Container Orchestration and Kubernetes Operations Questions

This topic covers the design, deployment, operation, and scaling of containerized applications and Kubernetes clusters in production environments. Candidates should understand application level constructs such as pods, replica sets, deployments and controllers; rolling updates and canary and blue green deployment strategies; horizontal pod autoscaling and cluster autoscaling; resource requests and limits; scheduling, node and pod affinity and taints. It also includes service discovery, internal and external load balancing, ingress and traffic management, service mesh patterns, persistent storage including persistent volumes and storage classes, and storage provisioning. Candidates should demonstrate knowledge of container networking models, network policies, security and role based access control, secrets management, and observability including logging, metrics and distributed tracing for both cluster and application health. Operational responsibilities include cluster provisioning and upgrades, control plane and etcd considerations, high availability and multi zone topologies, multi cluster strategies, backup and disaster recovery, capacity planning, cost and reliability trade offs, managed versus self managed Kubernetes services, continuous integration and continuous deployment integration, operational runbooks, incident response, and debugging and troubleshooting approaches at production scale. Senior level candidates should be able to articulate cluster architecture and design trade offs, extensibility and automation strategies, maintenance and upgrade strategies, and long term operational governance.