An engineer swears the billing-api Deployment vanished: kubectl get deploy prints nothing, yet the CI job reports a successful apply. What should they check first?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Empty kubectl output is often “wrong building, wrong floor”—context or namespace mismatch. Confirm where you are pointing before tearing into deeper failure theories. CI may have applied somewhere else entirely.
Full Explanation
kubectl defaults to the current kubeconfig context and namespace. Listing Deployments in the wrong namespace or cluster yields an empty result even when the resource exists elsewhere. Verifying context (kubectl config current-context) and namespace (-n / kubectl config view --minify) is the first debugging step. etcd encryption rotation, Ingress restarts, and image CVE scanners are unrelated to an empty namespaced list from a context mismatch.