This DevSecOps interview question is meant to examine a candidate's communication and collaboration skills -- which are critical in a DevOps environment -- rather than security knowledge. Discuss situations where you helped share information between teams or team members to enhance security across the DevOps pipeline in a collaborative way.

Here's the nitty gritty: An anecdotal question that examines a candidate's direct involvement in a genuine security issue. That issue, whether a simple buffer overflow or a malicious hack, doesn't matter. Instead, discuss your experience with a security issue in a DevOps environment, and tell the interviewer about your specific involvement in the discovery and resolution of that issue. Be sure to include the follow-up steps you took, the lessons you learned and how you adjusted processes to avoid a similar issue in the future.

Again, this question gauges the candidate's hands-on experience, particularly with the security tools the prospective employer uses, such as those for vulnerability checks, testing, systems and change management, and intrusion detection and prevention. Typically, it's not necessary for a candidate to be an expert in every tool, but it's helpful to at least be familiar with tools the employer uses to expedite training. However, if the employer lists specific tools in the job requirements, be sure to learn more about them before the interview.

This DevSecOps interview question is intended to gauge a candidate's hands-on involvement in security issues. Respond in a way that reinforces your basic knowledge of security in DevOps processes and provides more detail about your adherence to sound security practices throughout the workflow, including how you developed those practices through team discussions and reporting. How exactly you test and fix flaws isn't nearly as important as the fact that you've been directly involved in software development security.

Interviewers ask this intentionally broad question to lead job candidates into the DevOps security discussion and to gauge the importance of security in their prior DevOps work. There is no wrong answer, but be sure to discuss your involvement in security goals along the pipeline. This can include code design best practices, code evaluation and testing for known vulnerabilities, and intrusion scanning in the production environment. This question, and your response, sets the stage for additional or more specific questions.

Security tools could be used for security-related automation in the continuous delivery cycle at the following stages of the SDLC: 

Scanning of source code: CheckMarx, Gitrob 

Scans and tests: Evident.IO, GauntLT, and Contrast 

Artifacts: Sonatype, Nessus, and Tanium  

Monitoring: Splunk, Evident.io, FireEye, and Metasploit   

The inclusion of IT/OPs and Security staff members in Agile teams, resulting in sprint goals that include stories for both IT/OPs and security staff members, is the primary difference between traditional Agile and DevOps/DevSecOps teams. What’s more, the definition of DONE shifts. The definition of DONE in Agile SCRUM development is creating demonstrable software/artifacts at the end of the sprint. The definition of DONE in an Agile SCRUM team following the DevOps/DevSecOps philosophy shifts to creating demonstrable software/artifacts in a production-like environment at the end of the sprint. 

 On one of my Github pages, Continuous Delivery of Microservices on AWS, I have a detailed write-up on continuous delivery on AWS ECS and AWS EC2. The continuous delivery reference architecture for AWS is depicted in the diagram below. 

The following are some key points to consider when architecting a Docker-based continuous delivery solution: 

Arrange the apps for tokenization or containerization. This may necessitate thinking about microservices architecture. 

Consideration of Docker for provisioning development and test environments 

Setting up a Docker container registry on-premises or in the cloud (for example, AWS ECR) 

 Some of the stages of the continuous delivery model are as follows: 

Developers check-in code, which causes WebHooks to be activated, triggering CI Builds. 

App compilation and deployment artefact creation 

Uploading deployment artefacts to art factories 

Deployment of app artefacts across multiple test environments  

Some of the technologies that could be used for DevOps implementation are as follows: 

Automated provisioning of environments using configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, and Ansible. 

Tools for continuous integration, such as Jenkins 

Container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, among others 

Artifacts repository software like Nexus Repository Manager, JFrog Artifactory, and others. 

DevOps does not necessitate the use of Docker technology to achieve its primary goal. The fact that cloud-native apps with Docker as the underlying technology can be used for automated environment provisioning and deployment across multiple environments, including cloud services, makes it a very useful technology for DevOps adoption. 

Yes, that is correct. Ad-hoc automation of build, deployment, and environment provisioning processes could be used to achieve DevOps with the primary goal of lowering MTTC and MTTR. 

A DevOps Architect’s responsibilities may include the following: 

Create a pipeline for continuous delivery.  

Create a strategy for implementing DevOps across multiple teams. 

Be in charge of the DevOps implementation. 

Outline the technologies that will be used to implement DevOps. These technologies could be related to various aspects of automation, such as build, deployment, and environment provisioning, among others. 

It is not possible to form a separate DevOps team. This is because DevOps is a software development philosophy that requires developers and IT/Ops staff to collaborate as a single team with shared Sprint (Agile SCRUM) goals. As a result, the product team is restructured to follow the DevOps or DevSecOps philosophy. The following diagram depicts the various aspects of product teams being transformed to work according to the DevOps philosophy. 

