CKAD Application Deployment Practice Question
You have a Deployment with the following strategy: type: Recreate. What happens when you update the pod template?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Recreate with RollingUpdate, assuming new Pods are always created first to minimize downtime, but Recreate deliberately sacrifices availability for safety by terminating all old Pods before starting new ones.
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
✓
Old pods are terminated first, then new pods are created
The Recreate strategy in a Kubernetes Deployment first terminates all existing Pods before creating new ones. When the pod template is updated, the Deployment controller scales down the ReplicaSet to 0 replicas, waits for all Pods to terminate, then scales up the new ReplicaSet to the desired number of replicas. This ensures zero overlap between old and new Pods, which is useful for workloads that cannot run concurrently.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Old pods are terminated first, then new pods are created
Why this is correct
In a Recreate strategy, the Deployment controller first scales the old ReplicaSet down to zero and waits for all old pods to terminate completely. Only after a clean shutdown does it create the new ReplicaSet and its pods. This guarantees that no two versions of the application ever run concurrently, but it intentionally introduces downtime during the transition.
- ✗
New pods are created first, then old pods are terminated
Why it's wrong here
This behavior describes the RollingUpdate strategy, the other valid Deployment strategy, where the controller incrementally replaces old pods with new pods while keeping the service available. For a Recreate deployment, creating new pods before terminating old ones would break the contract that only one version exists at a time, possibly causing database migrations or shared-resource conflicts. Therefore, this option is incorrect for Recreate.
- ✗
Pods are updated in-place without termination
Why it's wrong here
Deployment pod templates are immutable; any change to the pod spec creates a new ReplicaSet, forcing pod replacement. Kubernetes has no mechanism to surgically update a running pod's image or command without terminating it. For Recreate, the specification explicitly requires destroying old pods first, not modifying them in place, so this description does not match any real Deployment behavior.
- ✗
The update is rejected because Recreate is not a valid strategy
Why it's wrong here
The Deployment API supports two strategy types by default: RollingUpdate and Recreate. A manifest with strategy.type set to Recreate is perfectly valid and will be accepted by the Kubernetes API server. The update is not rejected; instead, the Deployment controller executes the Recreate strategy by scaling down old pods before scaling up new ones.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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