Kubernetes Job Readiness

Entry-level resume snapshot

Skills: Kubernetes (kubectl, Helm), Deployments + Services + Ingress, RBAC, HPA, resource quotas, StatefulSets, PV/PVC, observability (Prometheus + Grafana), kind / EKS / GKE / AKS. Projects: 'Deployed a multi-service Helm chart to a Kubernetes cluster; rolling updates with zero downtime; <repo link>.' 'Authored a custom Helm chart for a Node + Postgres app; values.yaml parameterizes 3 environments.' Certs: CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer), practical exam; CKA (Administrator) one step up.

Interview questions you'll face

'What's the difference between a Pod and a Deployment?' 'Walk me through a rolling update. What can go wrong?' 'How do you debug a CrashLoopBackOff?' 'When would you NOT use Kubernetes?' (Senior trap; lean on do-k8s-01 lesson.) 'Service vs Ingress, when do you use each?' 'How do you give a Pod access to AWS S3 without long-lived keys?' (IRSA / Workload Identity.)

Build a portfolio that gets interviews

Two of these inside 60 days.

1. 1

   Ship the do-k8s-passion project (Helm chart + multi-service stack).

2. 2

   Blog: 'How I debugged a Pod stuck in Pending' or 'Why rolling deploys drop requests (and how I fixed it)'.

3. 3

   Contribute to a public Helm chart (PR to ingress-nginx, cert-manager, or a smaller chart).

4. 4

   Pass CKAD (the practical exam; ~$395; valuable signal).

5. 5

   Write a homelab post: 'Running production-ish K8s on my Raspberry Pi cluster'.

Common mistakes only candidates with offers avoid

Listing 'Kubernetes' with no Helm chart you can show. Tutorial-level YAML (no probes, no resources, `:latest` tags). Recommending K8s for everything. Senior-engineer move is knowing when NOT to. Skipping the observability story. Hiring managers want 'how would you know it's broken'. Forgetting RBAC. Security questions appear in every K8s interview.