The correct answer is A: kubectl get pods. Kubernetes does not manage “containers” as standalone top-level objects; the primary schedulable unit is the Pod, and containers run inside Pods. Therefore, the practical way to list what’s running in a namespace is to list the Pods in that namespace. kubectl get pods shows Pods and their readiness, status, restarts, and age—giving you the canonical view of running workloads.
If you need the container-level details (images, container names), you typically use additional commands and output formatting:
kubectl describe pod to view container specs, images, states, and events
kubectl get pods -o jsonpath=... or -o wide to surface more fields
kubectl get pods -o=json to inspect .spec.containers and .status.containerStatuses
But among the provided options, kubectl get pods is the only real kubectl command that lists the running workload objects in the current namespace.
The other options are not valid kubectl subcommands: kubectl ls, kubectl ps, and kubectl show pods are not standard Kubernetes CLI operations. Kubernetes intentionally centers around the API resource model, so listing resources uses kubectl get . This also aligns with Kubernetes’ declarative nature: you observe and manage the state via API objects, not by directly enumerating OS-level processes.
So while the question says “running containers,” the Kubernetes-correct interpretation is “containers in running Pods,” and the appropriate listing command in the namespace is kubectl get pods, option A.
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