Kubernetes Interview Prep
5 min read Quiz at the end
Key K8s interview topics: Pods vs Deployments, Service types, ConfigMap vs Secret, HPA, etcd.
Kubernetes Interview Topics
- Pod vs Deployment — Pod is one instance; Deployment manages replicas, updates, rollbacks
- Service types — ClusterIP (internal), NodePort (node IP), LoadBalancer (cloud LB)
- ConfigMap vs Secret — ConfigMap for config; Secret for sensitive data (base64 encoded)
- Liveness vs Readiness — Liveness restarts container; Readiness removes from load balancer
- StatefulSet vs Deployment — StatefulSet gives stable names and per-pod PVCs for databases
- DaemonSet — runs one pod per node (log collectors, monitoring agents)
- Namespace — virtual cluster isolation; use for dev/staging/prod or teams
- Ingress — HTTP routing with host/path rules; needs an ingress controller (Nginx)
- HPA — scales pods up/down based on CPU or custom metrics
- etcd — distributed key-value store that holds all K8s cluster state
Topic Quiz · 2 questions
Test your understanding before moving on
1. What is the role of kubelet on a worker node?
💡 kubelet is the node agent that ensures containers are running in Pods as specified.
2. Which kubectl command shows resource consumption of pods?
💡 kubectl top pods shows CPU and memory usage per pod (requires metrics-server).