Interview Questions/Troubleshooting Scenarios/Kubernetes Pod Stuck in Pending
IntermediateScenario
10 min

Kubernetes Pod Stuck in Pending

KubernetesContainersSchedulingTroubleshooting
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Interview Question

A pod has been stuck in Pending state for over 15 minutes. Walk me through how you would troubleshoot and resolve this issue.

Key Points to Cover
  • Check events with kubectl describe pod for scheduling errors
  • Verify node capacity and resource requests/limits
  • Check taints, tolerations, and affinity rules
  • Ensure images pull correctly and registry is accessible
  • Scale node pool if resources exhausted
Evaluation Rubric
Uses kubectl describe to inspect pod events30% weight
Considers node/pod resource constraints30% weight
Checks scheduling constraints/affinity20% weight
Proposes fixes like scaling or limits20% weight
Hints
  • 💡Often caused by insufficient resources or affinity rules.
Potential Follow-up Questions
  • How do you proactively prevent this?
  • How do you monitor cluster capacity?
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