Container Lifecycle Hooks
This page describes how kubelet managed Containers can use the Container lifecycle hook framework to run code triggered by events during their management lifecycle.
Overview
Analogous to many programming language frameworks that have component lifecycle hooks, such as Angular, Kubernetes provides Containers with lifecycle hooks. The hooks enable Containers to be aware of events in their management lifecycle and run code implemented in a handler when the corresponding lifecycle hook is executed.
Container hooks
There are two hooks that are exposed to Containers:
PostStart
This hook is executed immediately after a container is created. However, there is no guarantee that the hook will execute before the container ENTRYPOINT. No parameters are passed to the handler.
PreStop
This hook is called immediately before a container is terminated due to an API request or management
event such as a liveness/startup probe failure, preemption, resource contention and others. A call
to the PreStop hook fails if the container is already in a terminated or completed state and the
hook must complete before the TERM signal to stop the container can be sent. The Pod's termination
grace period countdown begins before the PreStop hook is executed, so regardless of the outcome of
the handler, the container will eventually terminate within the Pod's termination grace period. No
parameters are passed to the handler.
A more detailed description of the termination behavior can be found in Termination of Pods.
Hook handler implementations
Containers can access a hook by implementing and registering a handler for that hook. There are two types of hook handlers that can be implemented for Containers:
- Exec - Executes a specific command, such as
pre-stop.sh, inside the cgroups and namespaces of the Container. Resources consumed by the command are counted against the Container. - HTTP - Executes an HTTP request against a specific endpoint on the Container.
Hook handler execution
When a Container lifecycle management hook is called,
the Kubernetes management system executes the handler according to the hook action,
httpGet and tcpSocket are executed by the kubelet process, and exec is executed in the container.
Hook handler calls are synchronous within the context of the Pod containing the Container.
This means that for a PostStart hook,
the Container ENTRYPOINT and hook fire asynchronously.
However, if the hook takes too long to run or hangs,
the Container cannot reach a running state.
PreStop hooks are not executed asynchronously from the signal to stop the Container; the hook must
complete its execution before the TERM signal can be sent. If a PreStop hook hangs during
execution, the Pod's phase will be Terminating and remain there until the Pod is killed after its
terminationGracePeriodSeconds expires. This grace period applies to the total time it takes for
both the PreStop hook to execute and for the Container to stop normally. If, for example,
terminationGracePeriodSeconds is 60, and the hook takes 55 seconds to complete, and the Container
takes 10 seconds to stop normally after receiving the signal, then the Container will be killed
before it can stop normally, since terminationGracePeriodSeconds is less than the total time
(55+10) it takes for these two things to happen.
If either a PostStart or PreStop hook fails,
it kills the Container.
Users should make their hook handlers as lightweight as possible. There are cases, however, when long running commands make sense, such as when saving state prior to stopping a Container.
Hook delivery guarantees
Hook delivery is intended to be at least once,
which means that a hook may be called multiple times for any given event,
such as for PostStart or PreStop.
It is up to the hook implementation to handle this correctly.
Generally, only single deliveries are made. If, for example, an HTTP hook receiver is down and is unable to take traffic, there is no attempt to resend. In some rare cases, however, double delivery may occur. For instance, if a kubelet restarts in the middle of sending a hook, the hook might be resent after the kubelet comes back up.
Debugging Hook handlers
The logs for a Hook handler are not exposed in Pod events.
If a handler fails for some reason, it broadcasts an event.
For PostStart, this is the FailedPostStartHook event,
and for PreStop, this is the FailedPreStopHook event.
You can see these events by running kubectl describe pod <pod_name>.
Here is some example output of events from running this command:
Events:
FirstSeen LastSeen Count From SubObjectPath Type Reason Message
--------- -------- ----- ---- ------------- -------- ------ -------
1m 1m 1 {default-scheduler } Normal Scheduled Successfully assigned test-1730497541-cq1d2 to gke-test-cluster-default-pool-a07e5d30-siqd
1m 1m 1 {kubelet gke-test-cluster-default-pool-a07e5d30-siqd} spec.containers{main} Normal Pulling pulling image "test:1.0"
1m 1m 1 {kubelet gke-test-cluster-default-pool-a07e5d30-siqd} spec.containers{main} Normal Created Created container with docker id 5c6a256a2567; Security:[seccomp=unconfined]
1m 1m 1 {kubelet gke-test-cluster-default-pool-a07e5d30-siqd} spec.containers{main} Normal Pulled Successfully pulled image "test:1.0"
1m 1m 1 {kubelet gke-test-cluster-default-pool-a07e5d30-siqd} spec.containers{main} Normal Started Started container with docker id 5c6a256a2567
38s 38s 1 {kubelet gke-test-cluster-default-pool-a07e5d30-siqd} spec.containers{main} Normal Killing Killing container with docker id 5c6a256a2567: PostStart handler: Error executing in Docker Container: 1
37s 37s 1 {kubelet gke-test-cluster-default-pool-a07e5d30-siqd} spec.containers{main} Normal Killing Killing container with docker id 8df9fdfd7054: PostStart handler: Error executing in Docker Container: 1
38s 37s 2 {kubelet gke-test-cluster-default-pool-a07e5d30-siqd} Warning FailedSync Error syncing pod, skipping: failed to "StartContainer" for "main" with RunContainerError: "PostStart handler: Error executing in Docker Container: 1"
1m 22s 2 {kubelet gke-test-cluster-default-pool-a07e5d30-siqd} spec.containers{main} Warning FailedPostStartHook
What's next
- Learn more about the Container environment.
- Get hands-on experience attaching handlers to Container lifecycle events.