Ansible: A configuration management and orchestration tool used to automate IT tasks like provisioning, application deployment, and configuration management. Great for managing infrastructure as code. Git: A distributed version control system. It helps manage source code history and enables collaboration among teams. Bitbucket: A Git repository management tool that provides source code hosting and CI/CD integration. Commonly used for branch-based workflows. AWS (Amazon Web Services): A cloud platform offering services like compute (EC2), storage (S3), and managed Kubernetes (EKS). Widely used for hosting and scaling applications. Azure: Microsoft's cloud platform with similar offerings as AWS, including Azure DevOps for CI/CD pipelines, AKS for Kubernetes, and Azure Functions for serverless computing.

DevOps interviews start with HR screening, then a take-home automation task or live coding—write a CI pipeline, Dockerize an app, fix a Terraform bug. Next, system-design round: draw a multi-env AWS/GCP/K8s setup, explain zero-downtime deployments, monitoring, rollback. Tools grilled: Git, Jenkins, Argo, Helm, Ansible, Prometheus. Follow-up: incident-response role-play, security scanning, cost optimization. Culture fit: blameless postmortems, SRE mindset, cross-team empathy. Offer or polite reject within a week.