25 Kubernetes Interview Questions for DevOps & SRE

Kubernetes Interview Questions 2026: From Basics to Advanced

Kubernetes is used by 96% of organizations according to the CNCF 2025 Survey. K8s knowledge is required for DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, and backend roles. Interview questions range from basic pod management to complex multi-cluster architectures.

The #1 Kubernetes interview question: "Explain what happens when you run kubectl run nginx --image=nginx." This tests your understanding of the entire K8s control plane: API server, scheduler, etcd, kubelet, and container runtime.

Essential Kubernetes Concepts

• Pods — Smallest deployable unit, one or more containers sharing network/storage
• Services — ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer for networking
• Deployments — Declarative updates, rolling deployments, rollbacks
• ConfigMaps/Secrets — Configuration and sensitive data management
• HPA — Horizontal Pod Autoscaler for auto-scaling based on metrics
• Ingress — HTTP routing, SSL termination, path-based routing

Related: Docker questions, DevOps guide. Practice: AissenceAI.