Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate Questions and Answers
400 questions organized by topic with detailed explanations
Linux Foundation
KCNA
400 questions
20 topics
Updated Jul 2026Kubernetes Architecture
56 questions23 easy25 medium8 hard~14% of exam
Which Kubernetes control plane component stores the cluster's persistent state?Which control plane component runs controllers that reconcile the actual cluster state toward the desired state?A Pod has already been scheduled to a worker node, but its containers are not starting. Which node component is primaril...
Kubernetes Resources
64 questions17 easy35 medium12 hard~16% of exam
A developer needs to provide non-sensitive configuration data, such as feature flags and endpoint URLs, to Pods. Which r...A platform team wants to cap the total CPU, memory, and object counts that a single namespace can consume. Which resourc...A team needs a workload that keeps a declared number of replicas running and supports rolling updates and rollback. Whic...
Kubernetes API
24 questions6 easy12 medium6 hard~6% of exam
Containers and Runtimes
24 questions12 easy7 medium5 hard~6% of exam
Scheduling
16 questions2 easy9 medium5 hard~4% of exam
A workload must run only on nodes labeled disktype=ssd. What is the simplest built-in mechanism to express that requirem...Some nodes are reserved for GPU workloads and should repel regular Pods unless explicitly allowed. Which scheduling feat...A team has a machine learning workload that requires GPU resources. They want Pods to be scheduled only on nodes that ha...
Container Orchestration
16 questions5 easy10 medium1 hard~4% of exam
A frontend must keep reaching a backend even though backend Pods are created and destroyed over time. Which orchestratio...A company has many application instances spread across machines, and individual instances can fail or move. Which proble...A DevOps engineer wants to deploy a containerized application and ensure that if the cluster has available capacity acro...
A developer should be able to read Pods only within one namespace, not across the whole cluster. Which RBAC combination ...A security team wants to restrict which Pods may communicate with a payment service. Which Kubernetes feature is designe...A namespace enforces the Restricted Pod Security Standard. Which Pod setting would violate that policy for a Linux workl...
Networking
24 questions8 easy9 medium7 hard~6% of exam
Which Kubernetes add-on commonly provides cluster DNS so Pods can resolve Service names?A team wants a Service name inside the cluster to resolve to an external DNS hostname without proxying traffic through K...Which standard is used by Kubernetes networking plugins to implement the cluster network model on nodes?
A cluster should automatically provision storage when a matching claim is created. Which resource defines the classes of...A developer needs storage for a Pod and wants Kubernetes to find or provision matching storage on their behalf. Which re...Which Kubernetes resource represents the actual provisioned storage in a cluster (an NFS mount, a cloud disk, etc.) that...
Service Mesh
8 questions1 easy7 medium~2% of exam
A platform team wants mTLS, traffic splitting, and service-to-service telemetry without changing application code. What ...A platform team deploys Istio in their Kubernetes cluster. How does Istio typically intercept and manage traffic between...A platform team wants mTLS style zero trust controls, traffic shifting, and service level observability without changing...
Autoscaling
16 questions2 easy10 medium4 hard~4% of exam
Pods are pending because the scheduler cannot place them due to insufficient cluster capacity. Which autoscaling compone...Application demand rises, and a team wants the number of Pod replicas to change automatically based on observed metrics....A data processing workload scales based on the depth of a message queue rather than CPU usage. The team wants Kubernetes...
Serverless
8 questions1 easy5 medium2 hard~2% of exam
A team wants a Kubernetes-based platform for stateless HTTP services that can scale to zero when idle. Which project bes...A development team wants to deploy event-driven functions on Kubernetes that trigger in response to CloudEvents from mul...A team updates the container image on a Knative Service. Which result should they expect?
CNCF Community and Governance
16 questions5 easy9 medium2 hard~4% of exam
Which CNCF body provides technical leadership, approves new projects, and maintains the technical vision for the foundat...How does the CNCF projects page describe graduated and incubating projects?A project currently hosted in the CNCF at the Sandbox level wants to move to the Incubating level. Which body reviews an...
Open Standards
16 questions6 easy10 medium~4% of exam
A storage vendor wants one plugin model that can work across multiple container orchestration systems. Which standard is...Which organization and specification family standardizes container image, runtime, and distribution formats?Which specification defines the standard for how a container image should be built and packaged so it can be run by any ...
Cloud Native Roles
8 questions1 easy7 medium~2% of exam
A production service is missing its reliability target, and the team needs to improve alerting, incident response, and s...A company is hiring someone to design and oversee the overall cloud native infrastructure, including cluster topology, n...A company creates internal platforms and self-service workflows so application teams can ship faster without opening tic...
Observability
8 questions1 easy5 medium2 hard~2% of exam
Which set represents the three pillars of observability?A microservices application has a latency issue that spans multiple services. The team wants to visualize the path a sin...A request to a checkout service crosses API, inventory, and payment services. Which artifact is best for seeing the end ...
Prometheus and Metrics
16 questions2 easy8 medium6 hard~4% of exam
A team needs a component in the Prometheus ecosystem to handle alerts after rules fire. Which component should they use?How does Prometheus primarily collect metrics from targets?A team configures a Prometheus rule that triggers an alert when the error rate of an API exceeds 5% for five minutes. Af...
Cost Management
8 questions5 medium3 hard~2% of exam
A cluster consistently requests far more CPU and memory than workloads actually use, increasing cost. Which FinOps pract...A FinOps team is reviewing a Kubernetes cluster and finds that node CPU utilization averages 15% but requested CPU is 90...OpenCost is calculating a workload allocation for CPU. The request is 2 cores and observed usage is 1.2 cores. Which val...
Which project is a Kubernetes-native framework for defining and running CI or CD pipelines as Kubernetes resources?What is the main goal of continuous integration in a cloud native delivery workflow?In a cloud native CI/CD pipeline, code is merged, automatically built into a container image, pushed to a registry, and ...
All Questions
| # | Question | Topic | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Which Kubernetes control plane component stores the cluster's persistent state? | Kubernetes Architecture | easy |
| 2 | In a pull-based GitOps model, what typically applies the desired state to the cluster? | GitOps | medium |
| 3 | Which set represents the three pillars of observability? | Observability | easy |
| 4 | A frontend must keep reaching a backend even though backend Pods are created and destroyed over time... | Container Orchestration | medium |
| 5 | A developer needs to provide non-sensitive configuration data, such as feature flags and endpoint UR... | Kubernetes Resources | easy |
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