TCS Containers & Kubernetes interview questions

Both run pods, so the answer sounds obvious until an interviewer asks what happens when you delete one. The guarantees are narrower and more specific than most candidates think.

Everyone can recite the three. The scoring answer is what each failure causes, and why a badly configured liveness probe is more dangerous than none at all.

PDB governs voluntary disruptions only and does not gate rolling updates at all. Candidates who say 'it keeps N pods alive' have just described the part it does not do.

Three propagation mechanisms live inside this one question and only one of them is automatic. Most candidates promise instant reloads; the kubelet has never promised that to anyone.

Quotas are admission-time contracts counted in requests, not measured usage. That single sentence explains most quota outages, most quota confusion, and the reason LimitRange must sit beside every quota.

Pull auth resolves on the node before any container exists. Candidates who can order the credential chain and read 401 versus 403 versus 429 in events diagnose this in minutes; the rest rotate secrets blind.

Tenancy is a dial from policy-based soft isolation to hard cluster boundaries with a virtual-control-plane middle ground. The scored answer picks by blast radius requirements and names what each model still leaves shared.

Best-effort objects, one-hour TTL, deduplicated by count, invisible unless shipped out. Events narrate scheduling and lifecycle decisions; treating them as durable records is the expensive mistake.

Kind precedence orders manifests, hooks jump the queue with their own weights and delete policies, and --atomic plus --wait turn hope into rollback. Split charts along blast radius, not folder aesthetics.

Two-phase deletion, a controller that purges content, finalizers holding the door. Stuck CRD instances, dead webhooks and GitOps recreates are the real story; standards prevent the ticket.

The single most common Kubernetes interview question, and the one where a vague answer is most obvious. Every stage you name is a place the interviewer can ask you to debug.

Asked in nearly every senior Kubernetes loop, and most candidates answer with a feature list. The scoring answer names the three problems it solves and then argues for not adopting it.

The pair everyone configures and few can explain. QoS hints at eviction risk, but usage versus requests and Pod priority determine node-pressure ranking, and CPU and memory behave completely differently when you exceed them.

The question that finds out whether you know Kubernetes networking or just use it. The model has three rules and everything about CNI follows from them.

Almost always a finalizer, and the fast fix is the one that loses data. The safe answer explains what the finalizer is protecting against before removing it.

A practical question with a precise answer, and the size is not the real cost. Pull time on every node, registry storage, and attack surface all scale with it.