The correct answer is D: Deployment. A Deployment is the standard Kubernetes controller for managing stateless applications. It provides declarative updates, replica management, and rollout/rollback functionality. You define the desired state (container image, environment variables, ports, replica count) in the Deployment spec, and Kubernetes ensures the specified number of Pods are running and updated according to strategy (RollingUpdate by default).
Stateless workloads are ideal for Deployments because each replica is interchangeable. If a Pod dies, a new one can be created anywhere; if traffic increases, replicas can be increased; if you need to update the app, a new ReplicaSet is created and traffic shifts gradually to new Pods. Deployments integrate naturally with Services for stable networking and load balancing.
Why the other options are incorrect:
A DaemonSet ensures one Pod per node (or selected nodes). It’s for node-level agents, not generic stateless service replicas.
A StatefulSet is for workloads needing stable identity, ordered rollout, and persistent storage per replica (databases, quorum systems). That’s not the typical stateless app case.
kubectl is a CLI tool; it doesn’t “manage” workloads as a controller resource.
In real cluster operations, almost every stateless microservice is represented as a Deployment plus a Service (and often an Ingress/Gateway for edge routing). Deployments also support advanced delivery patterns (maxSurge/maxUnavailable tuning) and easy integration with HPA for horizontal scaling. Because the question is specifically “managing a stateless application workload,” the Kubernetes resource designed for that is clearly the Deployment.
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