And that's why the title DBA is going the way of the dodo; state in this instance does not include cache and connections, because those are theoretically idempo

And that's why the title DBA is going the way of the dodo; state in this instance does not include cache and connections, because those are theoretically idempotent. Theoretically is not actually, and a ton of the assumptions in k8s break down when you look at them super closely, but they break down when things have gone wrong. If your cache is properly designed it doesn't matter if it's a little stale; you're not using it for things where correct and up to date is the most important thing. Connections, too; it shouldn't matter if your connection pool needs to spin up another connection, because if any of the conditions exist that the connection fails (or takes too long and stalls requests for any appreciable time), you already should have been paged and be on the way to resolving the incident.