jargon

Platform & DevOps·The orchestrator's model of the world

the spec says three and the status says one, and the gap between those two numbers is the entire incident.

Observed state

Also calledactual state, status, current state

What the system actually reports it has, as opposed to what was asked for. Every orchestrated object carries both, and reading the two side by side is the fastest diagnostic there is: matching means healthy, persistently diverging means a controller is trying and failing and its events will say why. Dashboards that only show desired state look green through an entire outage.

Commonly confused with