Kubernetes Interview Questions
128 questions
The most extensive topic on this site: RBAC and security context, storage (PV/PVC/StorageClass), workloads and controllers (Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, Jobs, CronJobs), autoscaling (HPA/VPA), scheduling and affinity, networking, cluster architecture, CRDs and operators, admission control, and cluster security hardening. Every question is a realistic production scenario — a pod stuck Pending, a webhook silently breaking scheduling, a StatefulSet rollout behaving unexpectedly — not a bare definition.
What's etcd's actual role in a cluster, and what happens if it becomes unavailable?
BeginnerKubernetesEtcd5 min
Why does setting only limits (no requests) on a container break HPA's CPU-based scaling calculation?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
What's the difference between envFrom and individually listing env entries sourced from a ConfigMap/Secret, and when does it matter?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
Why are Kubernetes Secrets only base64-encoded by default, not encrypted, and how would you actually protect them at rest?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
What's actually different about a CustomResourceDefinition versus a built-in Kubernetes resource like a Deployment?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
What's the actual difference between a Pod and a Deployment in Kubernetes, and why would you almost never create a bare Pod directly in production?
BeginnerKubernetes6 min
What's the difference between ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer, and ExternalName, and how do you choose?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
Why does Kubernetes require a CNI plugin at all — what job does it do that kube-proxy doesn't?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
What's the difference between a Role/RoleBinding and a ClusterRole/ClusterRoleBinding, and when would you bind a ClusterRole at namespace scope on purpose?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
What's the practical difference between node affinity and a plain node selector, given affinity seems strictly more powerful?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
What's the difference between ReadWriteOnce, ReadWriteMany, and ReadWriteOncePod, and what production symptom does picking the wrong one cause?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
A production workload needs persistent storage, and its pods may be rescheduled to different nodes — how do you design storage so data survives that?
BeginnerKubernetes6 min
How would your investigation differ if a Pod entered ImagePullBackOff instead of CrashLoopBackOff?
BeginnerKubernetes6 min
What's actually different at the API level between kubectl rollout restart and deleting all of a Deployment's pods manually?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min