Intermediate DevOps Interview Questions
322 questions
What's the difference between the older Ingress resource and the newer Gateway API, and when would you actually migrate?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
You deploy a new version of a Kubernetes Deployment. The pods show Running and pass their readiness checks, but the Service in front of them stops routing traffic entirely. Where do you look?
IntermediateKubernetes10 min
How would you design RBAC so a monitoring tool has read access across the whole cluster without being able to read Secrets?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
A pod can read ConfigMaps but not Secrets in the same namespace, even though its Role looks like it should allow both — how do you find the gap?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
Why doesn't a RoleBinding in namespace A grant access to namespace B, even though the ClusterRole it references is itself cluster-scoped?
IntermediateKubernetes5 min
A ServiceAccount that worked fine before a deployment suddenly gets Forbidden errors on the Kubernetes API — how do you diagnose it?
IntermediateKubernetes7 min
A Deployment runs fine in the staging namespace but fails with RBAC errors in production — what's actually different?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
What's the difference in behavior between a container hitting its own memory limit versus the underlying node running out of memory overall?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
Your container runs fine locally but repeatedly gets OOMKilled after you deploy it to Kubernetes. How would you investigate it?
IntermediateKubernetesContainers10 min
How do requests.memory and limits.memory affect Pod scheduling and node-level eviction behavior differently from each other?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
How does the Kubernetes scheduler actually decide which node to place a pod on — walk through filtering and scoring?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
Why might a pod with a very specific nodeSelector never get scheduled, even though matching nodes exist with capacity?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
A pod stays Pending with node(s) had untolerated taint — how do you diagnose it and decide toleration vs. removing the taint?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
What's the difference between requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution and preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution, and what incident does confusing them cause?
IntermediateKubernetes5 min
How would you back up and restore persistent volume data for a stateful app, given kubectl alone doesn't capture volume contents?
IntermediateKubernetes7 min
A pod is stuck Pending with an event about its PVC failing to bind — how do you diagnose why?
IntermediateKubernetes7 min
A team deletes a PVC expecting the data gone, but it's later recovered from the underlying disk — why, and how should reclaim policy be chosen deliberately?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
How would you design a StorageClass for a high-IOPS database workload versus a cheap-capacity logging workload?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
How would you set up alerting to catch a CrashLoopBackOff-class issue before it reaches production traffic, rather than discovering it via a user-facing outage?
IntermediateKubernetesPrometheus7 min
A pod goes into CrashLoopBackOff immediately after you roll out a ConfigMap change, but only in one namespace. How do you investigate it?
IntermediateKubernetesContainers10 min
How do liveness and readiness probes interact with a Pod that's already crash-looping on startup?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
How would you decide between a Deployment, a StatefulSet, and a DaemonSet for three different real services (a stateless API, a database, a node agent)?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
What's the difference between a CronJob's concurrencyPolicy: Forbid and Replace, and what production incident does picking the wrong one cause?
IntermediateKubernetes5 min
A DaemonSet pod is missing from exactly one node while running fine everywhere else — how do you find out why?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min