A Guaranteed Project Question for DevOps/SRE Interview

The question you’re likely to be asked is: “Can you tell me about a challenging project, a project you handled independently, or a project you’re particularly proud of?” These variations all aim to uncover the project you are most familiar with and have the most hands-on experience with. This allows the interviewer to probe further into the details.
So, how should you prepare for this? This question is very likely to come up-there’s about a 95% chance. If I asked you to talk about this project for five minutes, could you do it?
Remember, five minutes is not a short amount of time. If you’re on stage, filling that time with words, topics, and details can feel quite long. So, it’s important to have this prepared, either by writing it down, practicing it, or even creating a PowerPoint with enough details to confidently speak for five uninterrupted minutes.
When you first answer this question, focus on the problem you were solving and the intended outcome of the project. What was the goal, and why was this project important?
Almost immediately after, the interviewer will likely ask about the challenges you faced. You’ll need to rely on your memory, especially if the project happened a few years ago. It’s important to think this through beforehand and have a clear answer ready to discuss.
Once you answer, expect secondary questions based on your response. For example, one of my favorite projects was moving an entire application from on-premises to AWS for Disney, several years ago. The process was primarily executed through Terraform since we didn’t have CI/CD at the time.
*Examples of Questions:*
You might be asked, “How did you structure your Terraform folders? How did you manage the state? What data store did you use, and why did you choose certain AWS services?” These are detailed questions that require a strong recall of the project’s specifics.
*Further Probing:*
After answering these secondary questions, the interviewer might probe further. For example, if you used an S3 bucket for state management, they may ask, “How did you manage states between different folders and environments? How did you handle infrastructure shared between staging, development, and production?”
*Depth of Knowledge:*
This is where you can demonstrate your in-depth understanding. If you haven’t prepared, you might struggle to recall these details, and the interviewer might conclude that your involvement was limited.
*Critical Thinking:*
Another common angle is, “Why not something else?” For instance, if you chose S3 or RDS for your datastore, you might be asked why you didn’t consider NoSQL. Here, you’ll need to apply critical thinking and explain your reasoning.
*Conclusion:*
By anticipating these follow-up questions, you’ll be well-prepared. This question is almost guaranteed to appear in a DevOps or SRE interview, so being ready can make a significant difference.
*Closing:*
I hope you found this helpful, and I’ll see you in the next video.

[@wanderadi]

thank you soo much master, for posting daily videos..

[@mamun001]

Thank you for the feedback!