Interview › Kubernetes, Docker, Helm & Podman
How do you expose a service externally on EKS, and what gets created?
Kubernetes, Docker, Helm & Podman · Intermediate level
Answer
On EKS, I can expose a service externally with a LoadBalancer Service or an Ingress. Depending on controller and annotations, AWS creates an NLB, ALB, target groups, security group rules, listeners, and DNS names.
Technical explanation
The AWS Load Balancer Controller is commonly used for ALB Ingress and NLB/target group integrations.
Subnets, tags, security groups, target type, health checks, and annotations determine the AWS resources created.
Troubleshooting starts from state and events: get, describe, logs, previous logs, events, and then node/runtime/network checks.
Separate scheduling failures, image pull failures, runtime failures, app failures, and traffic-routing failures so you do not fix the wrong layer.
Operational commands like drain and rollback must respect PDBs, probes, and workload disruption tolerance.
Hands-on example
1. In a non-production namespace, create this safe broken scenario: expose a sample app on EKS with Service type LoadBalancer or ALB Ingress.
2. Follow a fixed triage order: kubectl get, describe, logs or logs --previous, events, rollout status, node status, and then runtime/network checks.
3. Fix only one variable at a time so the root cause is clear rather than accidentally masked.
4. Save the commands and final diagnosis as an interview-ready incident walkthrough.
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More Kubernetes, Docker, Helm & Podman interview questions
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- Explain the Kubernetes control plane components (API server, etcd, scheduler, controller manager).
- What runs on a worker node (kubelet, kube-proxy, container runtime)?
- What is a Pod, and why does Kubernetes schedule Pods rather than containers?
- What is the difference between a Pod, a ReplicaSet, and a Deployment?
- How does a Deployment perform a rolling update, and how do maxSurge and maxUnavailable work?
- How do you roll back a Deployment, and how does Kubernetes track revisions?
- What is a Service, and what are the types (ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer, ExternalName)?