Your Kubernetes Controller Is Silently Dead and Nobody Knows
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Kubernetes controller silent failure is a critical operational issue with clear fixes.
Summary
Kubernetes controllers on client-go's CachedFileTokenSource can silently die when a projected ServiceAccount token becomes invalid—the pod stays Running/Ready while retrying 401s forever, because the library only logs errors without exiting. A fix for KAI-Scheduler (CNCF Sandbox GPU scheduler) adds a transport wrapper on rest.Config that calls os.Exit(1) on 401, as leader election lease release requires a valid token. This mirrors upstream kube-scheduler's error handling, converting a silent failure into a visible crash loop.