CKA Workloads and Scheduling Practice Question
You have a Deployment that should have a rolling update with no downtime. You set maxSurge to 25% and maxUnavailable to 0%. With 4 replicas, how many pods will be created above the desired count during the update?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates often forget that maxSurge is calculated as a percentage of the desired replicas and rounded up, leading them to incorrectly calculate 25% of 4 as 0 (if they round down) or 2 (if they double the percentage).
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
1
With maxSurge=25% and maxUnavailable=0%, the Deployment controller ensures that during a rolling update, the number of pods above the desired count is limited to 25% of the desired replicas, rounded up. For 4 replicas, 25% is 1, so at most 1 extra pod is created above the desired count, ensuring zero downtime by keeping all 4 original pods running until the new pod is ready.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
2
Why it's wrong here
A value of 2 would represent a 50% surge relative to the desired replica count of 4. Since the rolling update strategy specifies a maxSurge of 25%, Kubernetes strictly limits the number of additional pods created during the transition to exactly 1. Therefore, allowing 2 extra pods violates the configured surge limit.
- ✓
1
Why this is correct
With a desired replica count of 4 and a maxSurge set to 25%, Kubernetes calculates the maximum number of extra pods allowed during an update as 25% of 4, which equals exactly 1. Even if the percentage calculation yielded a fractional value, Kubernetes always rounds up to the nearest integer to ensure at least one extra pod can be created. Thus, 1 is the correct maximum surge capacity.
- ✗
4
Why it's wrong here
Creating 4 additional pods during the rolling update would represent a 100% surge, doubling the deployment's capacity to 8 concurrent pods. This behavior is incorrect because it completely ignores the 25% maxSurge restriction defined in the deployment's update strategy. Such a massive surge could easily exhaust cluster resources or exceed node capacity limits.
- ✗
0
Why it's wrong here
Setting the surge value to 0 would mean that no new pods can be created before old ones are terminated, which describes a maxSurge: 0 configuration. Since maxSurge is configured at 25% for a 4-replica deployment, Kubernetes is explicitly permitted to spin up 1 new pod before tearing down any existing ones. A value of 0 fails to utilize this allowed surge capacity.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CKA practice question is part of Courseiva's free CNCF certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CKA exam.