Question

Your team adopts GitOps for a production cluster using Flux. A developer, in a hurry to fix an outage, uses 'kubectl edit deployment' to increase the replica count directly on the cluster. Twenty minutes later, the change is gone and the deployment is back to its original replica count. What is the MOST likely reason this happened?

Accepted Answer

The Flux controller reconciled the live cluster state back to match the manifests stored in the Git repository, which remained the source of truth.

Answer

Kubernetes automatically discards manual edits to Deployments after a fixed timeout to enforce immutability.

Answer

The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler scaled the deployment back down because the extra replicas were idle.

Answer

The 'kubectl edit' command only modifies a local copy and never persists changes to the API server.