It seems that deleting a pod by UID used to be possible, but has been removed (https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/40121).
It also seems one cannot get a pod by its resource either (https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/20572).
(Why did they remove deleting by UID, what is the use of the UID then?)
Because I need something like replicas and none of the controllers (like Job, Deployment etc) suit my case.
The good thing about UIDs is that kubernetes generates them -- I don't have to worry about differentiating the pods then, I just save the returned UID. So it would be great if I could use it later to delete that particular pod ("replica").
Is it really not possible to use the UID to get/delete?
Is my only option then to take care of differentiating the pods myself (e.g. keep a counter or generate a unique id myself and set it as the name or label)?
I assume you are writing a controller to manage a set of replicas using a TPR or CRD
The short answer is that you should not track pods by UID or name but by using a selector much like Deployments/ReplicaSets/Services do. If pods match that selector, you can check the Pod's metadata or Pod spec to see if it needs to be deleted for some reason.