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.
A Job is supposed to run to completion exactly once, but it created multiple pods — why, and is that actually a bug?
IntermediateKubernetes6 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
A Deployment's new pods keep getting scheduled but immediately evicted, while old pods keep running fine — what changed?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
A rolling update to a Deployment is stuck at 50% — how do you determine whether it's a bad readiness probe, insufficient capacity, or a PodDisruptionBudget blocking it?
AdvancedKubernetes8 min
What's actually different at the API level between kubectl rollout restart and deleting all of a Deployment's pods manually?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
How would you safely roll out a breaking change to a DaemonSet running a critical node-level agent across a large production cluster?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
A StatefulSet pod is deleted but isn't recreated with the same identity fast enough — what's actually blocking it?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
Why does a StatefulSet's rolling update behave completely differently from a Deployment's, and why can that ordering guarantee become a problem mid-incident?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min