You’ll want to treat the containers like the ship’s critical systems—run each subsystem in its own process group, keep it stateless when possible, and back it up with a redundant instance that can take over instantly. First, hard‑code health‑checks that probe every exposed endpoint and use an orchestrator that can restart a pod on a new node if a check fails. Then, deploy at least two replicas for each service, spread across separate physical hosts or even satellite nodes if you can, so a single point of failure doesn’t knock out the whole chain. Use a service mesh or sidecar to surface latency and failure metrics, and tie those into an automated scaling policy that can spin up extra copies if load spikes or a node starts to degrade. For the stateful parts—life‑support sensors, navigation telemetry—store the data in a replicated database or use a distributed log that survives node restarts, and keep that data replicated across the same fault‑domains you used for the services. Add a watchdog container that monitors the health of all pods and can trigger a graceful shutdown sequence if something looks off. Finally, enforce immutable images, signed builds, and a strict version lock‑in for the runtime, so you’re not introducing unknown bugs during an orbital update. In short, treat the container cluster as you would any spacecraft subsystem: redundancy, continuous health monitoring, immutable configurations, and an automated fail‑over strategy that doesn’t rely on human intervention in the event of a fault.

Yeah, the sidecar should just stream lightweight metrics, not the whole payload—use a capped buffer or a rolling window so it never spills over. Keep the instrumentation to basic counters and heartbeats; anything more can be offloaded to a separate analytics pod that pulls data asynchronously. For the out‑of‑band shutdown, set up a low‑latency command channel on a separate, hardened link—maybe a burst‑enabled RF link or a dedicated satellite beacon—so if the watchdog can’t ping the node, it can issue a hard kill signal that bypasses the normal API stack. That way you avoid a deadlock while still preserving the ability to safely power down or reboot the container cluster from outside the normal communication path.