Public-health Services stop delivering traffic to healthy pods after kube-proxy DaemonSet pods begin crash-looping on several nodes. What should administrators conclude?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
kube-proxy is the traffic clerk that writes the local rules sending Service hits to pod IPs. If that clerk's pods crash on a node, Services on that node go nowhere even when backends are healthy.
Full Explanation
kube-proxy (or an equivalent dataplane such as some eBPF replacements) maintains node-local rules that implement Service virtual IPs and load balancing to Endpoints or EndpointSlices. When kube-proxy pods crash, those rules are not maintained and Service traffic fails on affected nodes. It is not a certificate renewer, not proof of etcd quorum loss by itself, and CoreDNS does not replace Service packet forwarding.