Clearing Evicted Pod in One or All Namespaces on Kubernetes Cluster

NAME       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
myapp      0/1     Evicted   0          10s

You might have seen pods in the above state on Kubernetes cluster. Eviction is the process of terminating one or multiple pods on K8s nodes which could be because of lack of resources like CPU, memory, disk space, and filesystem inodes etc. It is mostly due to resource planning difficulty and pod needs to be rescheduled from high to low pressure node.

When any of the node in the cluster is under high pressure, it starts to cleanup unused Kubernetes resources like killed container, old container images etc. If that also could not sufficiently clean server resource of the node, further containers start to get killed.

The queue of getting killed in containers list comes on top which has not well defined cpu & memory requests, limits. This should be defined on pod manifest like this:

containers:
  - name: myapp
    image: nginx:alpine
    resources:
          requests:
            cpu: 100m
            memory: 128Mi
          limits:
            cpu: 500m
            memory: 768Mi

The evicted pods can be seen with simple kubectl get pods command.

Deleting Evicted Pods In All Namespaces

To delete pods of all namespaces at once, run the following script:

kubectl get po --all-namespaces | awk '{if ($4 ~ /Evicted/) system ("kubectl -n " $1 " delete pods " $2)}'

The similar approach applies for pods in other states like “Error”, “Completed”, “ContainerStatusUnknown”.

Deleting Evicted Pods In Each Namespace

#For Default Namespace
kubectl get pods | grep Evicted | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kubectl delete pod
#For $NAMESPACE
kubectl get pods -n $NAMESPACE | grep Evicted | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kubectl delete pod -n $NAMESPACE