Every outbound call from the cluster carries an extra 20ms and DNS query volume is five times what it should be. Why?

The pod's resolver is configured to try five search domains before the real one. An uncached external hostname can trigger several search-expanded queries before its absolute lookup, and the failures are what you are paying for.

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.