Kubectl remove pending pod like a pro with a little help from our experts. Read on to find out more. 

At Bobcares, we offer solutions for every query, big and small, as a part of our Server Management Services.

Let’s take a look at how our Support Team helped our customers with removing pending pods via kubectl and other ways.

Tutorial to Remove Pending Pod Kubectl

We can remove all the pods from a node or a specific one from our cluster without too much trouble. To begin with, our Support Team recommends confirming the name of the node we want to remove with the following command:

kubectl get nodes
kubectl get pods -o wide | grep

This gives us a peek at all the pods to ensure we can remove the nods on the pods safely.

After that we have to use the following command to evict the user pods from the node:

kubectl drain

These user pods will get scheduled to other nodes by the controller. Furthermore, we can run several drain commands in different shells in order to drain multiple nodes. However, it executes only one at a time.

Then, we can ensure there are no more user pods on the node via this command:

get pods

In some scenarios, there may still be system pods running on the node. Moreover, there might also be DaemonSet pods on the node. In case the drain command fails, it is because a controller is not managing some of the pods. We can resolve this by running the drain once again with the –force flag. This deletes all the pods.

Now, we can either replace the node or troubleshoot it. If we opt for the former, we have to use the following command to delete the node initially:

kubectl delete node

Then, we can replace it with a new node. However, if our nodes are in an Amazon AutoScaling Group, we can terminate the EC2 instance backing our node and have it replaced within a few minutes.

Troubleshooting tips to remove pending pods

If the above procedure did not help remove the pods in your node, here are a few troubleshooting tips via our Support Team:

• Try deleting the statefulset that controls the pods before deleting the pods directly.

  kubectl delete statefulset
• The following command may come in handy to delete pods:

  kubectl delete pod  --grace-period=0 --force -n kube-system
• Alternatively, remove pending pod by deleting the deployment file with kubectl command:

  kubectl delete -f deployment-file-name.yaml
• If another pod gets recreated automatically after deleting it as per the number of replicas we mentioned during cluster creation, we have to use this command:

  $ ./cluster/kubectl.sh delete pod

Let us know in the comments which method helped remove pending pods.

[Need assistance with a different issue? We are available 24/7.]

Conclusion

At the end of the day, we went through different ways to remove pending pods in our node. Our skilled Support Engineers at Bobcares also took us through some additional troubleshooting tips to help get the job done.