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 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
What's the difference between HPA scaling on CPU utilization versus a custom metric like queue depth, and when is CPU actually the wrong signal?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
How does HPA's scaling decision actually get computed from raw metrics — walk through what happens between a CPU spike and a new replica appearing?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
Why might an HPA be unable to scale a Deployment even with plenty of spare CPU capacity on existing nodes?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
An HPA scales up rapidly during a spike, then flaps up and down repeatedly for the next hour — what's causing it, and how do you fix it?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
Users report increasing latency under load, but the HPA isn't scaling the Deployment at all — how do you figure out why?
AdvancedKubernetes8 min
Why does setting only limits (no requests) on a container break HPA's CPU-based scaling calculation?
BeginnerKubernetes5 min
A workload is constantly OOMKilled despite having an HPA configured — why doesn't horizontal scaling fix this, and what should you actually do?
IntermediateKubernetes6 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
How would you design autoscaling for a workload with a sharp, predictable daily spike versus one with genuinely unpredictable bursty traffic?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min