Technical Screen: Kubernetes, Cloud Services, and Secure CI/CD
Context
You are designing and operating services on Kubernetes in a public cloud. Answer the following to demonstrate understanding of cluster architecture, troubleshooting with kubectl, cloud service mappings across providers, and secure CI/CD design.
Tasks
-
Kubernetes Architecture
-
Explain the high-level architecture of a Kubernetes cluster.
-
Describe control plane (master) components and worker node components, including their responsibilities and how they interact.
-
kubectl Troubleshooting
-
List key kubectl commands, flags, and patterns you use to debug cluster issues (nodes, pods, services, networking, rollouts). Include brief explanations and examples.
-
GCP vs AWS Core Services
-
Compare core computing and testing/CI services between Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Map common equivalents (VMs, managed Kubernetes, containers, serverless, build/test/deploy, artifact registries, security scanning).
-
Secure CI/CD Design in Public Cloud
-
Propose a secure CI/CD pipeline architecture suitable for deploying to Kubernetes in a public cloud.
-
Cover: identity and access, secrets, artifact management and signing, build isolation, policy enforcement, environment segregation, deployment strategies, observability, and guardrails.