Your operator is the top API consumer and etcd is sweating. Explain informers, resourceVersion and the real cost of LIST.

Repeated full-resource polling can make an operator an expensive API client. This question separates people who run controllers at ten-thousand-object scale from those who copied a tutorial: watch semantics, cache behaviour, and which LISTs touch etcd.

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.