etcd

Two artifacts hide under 'Kubernetes backup' and they recover different things. Interviewers grade the misses: volume bytes, encryption keys, and everything that never lived in etcd at all.

One disk metric explaining a whole cluster's weirdness is the point of this question. Candidates who restart etcd first turn a slow cluster into a down one.

Four tools that solve the same sentence and differ on one question: where does the plaintext end up? In a regulated environment that question decides the answer.

Leases prevent dead holders but not overlapping ones. The staff-level answer is fencing tokens and a candid account of why quorum lock services without downstream checks are still probabilistic.