Every pod eviction in Kubernetes, explained

Anyone who is running Kubernetes in a large-scale production setting cares about having a predictable Pod lifecycle. Having unknown actors that can terminate your Pods is a scary thought, especially when you’re running stateful workloads or care about availability in general. There are so many ways Kubernetes terminates workloads, each with a non-trivial (and not always predictable) machinery, and there’s no page that lists out all eviction modes in one place. This article will dig into Kubernetes internals to walk you through all the eviction paths that can terminate your Pods, and why “kubelet restarts don’t impact running workloads” isn’t always true, and finally I’ll leave you with a cheatsheet at the end.