One probe bug, three Kubernetes distributions, and a Go tag nobody opted into

Three is a count of environments, not of bug reports. The script filed with #141155 takes a flag, boots k3s, minikube or kind from pinned images, and runs the identical sequence in each ^[3]. Packaging as different as a single privileged k3s container and a kindest/node image landing on the same ordering points at the component they share: the kubelet, which is the thing that actually executes probes ^[6]. Pinning a different distribution does not route around that.

The manifest in the script shows why ordering carries weight. Its startup probe runs every second with a failure threshold of 100, and its liveness probe runs every second with a threshold of one ^[4]. That is 100 seconds of protected boot on the first start against one second on the restarted container if liveness gets there first ^[5]. A startup probe is an admission that the process is slow to come up, and a restart is exactly when it comes up again.

etcd is where this compounds. The etcd liveness probe checks /health three times, the default failure threshold, and restarts the server when all three fail ^[7]. Issue #96886 argues that restarting fixes almost nothing /health reports: not a NOSPACE alarm, not a missing raft leader, not slow QGETs from an overloaded cluster, which will simply receive the same load again ^[8]. The same issue cites event-etcd being restarted by the kubelet under overload when leaving it alone would have let it finish and recover ^[9].

The Go 1.27 case is the same shape at the toolchain layer. The new inline JSON tag is honoured by encoding/json, not only v2, deliberately, so a library adopting it does not force its dependents onto the new API ^[11]. Roughly 29,000 uses of that tag already exist in public code, much of it Kubernetes-derived from a time when the tag did nothing at all ^[12][17]. On named rather than embedded fields the count is 2,639, or 694 once openai-go copies are filtered out ^[13]. The issue author reports no definitively broken case and no confidence that there is none ^[14].