Pod Cannot Reach External API? It Is Probably Egress NetworkPolicy
Cluster-to-cluster is fine. Cluster-to-Stripe is dead. The rule that hides in plain sight.
Read the postThirty-five entries, mapped 1:1 to scenarios in troubleshoot-kubernetes-like-a-pro. Every entry — deploy the broken config, debug it, apply the fix.
The pod is Running. The controller is silent. The API server is quietly returning 403 and nobody is reading the audit log.
runAsNonRoot, runAsUser, fsGroup, allowPrivilegeEscalation. The four lines that turn a SOC2 finding from red to green.
A pod with hostPID: true is not a pod, it is a node-wide observation deck. Here is exactly what an attacker sees.
Profile mismatches, denied syscalls, and the audit2allow loop you should never run blind.
RuntimeClass not found, sandbox failures, the layer below containerd where kubelet and CRI disagree.
Voluntary disruptions, minAvailable, and the PDB somebody wrote eighteen months ago that now blocks your upgrade.
The upgrade matrix, deprecated APIs, why you cannot skip a minor, and the honest lessons from thirty-five scenarios in the dark.
Thirty-five scenarios in five weeks. Here is the single mental model that ties them together — and the repo you can keep coming back to.
Sr. DevOps Engineer based in India. I've run Kubernetes in production across AWS, Azure, and GCP — the good, the bad, and the 3AM pages. These posts are the playbook I wish existed when I started.