A maintenance reboot made pods vanish instead of draining. Why did they never show Terminating at all?

Pod-level SIGTERM handling and node-level shutdown coordination are different mechanisms, and conflating them is the trap. The kubelet can only drain pods on power-off if it participates in systemd's shutdown sequence.

Grounded in researched DevOps, SRE and platform engineering interview loops, written to a senior-engineer editorial bar, and never padded to hit a word count.