node lifecycle

The kubelet is a local reconcile loop with its own event stream, probe workers and eviction brain. Staff-level candidates can narrate it and explain why Ready status can reflect either reported health failure or missing heartbeats.

SSH plus yum is how outages start. The senior answer replaces nodes from versioned images on a cadence, orchestrates with surge capacity and PDBs, and can explain the kernel-skew problem that makes fleet homogeneity a feature.

Pod-level SIGTERM handling and node-level shutdown coordination are different mechanisms, and conflating them is the trap. The kubelet can only drain pods on power-off if it participates in systemd's shutdown sequence.

The pods are Pending, the nodes are Ready, and the GPUs have vanished from allocatable. Something changed on the node under a fleet that nobody considered part of the deploy surface.