Title: Kubernetes Debacle: A Day in the Life of an Ops Engineer

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September 3, 2018. The day started out like any other Monday. I was sipping on a cold brew, scrolling through Hacker News, and feeling pretty good about the state of DevOps tools—Kubernetes (K8s) winning the container wars, Helm making deployment easier, Istio adding service mesh magic, and Prometheus + Grafana serving up beautiful metrics. But as they say, Mondays can often bring their own set of challenges.

Today was no different. I had a scheduled meeting with our platform engineering team to discuss recent issues we’ve been experiencing in production—specifically with K8s deployments. The platform has been humming along smoothly for months, but suddenly, like clockwork every Tuesday and Thursday, something seems to go awry.

The Meeting

We walked into the conference room, coffee cups clutched tightly, ready to face whatever might come our way today. Our team lead, Sarah, opened the meeting by stating that we’ve seen a significant uptick in pod failures and restarts over the past two weeks. We’ve been attributing these issues to some funky network behavior, but no one could pinpoint exactly what was going on.

Sarah shared her screen with a Grafana dashboard showing spikes in restart rates around 10 AM and 2 PM—our typical deployment windows. I looked at our trusty Prometheus metrics, trying to trace the issue back to its source. The logs didn’t give us much to go on—they were clean enough to indicate nothing went catastrophically wrong, but not detailed enough to reveal any insights.

The Debugging

After some debate and a few cups of coffee later, we decided to take a deep dive into one of the problematic deployments. I picked an arbitrary deployment at 10 AM—the time when restarts seemed to spike. We went through the usual checklist: ensuring that all required services were running, checking network policies, verifying resource limits.

Then it hit me—our ingress controller. The ingress controller was handling both HTTP and HTTPS traffic for our applications, and we recently upgraded it to a newer version without properly testing the changes in production. Could this be the culprit? I ran some diagnostics on the ingress controller pods, and sure enough, they were throwing errors related to certificate validation.

The Fix

With renewed energy (and a bit of self-deprecation), I quickly whipped up a fix by reverting the ingress controller back to its previous version and redeploying. Within minutes, our restart rates began to normalize. We huddled around the screen as Prometheus metrics showed steady values, confirming that the issue was indeed resolved.

The Aftermath

The meeting ended on a high note—our team had just saved the day. But I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of anxiety about the potential long-term impacts of our recent upgrade practices. We had been so focused on moving quickly and adopting new tools like Helm that we might have overlooked some crucial testing steps.

As I walked out of the meeting, I mused over how much more polished things could be if only we followed best practices—something I’ve always known but sometimes forget in the fast-paced world of DevOps. Maybe next time, we’ll spend a bit more time on thorough testing before rolling out changes like this.

Conclusion

September 3rd was just another day in ops hell, filled with debugging and fixes. But it’s moments like these that remind me why I love my job—challenges, learning, and the satisfaction of solving real problems. The world might be full of exciting tech trends and debates, but for now, it’s back to the basics: make sure your infrastructure is robust enough to handle production workloads.

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This was a day in the life, not a polished piece of writing, but rather a reflection on some of the realities faced by platform engineers. There’s always more to learn, and sometimes, it takes a crisis to remind us of the importance of careful deployment practices.