A production incident review reveals that a critical service had only one running replica for two weeks because a scaling configuration change silently failed to apply.

Beyond the immediate fix (correct the scaling config), the deeper gap is that replica count itself wasn't monitored/alerted on — recommend adding an alert specifically for 'desired replica count' not matching 'actual ready replica count' over a sustained period, so a silent scaling failure is caught immediately rather than discovered only in a postmortem after an extended exposure window.