GKE pod IP exhaustion is one of the few failure modes that gives you no warning before it goes terminal. I recently stepped into a war room where a client’s primary scaling group had flatlined — workloads cordoned, deployments stuck in Pending, and the estimated cost of the stall nearing $15k per hour in lost transaction volume. The culprit wasn’t traffic. It was a /20 subnet that had quietly run out of address space, and a set of GKE allocation defaults nobody had questioned at design time.
The IP Math I Uncovered During Triage: https://www.rack2cloud.com/gke-pod-ip-exhaustion-triage-part-1
The Class E Rescue: https://www.rack2cloud.com/gke-ip-exhaustion-fix-part-2