[growse]

Interestingly, the kubernetes approach is the opposite one. Dependencies between pods / software components are encouraged to be a little softer, so that the scheduler is simpler.

Starting up, noticing that the environment doesn't have what you need yet and dying quickly appears to be The Kubernetes Way. A scheduler will eventually restart you and you'll have another go. Repeat until everything is up.

The kubelet operates the same way afair. On a node that hasn't joined a cluster yet, it sits in a fail/restart loop until it's provisioned.