How a Pod is Deleted - Behind the Scenes Breakdown

In partnership with

TechOps Examples

Hey — It's Govardhana MK 👋

Along with a use case deep dive, we identify the top news, tools, videos, and articles in the TechOps industry.

IN TODAY'S EDITION

🧠 Use Case

  • How a Pod is Deleted - Behind the Scenes Breakdown

🚀 Top News

  • DataDog released 2024 State of Cloud Security Report

    Highlights:

    • Less than half of EC2 instances enforce IMDSv2

    • Long-lived credentials continue to be a major risk

    • 79% of S3 buckets have Public Access Block enabled

    • Many managed Kubernetes clusters expose their API server to the internet

    • More details here

📽️ Videos

📚️ Resources

TOGETHER WITH WRITER

Writer RAG tool: build production-ready RAG apps in minutes

RAG in just a few lines of code? We’ve launched a predefined RAG tool on our developer platform, making it easy to bring your data into a Knowledge Graph and interact with it with AI. With a single API call, writer LLMs will intelligently call the RAG tool to chat with your data.

Integrated into Writer’s full-stack platform, it eliminates the need for complex vendor RAG setups, making it quick to build scalable, highly accurate AI workflows just by passing a graph ID of your data as a parameter to your RAG tool.

🛠️ TOOL OF THE DAY

Litmus -  helps SREs and developers practice chaos engineering in a Cloud-native way.

  • Multi Tenant for K8s

  • Chaos experiments are chained in sequence or parallel to build a scenario.

  • Litmus exports Prometheus metrics to quantify the impact of chaos on applications or infrastructure.

🧠 USE CASE

How a Pod is Deleted - Behind the Scenes Breakdown

When we run kubectl delete pod , the confirmation message pops up saying the pod is deleted(if all good)

$ kubectl delete pod techops-pod

pod "techops-pod" deleted

Wondered, what happens behind the scenes?

Before diving into pod deletion behind the scenes, you should know the basics.

SIGTERM: Requests a graceful shutdown, allowing the program to finish tasks and clean up. In Kubernetes, pods get time to exit cleanly.

SIGKILL: Forces an immediate stop, with no cleanup. If a pod doesn't shut down in time after SIGTERM, Kubernetes sends SIGKILL to terminate it.

In short,

  • SIGTERM allows for cleanup.

  • SIGKILL stops everything instantly.

Pod Deletion - Behind the Scenes:

Pod deletion flow

  1. kubectl delete pod: Triggers the API Server to update ETCD with deletionTimestamp and deletionGracePeriodSeconds, marking the pod as Terminating.

  2. API Server Kubelet: Notifies the Kubelet of the pod’s termination.

  3. Endpoint Controller: Removes the pod from active service endpoints, stopping any traffic from reaching the pod.

  4. PreStop Hook (if configured): Before sending SIGTERM, the Kubelet runs the PreStop Hook. This allows the pod to perform custom tasks (e.g., closing connections) during shutdown.

  5. SIGTERM: Kubelet sends SIGTERM, initiating a graceful shutdown. The pod is given the deletionGracePeriodSeconds (default 30s) to cleanly exit.

  6. Graceful Shutdown: During the grace period, the pod handles any ongoing tasks, such as completing requests or saving data, before it fully stops.

  7. SIGKILL: If the pod doesn't terminate within the grace period, SIGKILL is sent, forcing immediate shutdown.

  8. Pod Deleted: The API Server updates ETCD, marking the pod as deleted. Components like Kube-Proxy, Ingress, and others remove all references to the pod.

Here are some common signals for your knowledge (though out of context):

  • SIGHUP: Hangup signal

  • SIGINT: Interrupt signal (triggered by Ctrl+C)

  • SIGQUIT: Quit signal

  • SIGSTOP: Stop the process (cannot be caught or ignored)

I hope this was helpful in your learning journey.

You may even like:

Over the past 17+ years, I’ve led millions of dollars' worth of digital and cloud transformation projects for 40+ clients, including:

I can help you kickstart your digital and cloud transformation or optimize your existing systems to make them more efficient, scalable, and future-ready.

Whenever you’re ready for that, book a call.

Looking to promote your company, product, service, or event to 16,000+ TechOps Professionals? Let's work together.