KCNA Kubernetes Fundamentals Practice Question
A development team deploys a microservice that crashes every few minutes. The deployment uses a single replica, and the pod restarts repeatedly. Which Kubernetes feature should be enabled to ensure the service remains available during failures?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse health probes (readiness/liveness) with redundancy; while probes help detect and manage unhealthy pods, they do not provide the multiple running instances needed to maintain availability during a crash.
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
✓
Increase the replicas in the Deployment to at least 2
Increasing the replicas to at least 2 ensures that if one pod crashes, the other replica(s) can continue serving traffic, maintaining availability. With only a single replica, the service becomes unavailable every time the pod restarts. This is the most direct way to provide redundancy and fault tolerance for a stateless microservice.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Move the deployment to a separate namespace
Why it's wrong here
Namespaces provide logical isolation of resources and RBAC scoping, not fault tolerance; a crashing pod still crashes and the service still goes down. Namespaces are tempting because they genuinely separate teams and environments, which is their actual purpose in multi-tenant clusters.
- ✓
Increase the replicas in the Deployment to at least 2
Why this is correct
Increasing replicas to at least 2 keeps the service available because the ReplicaSet controller maintains the desired count, rescheduling pods onto healthy nodes when one crashes. This satisfies the availability constraint, unlike a single replica, which leaves no capacity during restarts. Note that this masks crashes rather than fixing the underlying fault.
- ✗
Store the application configuration in a ConfigMap
Why it's wrong here
A ConfigMap only injects configuration data as environment variables or mounted files; it cannot restart or replace a crashed pod, so availability is unchanged. ConfigMaps are tempting because they genuinely decouple configuration from images, which is their actual purpose in twelve-factor deployments.
- ✗
Add a readiness probe to the pod
Why it's wrong here
A readiness probe only gates traffic to a pod that is already running; it does not restart a crashing container or add capacity, so a single replica still leaves an outage. Readiness probes are tempting because they genuinely prevent traffic reaching unready pods, which is their real purpose.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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