What is the strategy of kubelet managing containers within the machine if the connection with the master is broken due to some network issue? Is it possible to configure kubelet to kill all containers in such a situation?
Nodes in Kubernetes checkin with the master on regular intervals. If they fail to check in AND the master is still up then the pod eviction timout flag comes into play.
It basically waits this time before the pods are rescheduled elsewhere in the cluster. This is common to wait if the machine is just rebooting or something similar.
The flag is in the controller manager: --pod-eviction-timeout=5m0s: The grace period for deleting pods on failed nodes.
The second scenario is when the master goes down (or more specifically the controller-manager). If it stops responding then the cluster will still function as-is without interuption.