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Design secure Kubernetes with CI/CD

SalesforceSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen
HardSoftware EngineerTechnical ScreenSystem Design

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This question evaluates expertise in Kubernetes architecture, cluster operations and troubleshooting, security hardening, and CI/CD pipeline design for managed Kubernetes clusters, covering control plane and node responsibilities, incident diagnosis, access and network policies, secret management, image integrity, and progressive delivery mechanisms. It is commonly asked to assess operational and security judgment and design thinking, testing both conceptual understanding of distributed control and security models and practical application in real-world CI/CD and incident-response scenarios within the System Design domain.

Describe Kubernetes control plane components (API server, scheduler, controller manager, etcd) and worker node responsibilities (kubelet, kube-proxy, CRI/CNI). Given a rollout stuck in CrashLoopBackOff, walk through the kubectl commands and signals you would inspect to diagnose and fix it. Propose a security hardening plan (RBAC, least privilege, NetworkPolicy, Secrets with KMS, pod security standards, image scanning, admission controls) and an end-to-end CI/CD pipeline for GKE/EKS that supports canary releases and rollbacks.