I've sat on both sides of DevOps / SRE interviews. The pattern is the same.

People can recite what a Security Group is. They freeze when you ask why they'd block an IP with a NACL instead.

Interviewers for mid-level and senior roles are scoring three things:

1. Temporary over permanent. IAM Roles over IAM Users. Short-lived credentials. If your first instinct is a long-lived access key, that's a signal.

2. Blast radius. Can you change a shared IAM role without taking production down? Can you drain nodes without killing every replica? Seniors talk about the rollback before the change.

3. The metric that actually matters. Auto Scaling on CPU for an I/O-bound app is a junior answer. Request count per target is a mid-level one. Knowing when CPU is a lie is senior.

That's why this guide is built the way it is. Every question has the textbook answer, the plain-English version, what the interviewer is actually scoring, and the follow-up they'll ask next.

If you're mid-level and switching jobs, don't grind 400 flashcards. Grind the 65 questions that show up, in the order interviews actually go.