Question

A cloud engineer notices that a containerized microservice on a Kubernetes cluster repeatedly restarts under load. Reviewing the pod, the engineer sees the container's last state shows 'Reason: OOMKilled' with 'Exit Code: 137'. CPU utilization remains low, and node-level memory has ample free capacity. What is the MOST likely cause of the restarts?

Accepted Answer

The container exceeded its configured memory limit and was terminated by the kernel's out-of-memory killer

Answer

The node ran completely out of physical memory, triggering a cluster-wide eviction

Answer

The liveness probe timed out because CPU throttling delayed health check responses

Answer

The container image pull failed intermittently, causing the pod to crash-loop