Symptom

READY=False, REASON=PreviousRevisionUnavailable. The StageSet has spec.rollbackOnFailure set, a run failed, and the controller could not restore the last-good revisions.

Cause

rollbackOnFailure restores the previously-applied artifact revisions by re-fetching their recorded URLs and verifying their digests. That only works while the producer still retains those revisions. This reason means a revision the rollback needs is no longer fetchable — the producer garbage-collected it.

Rollback is best-effort by contract: it works exactly when producers retain. Common triggers:

• a JaaS JsonnetSnippet with spec.history: 1 (the default) — only the current revision is kept, so there is no previous revision to roll back to
• a stock source-controller source, which retains only the current revision
• the previous revision aged out of the producer’s retention window
• the run used SOPS decryption and the key Secret was rotated or deleted — rollback re-runs decryption rather than restoring plaintext, so it fails closed when the key is gone, even for a revision the rollback store holds

A configured external rollback store changes the failure shape rather than masking it:

• a transient store outage (an S3 5xx, a connection reset) is not reported as PreviousRevisionUnavailable. The controller emits a RollbackStoreFailed Warning Event and backs off so the rollback retries once the store recovers — it never silently re-fetches the producer, which could have already garbage-collected the revision and turned a recoverable blip into a false terminal.
• a corrupt snapshot in the store (the object decodes to garbage) emits a RollbackStoreFailed Warning Event and falls back to a producer re-fetch. If the producer still retains the revision, rollback succeeds; if not, this terminal reason is set.

Diagnosis

kubectl --namespace <namespace> describe stageset <name>   # Message names the stage + revision
kubectl --namespace <namespace> get events --field-selector reason=RollbackStoreFailed

Check the producer’s retention. For a JaaS snippet:

kubectl --namespace <namespace> get jsonnetsnippet <name> --output jsonpath='{.spec.history}'

Remediation

The cluster is left at the partially-applied failed state; resolve the underlying failure (see the failing stage’s own runbook) and fix forward — the StageSet converges once the desired revision applies cleanly.

To make rollback reliable in future, either:

• Increase producer retention so at least one previous revision is always fetchable — JaaS snippets used with rollbackOnFailure should set spec.history: 2 (or more); sources that retain only the current revision cannot support the re-fetch path, so rely on source revert instead.
• Configure the external rollback store — a filesystem/RWX PVC (--rollback-store-path) or an S3 bucket (--rollback-store-s3-*); see operations . When the controller pushes rendered output to a store it owns, rollback is bit-exact and independent of producer retention — this PreviousRevisionUnavailable state cannot occur for runs the store holds, unless the run used SOPS and the key Secret is no longer readable (see the SOPS trigger above).