running kubernetes v1.2.2 on coreos on vmware:
I have a pod with the restart policy set to Never. Is it possible to manually start the same pod back up?
In my use case we will have a postgres instance in this pod. If it was to crash I would like to leave the pod in a failed state until we can look at it closer to see why it failed and then start it manually. Rather than try to restart with a restartpolicy of Always.
Looking through kubectl it doesnt seem like there is a manual start option. I could delete and recreate but i think this would remove the data from my container. Maybe I should be mounting a local volume on my host, and I should not need to worry about losing data?
this is my sample pod yaml. I dont seem to be able to restart the 'health' pod.
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: health
labels:
environment: dev
app: health
spec:
containers:
- image: busybox
command:
- sleep
- "3600"
imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
name: busybox
restartPolicy: Never
One simple method that might address your needs is to add a unique instance label, maybe a simple counter. If each pod is labelled differently you can start as many as you like and keep around as many failed instances as you like.
e.g. first pod
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: health
labels:
environment: dev
app: health
instance: 0
spec:
containers: ...second pod
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: health
labels:
environment: dev
app: health
instance: 1
spec:
containers: ...Based on your question and comments sounds like you want to restart a failed container to retain its state and data. In fact, application containers and pods are considered to be relatively ephemeral (rather than durable) entities. When a container crashes its files will be lost and kubelet will restart it with a clean state.
To retain your data and logs use persistent volume types in your deployment. This will let you to preserve data across container restarts.