6 — Troubleshooting Production Clusters

Kubernetes

A book-shaped table of contents for Kubernetes: cloud-native foundations, the CKAD/CKA/CKS certification tracks, control-plane internals, platform tooling, multi-cluster architecture, and MAANG-level system design and interview prep — cross-linking the existing Prometheus, Observability, and Platform Engineering chapters instead of duplicating them.

4 — Events

Why Kubernetes Events default to a 1-hour TTL in etcd — they're built as a live debugging signal for right-now, not an audit trail, and vanish before most incident retros even start.

5 — kubectl Debug

Why kubectl debug's ephemeral containers can attach to a running pod's process namespace without restarting it — the only clean way to get a shell into a distroless container that ships none of its own.

1 — Logging

Why Kubernetes has no built-in log aggregation by design — stdout/stderr capture by the kubelet is node-local and ephemeral, so durability is a platform-team responsibility, not a cluster feature.

2 — Metrics

Why metrics-server only ever powers kubectl top and the HPA — it holds no history by design, which is exactly the gap Prometheus was built to fill in every real cluster.