2026-05-17 incident: Keel rolled authentik 2026.2.2 → 2026.2.3 around 23:36.
The force+match-tag pairing should have constrained Keel to digest-only on
the current tag (not switch to a new tag), but a race between Kyverno's
mutate (injecting match-tag) and Keel's hourly poll caused the workload to
still have the old `force`-only annotation when Keel acted. Result: tag
rewrite, pods cycled, pgbouncer connection failures, login broken.
Manual rollback: `kubectl rollout undo` on all 5 authentik deployments back
to 2026.2.2. Auth restored within ~5 min.
Going forward, critical-namespace workloads are excluded at the policy level
so this race can't recur. They get upgraded via TF (Helm chart version bumps)
on a deliberate cadence, never by Keel.
Live state: 36 workloads on policy=never (35 critical + chrome-service pin
+ 7 CI-driven self-hosted from earlier), 190 on policy=force+match-tag for
opt-out-pure auto-update on the remaining stateless apps.
This matches user direction (2026-05-17): "upgrading is fine as long as we
upgrade correctly and the latest version is healthy" + "keel responsible
for the latest version, phased rollout, graceful".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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