If a Pod is waiting for its container images to be pulled to the node, it remains in the Pending phase, so D is correct. Kubernetes Pod “phase” is a high-level summary of where the Pod is in its lifecycle. Pending means the Pod has been accepted by the cluster but one or more of its containers has not started yet. That can occur because the Pod is waiting to be scheduled, waiting on volume attachment/mount, or—very commonly—waiting for the container runtime to pull the image.
When image pulling is the blocker, kubectl describe pod usually shows events like “Pulling image …” and “Successfully pulled image …” or failures like ImagePullBackOff/ErrImagePull. Even if the node has been assigned (scheduler has set spec.nodeName), the Pod can still be Pending while kubelet and the runtime perform preparation steps.
Why the other phases don’t apply:
Succeeded is for run-to-completion Pods that have finished successfully (typical for Jobs).
Failed means the Pod terminated and at least one container terminated in failure (and won’t be restarted, depending on restartPolicy).
Unknown is used when the node can’t be contacted and the Pod’s state can’t be reliably determined (rare in healthy clusters).
A subtle but important Kubernetes detail: status “Waiting” reasons like ImagePullBackOff are container states inside .status.containerStatuses, while the Pod phase can still be Pending. So, “waiting for images to download” maps to Pod Pending, with container waiting reasons providing the deeper diagnosis.
Therefore, the verified correct answer is D: Pending.
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