Technical interview guide

Containerization & Orchestration

Packaging an app with its dependencies via containers, and how Kubernetes schedules and manages them at scale.

Read: 30 min
Practice MCQs: 25
Interview QA: 25
Edition: v4
Editorial status: Reviewed
Relevant for: AI EngineerDevOps EngineerForward Deployed Engineer (FDE)MLOps EngineerPlatform EngineerSite Reliability Engineer

Scope: Docker, OCI Image and Runtime specifications, and Kubernetes guidance current 2026-08-31.

Interview QA

Treat each question like a live interview question: answer out loud first (structure, assumptions, tradeoffs), then open the model answer to spot gaps and rehearse a tighter follow-up.

Curated: 2026-10-05 · Written: 2026-10-05 · Reviewed: 2026-10-03

QA-1

Design a production container and orchestration platform.

QA-2

Harden a container image and runtime.

QA-3

Decide whether two processes belong in one Pod.

QA-4

Design startup, readiness, and liveness probes.

QA-5

Diagnose a CrashLoopBackOff after release.

QA-6

Size container requests and limits.

QA-7

Plan resilient Kubernetes scheduling.

QA-8

Use PodDisruptionBudgets correctly.

QA-9

Design Kubernetes Service discovery and traffic.

QA-10

Secure workload identity and Kubernetes API access.

QA-11

Manage application secrets in Kubernetes.

QA-12

Design a safe rolling Deployment.

QA-13

How do you enforce image security and provenance throughout the container build and runtime lifecycle?

QA-14

Respond to node memory pressure and evictions.

QA-15

How does Kubernetes implement Pod-to-Pod networking, and how do CNI plugins route traffic across different nodes?

QA-16

Design namespace and multi-tenant isolation.

QA-17

Debug a Service that has no reachable endpoints.

QA-18

Design graceful shutdown for a request-serving Pod.

QA-19

How do you configure and debug Kubernetes NetworkPolicies to enforce pod isolation and default-deny traffic?

QA-20

How does an Ingress Controller route external traffic to internal Services, and how do you isolate whether a 502 or 504 error originates at the Ingress proxy or the upstream Pod?

QA-21

Test control-plane outage behavior.

QA-22

Migrate a legacy service into containers.

QA-23

How do you configure and enforce SecurityContext restrictions like runAsNonRoot, readOnlyRootFilesystem, and Linux capabilities across Kubernetes Pods?

QA-24

Measure orchestration effectiveness without gaming.

QA-25