The following are some of the stages that an organization might consider moving through to achieve success with a DevOps or DevSecOps rollout: 

Ad-Hoc: Complete ad-hoc tasks on-demand, such as build automation and environment provisioning automation.  

organized or Planned: Create a DevOps project roadmap; as part of this, select development methodologies, teams, tools, and frameworks to be used, as well as required team training and mentoring. 

Align & Assess: Create a proof-of-concept for one or two teams that cover key DevOps implementation aspects. Learn from your mistakes and make changes to the plan so that it can be used for a large-scale rollout across multiple teams within the company. 

Institutionalization: DevOps/DevSecOps implementation should be rolled out across the organization’s various teams. 

continuous Improvement: Apply what you’ve learned and keep improving your DevOps processes. 

The primary metric for determining DevOps success is to look at the following: 

To get started with DevOps or DevSecOps initiatives in your organization, you’ll need to go through various steps such as assessment, gap analysis, maturity model, project implementation roadmap, and so on. 

The main difference is that DevOps requires Developers and IT/Ops staff members to collaborate as a single team with shared sprint goals, whereas DevSecOps requires Developers, IT/Ops, and Security staff to collaborate as a single team with shared sprint goals. Another significant difference is the use of security-related tools at various stages of the SDLC to automate security testing. 

 DevOps, also known as DevSecOps, is a software development philosophy with the primary goal of reducing mean-time-to-change (MTTC) and mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR) for moving new features or bugs fixes into production as quickly as possible. 

This is highly dependent on the organization and its culture. Ops is frequently the source of DevOps initiatives. However, if security and operations are closely aligned early on, it can be a powerful force multiplier. For example, observability and consistency, which are important to Ops, are also important to security. It may be easier to use real data to have conversations with Dev if you can achieve some security observability by partnering with Ops (such as seeing real-world attacks against the app or identifying gaps in cloud environments as a result of dev team misconfigurations). 

There are other options. We’ve worked with app teams that are eager to learn about and improve security (assuming there are no historical frictions and the conversations are conducted correctly) and are actively seeking advice on how to do so. When this happens, it may indicate that things are moving in the right direction and that developers are concerned about code quality, including security. 

 Even if DevOps is in its infancy, you should start DevSecOps concurrently to ensure that security is aligned with your DevOps efforts from the start. If your teams are well-aligned, you can use each other’s strengths and resources to become powerful force multipliers and scale together. You might be surprised to learn that security and DevOps have a lot in common. We’re currently working on a DevSecOps transformation project, and both the security and DevOps leadership teams are in the early stages of developing a program. We’ve been assisting them with the development of this program from the ground up, and having both DevOps and Security leadership on the steering committee and closely aligned is a big part of their success. 

Rather than security knowledge, this DevSecOps interview question focuses on a candidate’s communication and collaboration skills, which are critical in a DevOps environment. Discuss instances where you assisted in the collaborative sharing of information between teams or team members to improve security across the DevOps pipeline. 

Here’s the meat of the matter: Anecdotal question about a candidate’s direct involvement in a legitimate security issue. It makes no difference whether the problem is a simple buffer overflow or a malicious hack. Instead, talk about your experience in a DevOps environment with a security issue, and tell the interviewer about your specific role in the discovery and resolution of that issue. Include the steps you took to follow up, the lessons you learned, and how you adjusted processes to avoid a repeat of the problem. 

This question assesses the candidate’s practical experience, particularly with security tools used by the prospective employer, such as those for vulnerability checks, testing, systems and change management, and intrusion detection and prevention. It is not necessary for a candidate to be an expert in every tool, but it is beneficial to be familiar with the tools used by the employer to speed up training. If the employer specifies certain tools in the job requirements, learn more about them before the interview. 

This DevSecOps interview question is designed to assess a candidate’s hands-on security experience. Respond in a way that reaffirms your fundamental understanding of security in DevOps processes and goes into greater depth about your adherence to sound security practices throughout the workflow, including how you developed those practices through team discussions and reporting. The fact that you’ve been directly involved in software development security is far more important than how you test and fix flaws. 

Interviewers ask this intentionally broad question to lead job candidates into a discussion about DevOps security and to assess the importance of security in their previous DevOps work. There is no right or wrong answer, but be sure to discuss your role in the pipeline’s security goals. Best practices in code design, code evaluation and testing for known vulnerabilities, and intrusion scanning in the production environment are all examples of this. This question, along with your response, sets the tone for further, more specific inquiries. 

DevSecOps stands for development, security, and operations. It's an approach to culture, mechanization, and stage design that integrates protection as a shared responsibility throughout the entire IT lifecycle.


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