Kubernetes Operations

Kubernetes does not execute your intent once — it continuously reconciles the cluster's actual state toward your declared state, forever. Every operational problem is really a question about that loop: what did you declare, what does the controller see, and where does the gap live. Most outages trace back to a pod spec that never told the scheduler or kubelet what it actually needed.

The controller can only be as good as the information you give it — requests, limits, and probes are not bureaucracy, they are the interface you use to talk to the control loop. Debug by reading what the control loop already told you, not by guessing.

For a command-by-command debugging playbook and a table of pod failure signatures, read references/kubectl-debugging.md.

1. Set requests as a promise, limits as a leash