Software Design

Kubernetes Pod Lifecycle Phases

State Diagrams · made in Skemio

State diagram detailing Kubernetes pod lifecycle: Pending, Running, CrashLoopBackOff, leading to Succeeded or Failed terminal states.
State diagram detailing Kubernetes pod lifecycle: Pending, Running, CrashLoopBackOff, leading to Succeeded or Failed terminal states.
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What it shows

  • Pending means kube-scheduler has not yet placed pods on a node.
  • CrashLoopBackOff uses exponential backoff up to a five-minute cap.
  • Succeeded indicates all containers exited cleanly with zero code.

The takeaway

A Pod phase is an aggregation of container statuses, not a raw container state.

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