All challenges
intermediatekubernetesincident-response~12 min5 rounds

Pod Stuck in CrashLoopBackOff After a Deploy

A new deploy leaves a pod in CrashLoopBackOff. A teammate wants to bump CPU and memory. Defend how you actually diagnose it.

the decision you defend

After a deploy, a pod is stuck in CrashLoopBackOff. A teammate says just give it more CPU and memory and it will settle. How do you actually diagnose and fix this?

Sign in to startFree for everyone. Takes a few seconds.

the situation

You roll out a new version of a service to Kubernetes. One pod never reaches Ready; kubectl get pods shows it cycling through Running and CrashLoopBackOff with a rising restart count.

context

The deploy changed the app version and added a new environment variable. The cluster has spare capacity. A teammate, eager to move on, says the pod is probably just resource-starved and you should raise the CPU and memory limits.

How this challenge works

Take a position on the decision above and defend it. A senior-engineer AI will push back over up to 5 rounds. When you are done, you are scored against a verified rubric so you can see exactly what a complete answer covers - these are learning prompts, not gotchas.