Kubernetes Interview Questions — All Categories
169 questions tagged with Kubernetes as a technology, across every category it appears in
Related categories:Argo CDAWSAzureCI/CDCloud ArchitectureContainersDockerGitOpsHelmJenkinsKubernetesLinuxNetworkingSystem DesignYAML
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
How would you distinguish a genuine memory leak from a legitimately growing in-memory cache, using only Kubernetes-level metrics?
AdvancedKubernetesPrometheus8 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
Two pods that should never co-locate keep landing on the same node — what's wrong with the anti-affinity rule?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
A critical pod gets preempted by a seemingly lower-priority pod during a resource crunch — how do you investigate and prevent it?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
How would you dedicate a set of nodes exclusively to one team's workloads, while still letting that team's pods run elsewhere too?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
How does the Kubernetes scheduler actually decide which node to place a pod on — walk through filtering and scoring?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
What's the practical difference between node affinity and a plain node selector, given affinity seems strictly more powerful?
BeginnerKubernetes5 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
How would you troubleshoot a pod stuck Pending even though kubectl describe pod shows no scheduling errors at all?
ExpertKubernetes8 min
What's the difference between requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution and preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution, and what incident does confusing them cause?
IntermediateKubernetes5 min
How would you design pod topology spread constraints to keep a Deployment's replicas evenly distributed across availability zones?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
What's the difference between ReadWriteOnce, ReadWriteMany, and ReadWriteOncePod, and what production symptom does picking the wrong one cause?
BeginnerKubernetes5 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 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 safely expand a PVC for a running StatefulSet without downtime, and what does the StorageClass need to support?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
A pod is stuck Pending with an event about its PVC failing to bind — how do you diagnose why?
IntermediateKubernetes7 min
Why might mounting the same ReadWriteOnce PVC work for two pods on some clusters but fail on others?
AdvancedKubernetes6 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
A StatefulSet pod is rescheduled to a new node but its volume won't attach — what's happening, and how do you fix it?
AdvancedKubernetes8 min