I'm trying to set up a stateful Apache Flink application in Kubernetes and I need to save the current state in case of a disruption, such as someone deleting the pod or it being rescheduled due to cluster resizing.
I added a preStop hook to the container that accomplishes this behaviour, but when I delete a pod using kubectl delete pod it spins up a new Pod before the old one terminates.
Guides such as this one use the Recreate update strategy to make sure only one pod runs at a time. This works fine in case of updating a deployment, but it does not cover disruptions like I described above. I also tried to set spec.strategy.rollingUpdate.maxSurge to 0 but that made no difference.
Is it possible to configure my Deployment in such a way that no pod ever starts before another one is terminated, or do I need to switch to StatefulSets?
I agree with @Cosmic Ossifrage as StatefulSets make it easy to achieve your goal. Each Pod in StatefulSets is represented with unique, persistent identities and stable hostnames that Kubernetes Engine maintains regardless of where they are scheduled.
Therefore, StatefulSets are deployed in sequential order and are terminated in reverse ordinal order assuming that Kubernetes StatefulSet controller removes one Pod each time after complete deletion of previous one as well.