A guide to restarting pods in Kubernetes using kubectl

When should you restart a Kubernetes pod? What are the different pod states in Kubernetes? How to restart pods in Kubernetes using kubectl Conclusion Posted on December 1, 2025 by Kevel Bhogayata, Principal Engineer, Middleware CNCF projects highlighted in this post This Member Blog was originally published on the Middleware blog and is republished here with permission. kubectl is the command-line interface for managing Kubernetes clusters. It allows you to manage pods, deployments, and other resources from the terminal, helping you troubleshoot Kubernetes issues. , check pod health, and scale applications easily. Most kubectl commands follow a simple structure. For example, kubectl get pods lists running pods, and kubectl delete pod <pod-name> removes a pod. kubectl get pods kubectl delete pod <pod-name> Many users wonder how to restart a Kubernetes pod using kubectl. Contrary to popular belief, there is no direct kubectl restart pod command. Instead, Kubernetes expects you to work with higher-level objects, such as Deployments. kubectl restart pod This guide covers the safest and most effective methods for restarting pods, including rollout restarts, deleting pods, scaling replicas, and updating environment variables, helping you manage pod restarts in a predictable and controlled way. Knowing when to restart a Kubernetes pod is key to maintaining application stability and performance. Here are the most common scenarios that require a pod restart: When you update your application’s settings (such as environment variables or resource limits), the pod continues to use the old configurations.