Top 30 Azure DevOps Interview Questions and Answers

 

1. What is DevOps?

Of course, this is one of the first Microsoft Azure DevOps interview questions that you will be asked. The full form of DevOps is Development and Operation’s Collaboration. It focuses on the 3Ps Process, People, and (working) Product that stands for continuous integration and continuous delivery of value to end-users.

In simple terms, DevOps, essentially, speeds up the process of delivery of applications and software services. This ability to continuously deliver minimizes the risk factor. This is possible through stakeholder and end-user feedback collection.

2. Why use DevOps?

This is a common Azure DevOps interview question. Traditional software development always had a slow code deployment time after completion of development. And oftentimes, the Development Team and Operations Team or deployment team would get into arguments regarding its status blaming the server or the code for the issues. This is where DevOps enters with a solution.

DevOps facilitates the delivery of smaller features to clients in a quick and efficient manner and allows seamless software delivery.

3. How does DevOps work?

DevOps is the process of Operations and Development Engineers who work in collaboration in a complete project lifecycle, from the design and development to product releases and support.

4. What is Azure DevOps?

The process includes testing automation, continuous integration, as well as continuous delivery.
People with both development and operations skills work together and implement various tools for CI-CD and monitoring for quick response to customer’s requirements and fix issues and bugs.

Azure DevOps is the new name for Microsoft VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) and an application lifecycle management tool. It helps in project planning through Agile tools and templates. Other functionalities include version control of source code, management and execution of test plans, and management of branches.

Additionally, Azure DevOps also helps in solution deployments across various platforms with the help of Azure Pipelines and allows continuous integration and continuous deployment.

5. What are the benefits of DevOps?

The major benefits of DevOps are:

·       Customer satisfaction

·       More engagement and collaboration between Development and Operation teams

·       Faster code deployment in the market through continuous integration and delivery

·       Faster operational support

·       Higher efficiency

·       Strong infrastructure and IT performance

·       Continuous improvements and reduced failures

·       Transparency between teams/li>

·       Constant monitoring and better adaption

6. Name a few DevOps tools.

Some popular DevOps tools are:

·       Git

·       Selenium

·       Jenkins

·       Puppet

·       Chef

·       Ansible

·       Nagios

·       Docker

7. What are the popular DevOps tools for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment?

Azure Pipelines support macOS, Windows, and Linux. Following are a few popular DevOps tools for Continuous Integration:

·       Jenkins

·       TeamCity

·       Codeship

·       GitLab CI

·       CircleCI

·       Travis CI

·       Bamboo

Following are some of the popular Continuous Deployment tools:

·       Jenkins

·       Azure Pipelines for Deployment

·       DeployBot

·       TeamCity

·       Bamboo

·       ElectricFlow

·       AWS CodeDeploy

·       Octopus Deploy

·       Shippable

8. What are Azure Boards?

Azure Boards is an Azure DevOps service. It helps manage the work in software projects and provides a wide range of functionalities like native support for Kanban and Scrum, customizable dashboards, and integrated reporting. Azure Boards include features like boards, sprints, work items, dashboards, backlogs, queries, etc.

9. What is Azure Repos?

This is a basic Azure DevOps interview question but it can be difficult to answer. Azure Repos is a version control system that can manage the different versions of a code and the code itself throughout the lifecycle of development. It is easy to track any changes in the code made by different teams. It also keeps a detailed record of these changes and the history for better coordination within the team. The changes are then merged at a later stage.

Azure Repos offers a centralized version control system (Team Foundation Version Control) as well as a distributed version control system (Git).

10. What are containers?

Containers provide the means to package software code, its configurations, dependencies, and packages into a single unit or object. Multiple containers can run on the same machine and share OS with other containers for running fast, reliable, and consistent deployments anywhere.

11. What containers does Azure DevOps support?

Azure DevOps provides the following container support:

·       Docker

·       Azure Kubernetes services

·       Asp.Net with containers

·       Azure Service Fabric application with Docker support

12. What are Azure Pipelines?

Azure DevOps Pipeline automatically develops and tests code projects. It is a service on the Azure cloud that works well with most project types and languages. This service helps in improving the availability of code projects to other users.

13. What is the use of Selenium in DevOps?

Selenium is used for continuous testing in DevOps. It specializes in forms of regression and functional testing.

14. What are Azure Test Plans?

This is another one of the popular interview questions on Azure DevOps.
Azure Test Plans is a service provided by Azure DevOps. It provides a browser-based test management solution along with crucial capabilities in user acceptance testing, exploratory testing, and planned manual testing. It also includes a browser extension for the provision of exploratory testing as well as feedback from stakeholders.

Exploratory and manual testing are critical methods that consist of the evaluation of product or service quality.

Azure Test Plans, additionally, focus on DevOps on automated testing. It combines the contributions from developers, managers, testers, product owners, and user experience advocates and enhances the quality of a project.

15. What are some important features of Memcached?

Memcached offers a wide variety of features like:

·       CAS Tokens

·       Callbacks

·       GetDelayed

·       Binary protocol

·       Igbinary

16. What is the Dogpile effect and how can you prevent it?

Dogpile effect or cache stampede indicates the expiry of cache, followed by the website being simultaneously hit by numerous requests. Semaphore lock helps prevent this effect by generating a new value as the cache expires.

