Interview prep

Kubernetes Interview Questions

Kubernetes interviews are mostly debugging scenarios: why is this pod not ready, why is traffic not reaching it, why did it get evicted.

Questions and answers

01Walk through what happens when you apply a Deployment.

The API server persists the object to etcd, the deployment controller creates a ReplicaSet, the ReplicaSet creates Pods, the scheduler binds them to nodes and each kubelet pulls images and starts containers.

02A pod is stuck in CrashLoopBackOff. How do you debug it?

kubectl describe for events and exit codes, kubectl logs --previous for the last crash, then check probes, resource limits, config and secret mounts, and image entrypoint.

03Difference between requests and limits?

Requests drive scheduling and guaranteed share; limits cap usage. Exceeding a memory limit gets the container OOM-killed, while exceeding CPU only throttles it.

04How does a Service route traffic to pods?

The Service selects pods by label into an Endpoints/EndpointSlice object; kube-proxy or a CNI dataplane programs the node to load balance to those pod IPs.

05When would you use a StatefulSet instead of a Deployment?

When pods need stable network identity and stable per-pod storage — databases, queues and consensus systems.

How to answer these well

Interviewers are not grading recall — they are checking whether you've hit the failure mode the question describes. Anchor every answer to something you actually shipped or debugged with Kubernetes.

Say the trade-off out loud. "I'd use X here, but it costs Y under Z conditions" scores higher than a clean textbook definition every time.

Roles asking for Kubernetes

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