CKAD Application Deployment Practice Question
A Deployment is configured with strategy type 'Recreate'. Which statement about this strategy is true?
⚠ Common exam trap
CKAD often tests the distinction between Recreate and RollingUpdate strategies, and candidates confuse the order of Pod termination and creation — Recreate kills first, RollingUpdate creates first (or in parallel).
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
✓
It terminates all existing Pods before creating new Pods.
The Recreate strategy in a Kubernetes Deployment terminates all existing Pods before creating new ones, resulting in a brief period of downtime. This is the defining behavior of the Recreate strategy as documented in the Kubernetes Deployment spec. It is the opposite of RollingUpdate, which maintains availability by incrementally replacing Pods.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
It creates a new ReplicaSet but does not scale down the old one.
Why it's wrong here
Leaving the old ReplicaSet scaled up while creating a new one would mean both ReplicaSets are serving traffic simultaneously, which is not allowed by Recreate. Recreate explicitly scales the old ReplicaSet down to zero (and verifies Pod deletion) before the new ReplicaSet is created, so the old ReplicaSet is always at zero replicas during the transition. The scenario described matches a manual canary or a misconfigured rollout, not the Recreate strategy.
- ✗
It updates Pods by gradually terminating old Pods and creating new ones.
Why it's wrong here
Gradual replacement of old Pods with new Pods is the hallmark of the RollingUpdate strategy, not Recreate. Recreate performs a single, abrupt scale-down of the entire previous replicaset to zero, waits for termination, then performs an abrupt scale-up of the new replicaset; there is no incremental or progressive transition. RollingUpdate preserves availability by maintaining a minimum number of available Pods throughout the update, whereas Recreate deliberately allows a period with zero available Pods.
- ✓
It terminates all existing Pods before creating new Pods.
Why this is correct
Under the Recreate strategy, the Deployment controller first scales the old ReplicaSet down to zero and confirms all Pods have been terminated (respecting terminationGracePeriodSeconds and preStop hooks) before it creates any new Pods from the updated ReplicaSet. This guarantees that at no point are old and new versions running concurrently, at the cost of an explicit downtime interval during the rollout.
- ✗
It first creates new Pods and then terminates old Pods.
Why it's wrong here
Recreate does not create new Pods first because that would run both versions simultaneously, defeating the strategy's purpose. The API contract for Recreate is to terminate the existing Pods before advancing the rollout; if it created new Pods first, it would require extra cluster capacity and could cause race conditions for resources, which is exactly what Recreate avoids. Therefore this order is the opposite of the actual behavior.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official CNCF exam blueprint
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