IntermediateSITUATIONAL
Your company needs to migrate a legacy monolithic application to Kubernetes within three months with minimal budget and zero planned downtime. Outline your migration plan, priorities, incremental milestones, risks you would mitigate first, and success metrics you would track.
DevOps Engineer
General

Sample Answer

I’d break the three months into four 3-week sprints and focus on risk reduction first. Week 1–3: containerize a single read-only service and run it side-by-side in a small dev cluster to validate images and CI/CD, saving the team from surprise runtime issues. Weeks 4–6: add config, secrets via Vault, and an ingress with blue-green routing; deploy a canary for 5% of traffic. Weeks 7–9: migrate stateful pieces—database replicas and backup/restore runbooks—using PVCs and operator-managed replicas. Weeks 10–12: full traffic shift with automated rollback and runbooks. Priorities: zero-downtime routing, data integrity, and monitoring. I’d mitigate networking and persistence risks first. Success metrics: 99.95% availability during cutover, <1% error rate lift, and rollback time under 10 minutes.

Keywords

Phased sprints with canary and blue-green deploymentsEarly mitigation of networking and persistence risksConcrete success metrics: availability, error rate, rollback time
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