I'm trying to figure out a way to restart container on failure and NOT remove and create a new container to take it's place. It would be a plus to be able to try restarting it, say 3 times, and then stop the pod.

I have a statefulset that looks like this (I removed some insignificant parts):

apiVersion: "apps/v1beta1"
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  name: cassandra-stateful
spec:
  serviceName: cassandra
  replicas: 1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: cassandra-stateful
    spec:
      # Only one Cassandra node should exist for one Kubernetes node.
      affinity:
        podAntiAffinity:
          requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
            - labelSelector:
                matchExpressions:
                  - key: "app"
                    operator: In
                    values:
                    - cassandra
              topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"
      containers:
        - name: cassandra
          image: localrepo/cassandra-kube
          ports:
            - containerPort: 7000
              name: intra-node
            - containerPort: 7001
              name: tls-intra-node
            - containerPort: 7199
              name: jmx
            - containerPort: 9042
              name: cql
          lifecycle:
            preStop:
              exec:
                command: ["pkill java && while ps -p 1 > /dev/null; do sleep 1; done"]

The reason I know it's recreating the pods is that I'm purposefully killing my process with:

pkill java && while ps -p 1 > /dev/null; do sleep 1; done

If I do a describe for the pod I can see it recreates the container instead of restarting:

$ kubectl describe po cassandra-stateful-0
Events:
  FirstSeen LastSeen    Count   From                SubObjectPath           Type        Reason      Message
  --------- --------    -----   ----                -------------           --------    ------      -------
  11m       11m     1   default-scheduler                       Normal      Scheduled   Successfully assigned cassandra-stateful-0 to node-136-225-226-236
  11m       11m     1   kubelet, node-136-225-226-236   spec.containers{cassandra}  Normal      Created     Created container with id cf5bbdc2989e231cdad4bb16dd26ad55b9a016200842cc3b2a3915f3d618737f
  11m       11m     1   kubelet, node-136-225-226-236   spec.containers{cassandra}  Normal      Started     Started container with id cf5bbdc2989e231cdad4bb16dd26ad55b9a016200842cc3b2a3915f3d618737f
  4m        4m      1   kubelet, node-136-225-226-236   spec.containers{cassandra}  Normal      Created     Created container with id fb4869eb91313512dc56608a6ef3d24590c88234a0ef453cd7c16dcf625e1f37
  4m        4m      1   kubelet, node-136-225-226-236   spec.containers{cassandra}  Normal      Started     Started container with id fb4869eb91313512dc56608a6ef3d24590c88234a0ef453cd7c16dcf625e1f37

Is there any rule that make this possible?