Kubernetes Interview Questions

What is Kubernetes and why is it used?

Explain Kubernetes architecture — Master and Worker nodes.

What is the difference between a Pod, Deployment, and StatefulSet?

What are Kubernetes Services? Explain different types.

What is a ConfigMap and a Secret in Kubernetes?

What are Kubernetes Namespaces and why are they important?

What are Labels and Selectors in Kubernetes? How are they used?

What is a DaemonSet and when would you use it?

What are Jobs and CronJobs in Kubernetes?

What are the most essential kubectl commands every DevOps engineer should know?

What are resource requests and limits in Kubernetes? Why are they important?

What are PersistentVolumes (PV) and PersistentVolumeClaims (PVC)?

How do you use kubectl describe and kubectl logs for debugging?

What is a ReplicaSet and how does it relate to Deployments?

What are container probes in Kubernetes (liveness, readiness, startup)?

How does Kubernetes handle self-healing?

Explain Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) and Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA).

What is a Kubernetes Ingress? How is it different from a LoadBalancer Service?

Explain Kubernetes RBAC (Role-Based Access Control).

What are Init Containers and Sidecar Containers? When do you use them?

What are Taints and Tolerations in Kubernetes?

Explain Node Affinity and how it differs from nodeSelector.

What are Pod Affinity and Pod Anti-Affinity? Give real-world examples.

What are Resource Quotas in Kubernetes and how do you configure them?

What is a LimitRange and how does it differ from ResourceQuota?

What is Helm and how does it help manage Kubernetes applications?

What is Kustomize and how does it compare to Helm?

What is a Service Mesh (Istio)? Why would you use one in Kubernetes?

What is Pod Security Admission (PSA) and how does it replace PodSecurityPolicies?

How does ConfigMap hot reload work in Kubernetes without restarting pods?

What are Headless Services in Kubernetes and when do you use them?

What are Endpoint Slices in Kubernetes and why did they replace Endpoints?

What are Container Lifecycle Hooks in Kubernetes (postStart and preStop)?

Explain Kubernetes networking — how do pods communicate across nodes?

What is etcd and what happens if etcd goes down?

How do you implement zero-downtime deployments in Kubernetes?

What is a Custom Resource Definition (CRD) and what is an Operator?

How do you troubleshoot a pod stuck in CrashLoopBackOff?

What are Admission Controllers in Kubernetes and how do they work?

How do you build a custom Kubernetes scheduler?

What is Kubernetes API Aggregation and how do you extend the API server?

What are Pod Security Standards and how do you implement them in production?

How do you set up Kubernetes audit logging and what should you monitor?

How does the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler work in depth?

What is Kubernetes Federation and when would you use it?

What is the Descheduler in Kubernetes and how does it optimize pod placement?

Compare Kyverno and OPA Gatekeeper for Kubernetes policy enforcement.

What are multi-tenancy patterns in Kubernetes and how do you implement them?

How do you back up and restore Kubernetes clusters using Velero?

What are Pod Topology Spread Constraints and how do they improve availability?