Exercise - Prove microservice resilience in Kubernetes

  • 3 minutes

One of the benefits of Kubernetes is the support for declarative configuration management. The services you define in the configuration files will be retained at all costs.

This means that if there's a failure, Kubernetes automatically restarts the services that were running before the failure.

Let's see this resilience in action by deleting the storefrontend pod and then verifying that Kubernetes restarted it.

  1. First, in the TERMINAL on the codespace, run kubectl get pods and note the name, including the random string, of the storefrontend pod. Here's an example output:

    @user-name /workspaces/eShopLite % kubectl get pods

NAME                             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
productsbackend-7445bdb5c9-pnpk6 1/1     Running   0          31m
storefrontend-5b6cc765c4-hjpx4   1/1     Running   0          63m

  2. Now, delete the storefrontend pod by using the kubectl delete command. You need to specify the full name of the pod, including the random string.

    kubectl delete pod storefrontend-5b6cc765c4-hjpx4

    You'll receive a message immediately stating the pod has been deleted.

  3. Because Kubernetes maintains the system state as declared in the configuration files, it immediately starts up another pod instance. You can verify that by running kubectl get pods.

    @user-name /workspaces/eShopLite % kubectl get pods

NAME                             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
productsbackend-7445bdb5c9-pnpk6 1/1     Running   0          31m
storefrontend-5b6cc765c4-vwmv8   1/1     Running   0          7s

    Notice that the random string following the storefrontend name has changed, indicating that the pod is a new instance. Also the AGE value is considerably less as well.

In this exercise, you learned how Kubernetes automatically maintains declared system state, even if there's a failure.

Check your knowledge

1.

What is the reason Kubernetes restarts pods when they fail?