We've analyzed over 1 million production K8s failures across thousands of clusters. The data reveals something striking: the vast majority of incidents fall into predictable, preventable categories. By the law of large numbers, if we address these recurring issues, we can drastically improve production reliability.

This talk presents the most common K8s failure patterns backed by real data at scale. We'll cover 6 major categories: Resource Exhaustion (OOMKilled pods, memory leaks, GPU thermal throttling), Image & Deployment Issues (ImagePullBackOff, stuck rollouts), Config & Secret Management (rotation breaking apps, ConfigMap drift), Cascading Failures (missing ConfigMaps triggering multi-pod failures, dependency chains), Storage & Persistence (PVC conflicts, CSI driver issues), & App vs Infra Debugging (CrashLoopBackOff mysteries, GPU XID errors).

For each category, we'll show real K8s events, explain why these failures are so common, and provide actionable prevention strategies.