KCNA Container Orchestration Practice Question
You are troubleshooting a service that is not accessible from within the cluster. The service has a label selector that matches the pods. You run 'kubectl get endpoints myservice' and see that the ENDPOINTS column is empty. What is the most likely cause?
⚠ Common exam trap
Kubernetes often tests the distinction between service endpoint population (which depends on label selectors) and traffic forwarding (which depends on kube-proxy), leading candidates to incorrectly blame kube-proxy when the actual issue is a selector mismatch.
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
✓
The service's label selector does not match any pods
The ENDPOINTS column being empty for a service indicates that the service's label selector does not match any running pods. Kubernetes uses the label selector to dynamically populate the endpoints list; if no pods match, the service has no backends to forward traffic to, making it inaccessible from within the cluster.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The kube-proxy is not running
Why it's wrong here
kube-proxy manages network rules, but endpoints are managed by the endpoint controller.
- ✓
The service's label selector does not match any pods
Why this is correct
Endpoints are created for pods matching the selector; if none match, endpoints are empty.
- ✗
The service is in a different namespace
Why it's wrong here
Service endpoints are namespace-scoped, but empty endpoints within the same namespace indicate no matching pods.
- ✗
The service type is LoadBalancer and no external load balancer is provisioned
Why it's wrong here
Even for LoadBalancer type, endpoints should still show internal pod IPs.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This KCNA 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 KCNA exam.