How to Automatically Restart Pods in Kubernetes on a Schedule

Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration platform, provides a robust environment for deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications. In some scenarios, you might want to automatically restart pods at scheduled intervals to ensure the health, performance and response of your applications. In this guide, we’ll explore an easy and efficient way to achieve this using Kubernetes CronJobs.

Photo on Unsplash

Why Automatically Restart Pods?

Regularly restarting pods can be beneficial for various reasons:

1. Memory Leak Mitigation: Restarting pods helps in releasing accumulated memory and resources, mitigating the impact of potential memory leaks.
2. Application Cleanup: Certain applications may benefit from periodic restarts to clean up internal state and resources.
3. Configuration Updates: Applying changes to configurations or environment variables might require a pod restart to take effect.

Now, let’s dive into how you can schedule pod restarts effortlessly.

Step 1: Create a Kubernetes CronJob

CronJobs in Kubernetes allows you to run Jobs on a repeating schedule. We’ll leverage this feature to automatically restart pods. Let’s…