17. What is Continuous Testing? What is the use of Test Automation in DevOps?

DevOps is all about people, culture, and automation. Continuous testing plays a crucial role in DevOps. Scripts are written for software testing and made auto executable so that testing can be automated and frequent releases are possible using the delivery pipelines.

18. What is Forking Workflow?

Forking Workflow gives Developers the service-side repositories. It supports open-source projects and is often used together with a Git hosting service like Bitbucket.

19. What are some of the useful plugins in Jenkins.

Following are a few useful Jenkins plugins:

·       Amazon EC2

·       Maven 2 project

·       HTML publisher

·       Join

·       Copy artifact

·       Green Balls

20. Can we move or copy Jenkins from one server to another?

Yes, it is possible. Jenkins can be moved or copied from one server to another. When copying Jenkins, it is possible to move the jobs directory from the older server to the new or the current one. This enables moving an installation by copying in the corresponding job directory.

 

21. What are Azure DevOps Projects?

Azure DevOps Project is a simplified way to effectively bring existing code and Git repository for the creation of CI and CD pipeline to Azure.

Let’s move on to the next section of advanced Azure DevOps Interview Questions for experienced professionals.

22. What is the difference between Azure DevOps Services and Azure DevOps Server?

This is one of the trickier Azure DevOps interview questions. Azure DevOps Services is the cloud service of Microsoft Azure and it offers a highly scalable and reliable hosted service that is globally available. DevOps Server, on the other hand, is an on-premises offering that is on a SQL Server back end.

Enterprises go for the on-premises offering when they want their day within their network or when there is a requirement for accessing SQL Server reporting services that are integrated with Azure DevOps data and tools.

23. What are the different DevOps solution architectures?

Multiple tools and technologies can be leveraged with Azure to design solution architectures for the below DevOps scenarios:

·       CI/CD for Azure VMs

·       CI/CD for Azure Web Apps

·       CI/CD for containers

·       DevTest image factory

·       Using Azure Web Apps and Jenkins for Java CI/CD

·       Using Jenkins and Terraform on Azure Virtual Architecture for immutable infrastructure CI/CD

·       Using Jenkins and Kubernetes on Azure Kubernetes Service for Container CI/CD

24. What are the reasons to use CI and CD and Azure pipelines?

Make sure to go through this question as it is one of the important interview questions. Implementing CI and CD pipelines ensure quality and reliable code.

Azure pipelines are there to ensure a secure, easy, and quick way to automate project development processes and availability. They are entirely free for use in public projects and cost-effective for private ones (free 30 hours per month).

Below are a few reasons for using CI/CD and Azure pipelines:

·       Supports any platform or language

·       Enables work with open-source project>

·       Building on Windows, Mac, and Linux machines

·       Enables simultaneous deployment to various types of a target

·       Integration with GitHub and Azure deployments

25. What should you do to make a NuGet package available to anonymous users outside your organization alongside minimizing the number of publication points?

The answer is the introduction of a new feed for the package. Packages that are hosted in Azure Artifacts, find storage in a feed. Sharing packages with higher scalability and according to requirements can be ensured by setting up permissions on the feed. These multiple feeds enable control of access to packages across four levels. These four levels of access are:

·       Owners

·       Readers

·       Contributors

·       Collaborators

26. How can you enable communication between members of the development team working in different locations around the world using Azure DevOps?

For such an application, the isolation of members of different project teams into different communication channels is the first criterion. Additionally, maintaining communication history in the concerned channels is necessary. Effective integration with Azure DevOps is also important for the application and allows one to add external suppliers and contractors to projects. The Microsoft teams have addressed these requirements through their offering of the right capabilities.

Classifying teams allows the creation of different channels by users for the organization of communications according to the topic. Every channel can include a few to thousands of users.

Microsoft Teams provides a guest access feature that allows the invitation of external people to join internal channels for the purpose of meetings,  file sharing, and messaging. It helps in B2B project management and can also directly integrate with Azure DevOps.

27. Which feature can be used for the development of a multi-tier application using Azure App Service web apps as the front end and Azure SQL database as the back end? 

The appropriate option, in this case, is Application Map in Azure Application Insights. This is because it helps in identifying the performance bottlenecks as well as the failure hotspots in different components of the multi-tier applications.

Application components and the related dependencies are represented by the nodes on the map. Furthermore, it is also capable of providing the status for health KPI and alerts.

28. What can you do to improve the quality of code if there are many unused variables and empty catch blocks?

Selecting “Run PMD” in a Maven build task will do the trick. PMD is a source code analyser that is capable of identifying common programming errors like unnecessary object creation, unused variables, and empty code blocks.

An Apache Maven PMD Plugin will automatically run the tool on a project’s source code and the detailed code error results are provided on the site report.

 

29. What are the necessary components for the integration of Azure DevOps and Bitbucket?

The integration of Azure DevOps and Bitbuckets requires a self-hosted agent and an external Git service connection. Since GitLab CI/CD is compatible with GitHub and Bitbucket. Instead of moving an entire project to GitLab, it is possible to connect the external repository. One can make use of GitLab CI/CD in this manner.

30. Explain Pair Programming with reference to DevOps.

Pair programming is an engineering practice of Extreme Programming Rules. It involves two programmers working on the same system and on the same design/code/algorithm.

One programmer can be the driver and the other as the observer and constantly monitor the progress of a project and identify problems. The roles can be removed at any moment without prior intimation.