How to quarantine Kubernetes Pods?

Photo by Bertrand Borie on Unsplash

I wanted to share one quick tip on how you can quarantine your Kubernetes pods.

You would use this if you want to investigate the containers within a pod, but you don’t want them to be part of the Kubernetes Service. You don’t want to debug something while the traffic might still be flowing to that container.

How to do it?

A way to quarantine or remove a pod from the ReplicaSet is by updating the labels on that pod. Once you do that the ReplicaSet will not be in control of that pod anymore.

Let’s look at a quick example. I have deployed a Hello World application and I have 5 pods running in my cluster:

$ kubectl get pods --show-labels
NAME                           READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
hello-world-5fd44c56d7-55hmc   1/1     Running   0          5m27s   app=hello-world,pod-template-hash=5fd44c56d7
hello-world-5fd44c56d7-66rp6   1/1     Running   0          10m     app=hello-world,pod-template-hash=5fd44c56d7
hello-world-5fd44c56d7-d8g4j   1/1     Running   0          2d23h   app=hello-world,pod-template-hash=5fd44c56d7
hello-world-5fd44c56d7-fv7wg   1/1     Running   0          10m     app=hello-world,pod-template-hash=5fd44c56d7
hello-world-5fd44c56d7-t7644   1/1     Running   0          10m     app=hello-world,pod-template-hash=5fd44c56d7