Both pods go NotReady, the Service endpoint list empties and the front door returns 503, so adding Keycloak replicas buys nothing against database loss. The node holding the session in cache fails too, because a refresh writes LAST_SESSION_REFRESH. Recovery was automatic in about fifteen seconds with no restart, which is what readiness rather than liveness buys.
The observability finding matters as much: up stayed at 1 through a total outage, so alerting on it would have caught nothing. kube-state-metrics is missing and pod readiness is therefore not recorded as a metric.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Cutting TCP 7800 leaves cross-node refresh working (200), confirming sessions travel through PostgreSQL rather than the cluster transport. Logout is the opposite: the database row is deleted but the other node answers from its stale local cache, so the A-0 conclusion that invalidation rides the database is corrected here.
Two things the plan did not anticipate: a NetworkPolicy cannot sever an established connection because conntrack accepts it before policy evaluation, and Keycloak reports the partition through its readiness probe so the split node removes itself from the Service.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
