A team wants to move a service onto your Kubernetes cluster. What do you check before calling it production ready?
What the interviewer wants to hear
- Resource requests and limits set from real usage
- Correct liveness and readiness probes and graceful shutdown
- Multiple replicas spread across zones with a PodDisruptionBudget
- Autoscaling with HPA and cluster capacity
- Secrets from a secret store, least-privilege service accounts, non-root images
- Metrics, logs, alerts and a rollback plan
Model answer
First I check resources: every container needs CPU and memory requests based on real usage, and a memory limit, so scheduling and autoscaling work. Next, probes: a readiness probe that reflects whether the pod can serve traffic, a simple liveness probe that only checks the process, and graceful shutdown that handles SIGTERM and drains connections. For availability I want at least two or three replicas spread across zones with topology spread constraints, plus a PodDisruptionBudget that still allows node drains. I add an HPA on CPU or a custom metric. On security, the image should be scanned and run as non-root, secrets should come from a secret manager, and the pod should use its own service account with workload identity scoped to least privilege. Finally, I confirm dashboards, alerts tied to SLOs, logs with request IDs, and a tested rollback path.
Can you answer it under time pressure?
Take a timed medium round and get scored on every answer.
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