Architecture Interview Questions — All Categories
98 questions across 27 categories
Designing systems under real constraints: requirements, trade-offs, and the reasoning behind a specific design choice.
You need to make a breaking change to a shared infrastructure module used by 30 different projects. How do you version and roll this out without breaking everyone simultaneously?
AdvancedTerraform8 min
You've extracted common pipeline logic into a Jenkins shared library used by 40+ Jenkinsfiles. How do you version it so you can improve the library without breaking every pipeline that depends on it?
AdvancedJenkins7 min
How would you design and roll out a policy blocking :latest image tags cluster-wide, without breaking every existing deployment on day one?
IntermediateKubernetes7 min
For enforcing a new policy, when does it belong in a cluster admission webhook versus a CI-time check before deployment even happens?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
How would you design a highly-available control plane, and what breaks with only one control-plane node?
IntermediateKubernetes7 min
How would you design backup/DR for etcd, and what's actually recoverable from a snapshot versus what isn't?
AdvancedKubernetesEtcd8 min
How would you design multi-cluster architecture — when does an org actually need multiple clusters instead of namespaces?
AdvancedKubernetes8 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
How would you design autoscaling for a workload with a sharp, predictable daily spike versus one with genuinely unpredictable bursty traffic?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
How would you design a Kubernetes audit logging policy that's actually useful for a security investigation, without drowning in log volume?
AdvancedKubernetes7 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
How would you design network-level segmentation between the control plane and worker nodes, beyond what Kubernetes' own RBAC and NetworkPolicy provide?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
How would you design a workflow so a ConfigMap change automatically triggers a rolling restart of the Deployments that depend on it?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
How would you manage Secrets across dev/staging/prod without committing plaintext to Git, while staying GitOps-declarative?
AdvancedKubernetes8 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
A team wants to automate a repetitive operational task with a custom Kubernetes operator — when is that actually the right tool versus overkill?
AdvancedKubernetes7 min
How would you design NetworkPolicies for a namespace using default-deny-all while still allowing necessary traffic?
IntermediateKubernetes7 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
How would you design RBAC so a monitoring tool has read access across the whole cluster without being able to read Secrets?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min
How would you design least-privilege RBAC for a CI/CD pipeline that deploys to multiple namespaces, without granting cluster-admin?
AdvancedKubernetes8 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 would you design pod topology spread constraints to keep a Deployment's replicas evenly distributed across availability zones?
AdvancedKubernetes7 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
How would you design a StorageClass for a high-IOPS database workload versus a cheap-capacity logging workload?
IntermediateKubernetes6 min