Worker startup failure due to missing environment variables

Workers start but cannot connect to broker or result backend. Celery cannot find required connection strings (CELERY_BROKER_URL, CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND) in the environment. Often fails silently or with generic connection errors.

Verify environment variables are present using kubectl exec to check env. Ensure deployment spec includes env or envFrom entries for CELERY_BROKER_URL and CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND. For Redis Sentinel, use sentinel:// protocol in connection strings.