Describe how you use Kubernetes

Q: Describe how you use Kubernetes

This is a System Design interview question from Tesla for Software Engineer roles. View the full question and solution on PracHub.

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Question

System Design: Practical Kubernetes (K8s) Use and Operations

Context: In a technical screen, you are asked to describe how you have used Kubernetes in production to build and operate services. Provide concrete practices, tools, and trade-offs you made.

Cover the following areas:

Deployments and rollout strategies
- How you package manifests (kubectl, Helm, Kustomize) and promote across environments
- Readiness/liveness/startup probes, resource sizing, PDBs, surge/unavailable settings
- GitOps or CI/CD approach; blue/green or canary
Services and Ingress
- Service types (ClusterIP/LoadBalancer), internal vs. external routing
- Ingress controller choice, TLS/certificate management, host/path routing
- Service mesh usage (if any) and when it’s helpful
Autoscaling
- HPA/VPA/Cluster Autoscaler configuration and metrics used
- Stabilization, min/max bounds, and preventing thrash
Configuration and secret management
- ConfigMaps vs. Secrets, mounting patterns, reload strategies
- Encryption, rotation, and access controls (RBAC)
Observability
- Metrics, logs, traces; dashboards and alerting
- Golden signals and SLOs; synthetic checks
Rollback and upgrade strategies
- Application rollbacks and database migrations
- Node/cluster upgrades, draining, PDBs, and disruption management
Specific challenges and how you solved them
- Share 2–3 concrete issues (e.g., downtime during rollout, HPA flapping, NAT exhaustion) and your resolution

Describe how you use Kubernetes

System Design: Practical Kubernetes (K8s) Use and Operations

Solution (Locked)

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