8 — Kubernetes Failure Modes

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.

3 — Backup & Restore

Backing up etcd snapshots without also capturing PV data and CRDs restores a control plane that boots but manages nothing.

5 — Cost Optimization

Most Kubernetes clusters waste money on the requested-vs-used gap, not on compute price: pods routinely request two to three times what they actually consume, so right-sizing requests beats chasing spot-instance discounts.

2 — Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery is defined by RTO and RPO targets negotiated before an outage, not by how fast a runbook can be executed after one.

1 — High Availability

Running three or more control-plane replicas behind a load balancer only buys availability if etcd quorum, not just the API server, survives the loss of any single node.