culture, supported by tools. In a traditional setup, developers write code and hand it over to an operations team who deploy and run it, so there is a wall between them and slow, risky releases. DevOps removes that wall: the same team shares ownership of building, shipping and running the service. We automate everything we can, such as builds, tests, security scans, deployments and infrastructure through code, so releases become small, frequent and boring. Fast feedback from monitoring and users tells us quickly if something is wrong. We measure delivery with DORA metrics like deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate and time to restore. When things fail, we run blameless reviews and fix the system, not the person.
Can you answer it under time pressure?
Take a timed easy round and get scored on every answer.
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