
Mastering Kubernetes Commands: kubectl, Troubleshooting, and Production Operations
Six reads before you delete a crash-looping pod: context, namespace, get, describe, logs, and events. kubectl client v1.36.1 on 11 October 2026.
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Six reads before you delete a crash-looping pod: context, namespace, get, describe, logs, and events. kubectl client v1.36.1 on 11 October 2026.

For a product SaaS (~12 production nodes, 3 clusters), EKS Auto Mode cut internal K8s ops from 80 to 35 hours/month at similar compute spend — partner MSP quote was $6,500/mo on top for 24/7 paging alone.

Production guide for Kubecost on AWS EKS — cost allocation setup plus architecture changes that reduce spend, not just attribute it.

Default Docker seccomp is not enough for regulated workloads. EKS Pod Security Standards, seccomp profiles, and Fargate platform version constraints.

Cluster upgrades and Karpenter consolidation look healthy in the console while PDB-blocked evictions freeze your node drain for 45 minutes. This guide wires minAvailable, maxUnavailable, and EKS managed node group semantics.

App Mesh is legacy path—new meshes should start with VPC Lattice for AWS-native east-west or Istio on EKS when you need full L7 policy. Traffic shifting without duplicating load balancers per service.

AWS Prescriptive Guidance says Argo CD and Flux both handle most GitOps scenarios capably — so picking one is a fit decision, not a winner. The decisions that actually cause incidents are the ones underneath: plaintext secrets in the GitOps repo, CI running kubectl apply and reintroducing drift, no App-of-Apps so onboarding is click-ops, and repo topology you can't change later. Here is the Argo CD vs Flux matrix, an App-of-Apps example, and the five traps independent of tool.

n8n on EKS: queue mode, RDS Postgres, Redis/Valkey, ALB+WAF, IRSA. July 2026 production checklist.

The AWS observability team built a chaos engineering game on top of the official OTel Demo. 44 injected failures. Three signals. One LLM judge. Here's everything inside it.

Karpenter replaces Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler with intelligent bin-packing and just-in-time node provisioning. This guide covers setup, consolidation, cost optimization, and production patterns for EKS clusters.

Karpenter vs Cluster Autoscaler on EKS: consolidation + flexible NodePools beat half-empty ASG nodes. July 2026: karpenter.sh/v1, WhenEmptyOrUnderutilized, Spot mix checklist.

Autoscaling was supposed to make costs predictable by matching capacity to demand. Instead, it introduced feedback loops, burst amplification, and — with AI workloads — a new class of non-deterministic spend that no scaling policy anticipates.