Kubernetes CronJobs silently fail more than you think

A backup job missed 24 days of runs. Nobody knew. The CronJob looked fine in kubectl get cronjobs . No alerts fired. The last successful run timestamp in the status field just sat there, quietly getting older. The root cause: the CronJob controller had silently given up scheduling after missing 100 runs. Logged an error. Stopped trying. Moved on. This article explains why Kubernetes CronJobs are structurally unreliable without external monitoring, and what you can do about it. The three failure