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Timed mock tests and model answers written by working engineers, for every level from fresher to lead. Pick any of our 75 courses below.

Topic: Kubernetes & Containers. Questions are shared by related courses. View the Platform Engineering with Kubernetes & Terraform course → · Follow the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) roadmap and salary guide →

All Platform Engineering with Kubernetes & Terraform interview questions at a glance+

Fresher (0–3 years): Junior Kubernetes / DevOps Engineer

  1. Explain the Kubernetes architecture.
  2. Pod vs Deployment vs Service: what is the difference?
  3. How do you debug a pod in CrashLoopBackOff?
  4. Docker vs Kubernetes: how do they relate?
  5. What is the smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes?
  6. Which component stores the cluster state?
  7. Which object keeps 3 replicas of a stateless app with rolling updates?
  8. What gives a set of pods a stable network endpoint?
  9. How do you list pods in all namespaces?
  10. Where do you store non-secret configuration?
  11. Which agent on each node makes sure pods are running?
  12. Which object runs one pod on every node, e.g. a log agent?

Mid-level (3–8 years): Kubernetes Engineer

  1. How do you achieve zero-downtime deployments in Kubernetes?
  2. Explain requests vs limits and why they matter.
  3. A Service is not sending traffic to its pods. How do you troubleshoot?
  4. How do you manage secrets in Kubernetes securely?
  5. How do you route HTTP traffic by host or path to different services?
  6. Which workload suits a database that needs stable identity and storage?
  7. A pod was restarted with reason OOMKilled. What happened?
  8. How do you limit what a pod's service account can do?
  9. How do you restrict pod-to-pod traffic?
  10. Which object scales pod count based on CPU usage?
  11. What is the difference between readiness and liveness probes?
  12. How do you keep ordinary pods off nodes with special hardware?

Experienced (8–15 years): Senior Kubernetes / Platform Engineer

  1. Design a production Kubernetes platform for many teams.
  2. How do you upgrade a production cluster with minimal risk?
  3. The whole cluster is having an outage. How do you handle it?
  4. When would you use multiple clusters, and how do you manage them?
  5. How do you back up the state of a kubeadm cluster?
  6. How do you enforce pod security standards across the cluster?
  7. What is the minimum isolation for a multi-tenant cluster?
  8. What is the safe order for upgrading a cluster?
  9. You need mTLS and traffic shifting between services.
  10. Which tools reconcile a cluster from Git (GitOps)?
  11. Cost-efficient node scaling for spiky workloads.
  12. Which settings reduce the risk of container breakout?