There’s a particular kind of confidence that sets in after you’ve watched Kubernetes spin up a dozen fresh pods in under a minute. You’ve done the work. You’ve containerized everything, written your Helm charts, set your HPA thresholds. The architecture diagram shows twelve clean boxes behind a load balancer, arrows flowing neatly left to right, and some unspecified cloud thing in the corner labeled “DB” — as if that box were inert, as if it were just furniture.
Then traffic doubles. And the database CPU pegs at 99%.