The Auto Scaling Group detail is the part that stays with the reader: a node group stuck in CREATING for over twenty minutes gave no useful signal at the Kubernetes layer, and the real cause — an instance type not eligible under the Free Tier — only showed up in the ASG activity logs. That makes the lesson land well: when Kubernetes cannot explain a failure, the infrastructure underneath is the next place to look. The ImagePullBackOff drill is a good companion example too, since the older pod kept serving while the new one sat at 0/1, which is exactly how a failed rollout can look like a partial outage rather than a total one. Keeping the human verify step in the loop, after the AI gathers and analyses, is the right way to keep that speed without handing the cluster over to a script.