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5 posts tagged with "kubernetes"

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When the Pod Is Fine but Nothing Works — Debugging Kubernetes Services and PVCs

· 7 min read
Charles Wang
DevOps / Backend Engineer

Last time I deliberately broke Pods three ways and watched them fail to start
(CrashLoopBackOff and friends).
This time the Pods are all Running and healthy — and things still don't work.
The bug isn't in the Pod; it's in the plumbing around it: the Service → Endpoints → Pod
forwarding chain, and the PVC → StorageClass → PV binding chain.
The skill here is knowing which link broke without guessing.

Kubernetes Pod CrashLoopBackOff

· 3 min read
Charles Wang
DevOps / Backend Engineer

A Pod STATUS of CrashLoopBackOff isn't a single error —
it's an umbrella term for "the container keeps failing to start and kubelet keeps restarting it."
The same STATUS can have completely different root causes.
Today I deliberately created three failure scenarios; the way you investigate each one differs.

Why I chose Helm over Kustomize

· 4 min read
Charles Wang
DevOps / Backend Engineer

Two weeks ago I gave myself a task: write a Helm chart from scratch and really get Helm.
After finishing the exercise, I also did a tool-selection exercise alongside it,
thinking about why I'd choose Helm when Kustomize is simpler.
I asked myself "what capability does this situation actually need," letting the requirements pick the tool, rather than letting features pick me.

helm diff? Installing one plugin, I hit 4 pitfalls in a row

· 6 min read
Charles Wang
DevOps / Backend Engineer

Today's learning task started out simple: install the helm-diff plugin, try helm diff upgrade once, and understand why you'd want it in production.

Instead, from the helm plugin install moment onward, I hit 4 pitfalls in a row — and the last one let me actually witness how "the diff shows no change, but the real deployment changes things" happens. Here's the whole process, written down.