When I first started managing microservices at scale, Kubernetes felt like magic — until it didn’t. Pods restarted, requests vanished into the void, and tracing cross-namespace traffic became a weekend sport. At first, the networking model seemed almost too simple. A Pod gets an IP. A Kubernetes Service gives that Pod a stable virtual endpoint. CoreDNS handles service discovery. The CNI provides pod-to-pod connectivity. kube-proxy handles service traffic using mechanisms such as ipt...