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.
Two mutating webhooks both touch a pod's containers field, and the final result isn't what either webhook intended alone — how do you diagnose and resolve this?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
Every pod creation cluster-wide suddenly starts failing with an admission webhook TLS error — what happened, and how do you recover quickly?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
The API server responds slowly to all requests — how do you determine whether etcd, the API server, or something else is the bottleneck?
ExpertKubernetes9 min
A team wants to run HPA and VPA on the same Deployment for both CPU and memory — what breaks if you're not careful, and how do you combine them safely?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
A Deployment's pods get evicted during scale-up because new nodes take too long to become ready — how would you close that gap?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
Runtime security tooling alerts that a specific pod is exhibiting behavior consistent with compromise — walk through your immediate containment response.
ExpertKubernetes8 min
How would you design a policy requiring every image deployed to a cluster be cryptographically signed, and what does that actually protect against?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
A security scan found the kubelet's API port reachable without authentication on some nodes — what can an attacker actually do with that, and how do you fix it?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
A CRD needs a breaking schema change, but existing custom resources and consumers depend on the old shape — how do you version a CRD safely?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
How would you migrate a cluster from one CNI plugin to another without a full cluster rebuild — what's actually risky about it?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
A pod's ServiceAccount token was found in a public repo — what's your incident response, and how do you reduce blast radius for next time?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
How would you troubleshoot a pod stuck Pending even though kubectl describe pod shows no scheduling errors at all?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
A CSI driver upgrade causes new attach operations to fail while already-mounted volumes keep working — how do you investigate, and how would you roll this out more safely next time?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
How would you design a Job for a task that must never run twice, even if a pod fails partway through (e.g., a billing charge)?
ExpertKubernetes8 min