A Look Inside the Modern DevOps Interview
Preparing for a technical interview can feel like studying for an exam where the syllabus is a secret. You can grind through textbooks and tutorials, but the real test is a series of pointed questions from an engineer across the table (or screen). The internet is flooded with generic "Top 50 DevOps Questions" lists that are often outdated, trivial, or both. litu54/DevOps-Interview-Guide offers a refreshingly direct alternative: a crowdsourced collection of real interview questions, straight from candidates who have recently been in the hot seat.
The project's premise is simple but powerful. It gathers and organizes interview experiences from 2025 and 2026 for DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Cloud engineering roles. Its core mission is to replace SEO-driven filler content with authentic data. With 151 interview write-ups spanning 85 different companies, it provides a grounded, contemporary look at what hiring managers are actually asking.
The Company-Centric Advantage
The most significant feature of this guide is its organization. Instead of grouping questions by topic (like "Kubernetes" or "Terraform"), it groups them by company. The repository contains folders named after specific companies, from tech giants to smaller product shops and service-based consultancies. Inside each folder, individual Markdown files represent a single candidate's interview experience.
This structure is exceptionally useful for targeted preparation. If you have an interview scheduled with a specific company, you can go directly to their folder and see the questions other candidates faced. The filenames often add another layer of context, such as SRE_principal.md or DevOps_Engineer_2.md, indicating the role and sometimes even the interview round. This allows you to tailor your study plan, focusing on the technologies and concepts that a particular employer emphasizes. For instance, you might find one company drills deep on Kubernetes networking policies while another focuses on AWS cost optimization scripts. This is a level of specific insight that generic, topic-based lists can never provide.
This approach also reveals broader industry trends. By browsing through different company folders, you can get a feel for the different expectations at a product company versus a consultancy, or a fintech firm versus a large enterprise. The README explicitly encourages this kind of exploration, and it's a valid way to build a mental model of the current hiring landscape.
Scope and Content
The guide covers the full spectrum of modern infrastructure engineering. The README lists topics like Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions), Ansible, Linux fundamentals, scripting, and core SRE principles like SLIs, SLOs, and incident response. The value comes from seeing how these topics are combined and framed in a real interview setting. Instead of a sterile question like "What is an SLO?", you might find a submission describing a scenario-based question: "Your team is responsible for a service with a 99.9% availability SLO. Walk me through how you would instrument the service to track this, what SLIs you would choose, and what your process would be if you breach the error budget for a quarter."
The project's commitment to authenticity, promising "no paraphrasing," means you get the questions as the candidate remembered them. While this relies on the accuracy of individual contributors, it preserves the tone and style of the interviewer, which can be just as important as the technical content itself.
Limitations and Rough Edges
Despite its utility, the guide is not a complete interview preparation system. Its most obvious limitation is that it provides questions, not answers. This is a deliberate choice; it's a collection of prompts, not a study sheet. A candidate must use this repository as a starting point for their own research and practice. If you don't already have a foundational knowledge of the topics, this guide will show you what you don't know, but it won't teach it to you.
The quality and depth of the content are also inherently variable, as is the case with any crowdsourced project. Some submissions are detailed accounts of a multi-round interview process, while others might be a short list of questions from a single technical screen. This inconsistency means you may find a folder for a target company is sparse or contains only a single, brief entry.
Furthermore, the project lacks sophisticated navigation. Finding information relies on browsing the folder structure or using GitHub's built-in repository search. There are no tags for experience level, specific technologies, or question types. If you want to find all senior-level Kubernetes questions related to security, you'll have to do a lot of manual searching and reading. Finally, the project currently has an unknown license, which, while not a practical issue for individual users, is an administrative loose end.
Community and Project Health
The repository appears to be in good health. With over 600 stars and a recent mention on GitHub's trending list, it's gaining visibility. The last commit was just a few days ago, on August 5, 2026, and there are only five open issues. This suggests an active maintainer and a project that is growing without being overwhelmed by support requests.
The contribution model is straightforward: fork the repo, add a Markdown file in the correct folder, and open a pull request. This low barrier to entry is crucial for its long-term success, as the guide's value depends entirely on a steady stream of new interview experiences. The clear instructions in the README for contributing are a positive sign for its continued growth.