Kubernetes v1.34: Finer-Grained Control Over Container Restarts

Kubernetes v1.34: Finer-Grained Control Over Container Restarts The problem with a single restart policy Introducing per-container restart policies Use cases In-place restarts for training jobs Try-once init containers Pods with multiple containers How to use it Example 1: Restarting on specific exit codes Example 2: A try-once init container Example 3: Containers with different restart policies Learn more Roadmap Your feedback is welcome! With the release of Kubernetes 1.34, a new alpha feature is introduced that gives you more granular control over container restarts within a Pod. This feature, named Container Restart Policy and Rules , allows you to specify a restart policy for each container individually, overriding the Pod's global restart policy. In addition, it also allows you to conditionally restart individual containers based on their exit codes. This feature is available behind the alpha feature gate ContainerRestartRules. ContainerRestartRules This has been a long-requested feature. Let's dive into how it works and how you can use it. Before this feature, the restartPolicy was set at the Pod level. This meant that all containers in a Pod shared the same restart policy ( Always , OnFailure , or Never ). While this works for many use cases, it can be limiting in others. restartPolicy Always OnFailure Never For example, consider a Pod with a main application container and an init container that performs some initial setup. You might want the main container to always restart on failure, but the init container should only run once and never restart. With a single Pod-level restart policy, this wasn't possible.