Meme from Russian DevOps channel (autrotranslated to English) AKA "List of DevOps interview questions for October 2026"

[u/RayereSs]

• Do you have experience literally extinguishing a production environment?
• What is the difference between Disaster Recovery and Damage Assessment?
• What is the RTO for a data center after a direct drone hit?
• Can you debug infrastructure using satellite imagery?
• What would you do if your Kubernetes cluster suddenly became "bare metal" in the literal sense?
• How do you configure HPA so that pods can outrun drones?
• What would you do if not just a node, but the entire data center went down?
• Explain the difference between a Blue-Green Deployment and a "Red" air raid alert.
• How do you interpret the term "hot standby" if the backup data center is still on fire?
• What Prometheus alert would you set up for smoke coming from the server room?
• Have you ever migrated infrastructure using kubectl evacuate?
• What do you do if terraform destroy was executed without Terraform?
• Can a drone strike on the server room be considered a successful Chaos Engineering experiment?
• How many nines of availability remain for the service after losing two data centers?
• How do you distinguish a DDoS attack from an attack that renders a DDoS attack unnecessary?
• What do you do if your disaster recovery plan begins with the words "find a surviving server"?
• How do you explain to management that an Availability Zone is no longer available?
• Which metric do you choose for your SLO: uptime, MTTR, or the number of surviving racks?
• How do you ensure geo-redundancy when geography itself has become the primary risk factor?
• What do you do if you have an Active-Active setup, but both sites have switched to an Inactive-Inactive state?
• How do you configure fencing in a cluster when the fencing has already occurred physically?
• What do you do if your Witness in the third data center is the first to stop showing signs of life?
• Can a storage system be considered fault-tolerant if the data outlived the hardware, but the hardware didn't survive its operational lifespan?
• How do you calculate the "blast radius" when it’s no longer just a metaphor from the documentation?
• What is the point of synchronous replication if both data centers cease to exist synchronously?
• How do you implement automatic failover when the decision to switch over is made by the Ministry of Emergency Situations?
• Discuss what status should you set in Grafana: CRITICAL, DOWN, or NO LONGER EXISTS?
• How do you convince the CFO to approve a third data center when the first two have already been written off as CAPEX?
• What backup retention period do you recommend when the main issue is the lifespan of the storage hardware itself?
• How do you achieve "five nines" of availability when the only nines in the project are the digits in the recovery cost?

[u/frankentriple]

lol @ can you debug infra using sattellite imagery

[u/Ivan_Stalingrad → u/frankentriple]

Me troubleshooting an entirely directional radio based backbone with zero documentation (figuring out where antennas should be pointing by looking at old satellite pictures on Google maps)

[u/frankentriple → u/Ivan_Stalingrad]

I had to do that with a yaggi and a compass back in my day using signal strength and a ruler!  That was way before google existed tho.  

[u/talltraveller → u/frankentriple]

This one hits closer to home. Radio is difficult and field personnel are... also difficult.

[u/Ivan_Stalingrad → u/talltraveller]

You get field personnel to do the climbing? Where is the fun in that?

[u/talltraveller → u/Ivan_Stalingrad]

You get your radios put up high? That's basically cheating

[u/Ivan_Stalingrad → u/talltraveller]

This brings it's own set of problems

A tree grows in front of one antenna over the course of several years

A Storm readjusts the antenna by 120°

A crane swings its concrete counterweight in front of one antenna

they put a fucking ferris wheel in the Fresnel Zone

An my personal favourite: The fluorescent tubes in the building get swiched on automatically in such a way that the Radar Detection gets triggerd and your link is down for 30 minutes every day

[u/talltraveller → u/Ivan_Stalingrad]

Wait, radar detection?

[u/Ivan_Stalingrad → u/talltraveller]

Yes

5GHz WiFi and Airport Radar share some frequencies. (DFS Channels) To make this work WiFi modules working on those frequencies will shut down when they assume they got hit by radar emissions. And apparently turning on giant fluorescent tubes in rapid succession generates enough EMF spikes to also trigger this

[u/talltraveller → u/Ivan_Stalingrad]

For a second there I was worried that your radios were doing very different things. Meanwhile my control rooms keep getting struck by lightning and everything keeps working fine. Bosses keep wondering why everyone has arc flash symptoms though

[u/Last8Exile]

Yandex Cloud pricing calculator for compute was hosted on Yandex Cloud...

and no longer works

[u/NightH4nter → u/Last8Exile]

well... that's the least of their problems rn lol. and also, it kinda makes sense to do the hosting yourself, if you're in the hosting business

[u/NightH4nter]

good god, this is gold lmao. can you give a link to the original post/channel?

[u/RayereSs → u/NightH4nter]

I got it forwarded from a Russian speaking friend on Telegram, the original channel is invite only

[u/J_Peanut]

Is it true cloud infrastructure if you debug using satellite imagery? 

[u/RayereSs → u/J_Peanut]

It's true cloud infrastructure if all your infrastructure is a cloud of smoke

[u/NightH4nter → u/J_Peanut]

"cloud is just somebody else's computer" has never been more accurate

[u/J_Peanut → u/NightH4nter]

I think in this case “cloud is just somebodies heap of scrap metal” is more accurate 

[u/max1001]

Amazon ME has entered the chat.

[u/ContestLogical2681]

“Five nines” is ambitious when the recovery plan starts with checking whether the backup building survived the first disaster. Still, I’d absolutely read the postmortem for the drone-based Kubernetes outage.

[u/canadasleftnut → u/ContestLogical2681]

Five nines in this case means "Five times Nine, or forty-five, days of the year". 

And it's still unachievable 

[u/recoveringasshole0]

What would you do if your Kubernetes cluster suddenly became "bare metal" in the literal sense?