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Kubernetes Troubleshooting: The Domino Effect That Can Bring Your Cluster Down

Rsprasangi
DevPulse
Published in
4 min readFeb 7, 2025

Have you ever fixed a Kubernetes issue, only to see it spiral into a bigger mess?

That’s because Kubernetes errors don’t happen in isolation – they trigger a domino effect, where one small failure leads to another, escalating into a full-blown outage.

Let’s break it down:

The Kubernetes Chain Reaction

🔸ErrImagePull → Kubernetes can’t fetch the container image (wrong tag, private registry, network issues).

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🔸ImagePullBackOff → Retrying failed pulls, increasing wait time between attempts.

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🔸ContainerCreating → The container is stuck because the image isn’t available or resources aren’t sufficient.

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🔸CrashLoopBackOff → The container keeps crashing and restarting due to misconfigurations, bad entrypoints, or missing dependencies.

⬇️

🔸RunContainerError → Kubernetes can’t start the container due to permission issues, file system errors, or missing environment variables.

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🔸OOMKilled → The container runs out of memory, gets terminated, and restarts – impacting other workloads.

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🔸NodePressure → The node itself runs low on memory or CPU, affecting all other workloads running on it.

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Published in DevPulse

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Rsprasangi
Rsprasangi

Written by Rsprasangi

DevOps | AWS | Sharepoint | Splunk Enterprise | Service Delivery & IT Operations | ITSM | MBA- Project & Operations Management

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