Kubernetes
Also written as K8s
A system for automatically deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications across many machines.
Think of it like
Like a shipping yard manager who automatically routes, restarts, and reroutes containers across many trucks, so no single truck ever gets overloaded or sits empty.
Junior or senior?
Junior sounds like
Has only run Docker locally and hasn't touched an orchestrator.
Senior sounds like
Can describe something that broke in production that only Kubernetes-specific debugging could explain.
Ask them
“What's something that broke in production that only Kubernetes-specific debugging could explain?”
Sounds like real experience
Names a specific failure mode — a bad rollout, a misconfigured resource limit, a networking/DNS issue inside the cluster — and what they actually did to diagnose and fix it.
Probe further if
Describes Docker-level behavior (a container crashing) rather than anything Kubernetes-specific — scheduling, self-healing, service discovery — or credits 'the cluster' for handling it without describing their own diagnostic steps.