Forcing a new image pull → To ensure a pod is using the latest version of an image, if you are using the latest tag (which is not a best practice), you need to manually restart the pod to force a new image pull.This may be solved automatically if the pod’s restart policy allows it. OOM → If a pod is terminated with an Out Of Memory Error (OOM), you will need to restart the pod after making changes to the resource specifications.

However, there are some cases where a node is taken out of service, and the pods cannot be evicted from it, in which a restart will help with addressing the issue.

Pod stuck in a terminating state → In this case, usually, a delete and a recreation would do the trick in most of the cases.

Debugging applications → Sometimes, if your application is not running correctly, or you are just experiencing some issues with it, a good practice is to first restart the underlying pods to reset their state and make troubleshooting easier.

Applying configuration changes → If there are updates on the pod’s configuration (configmaps, secrets, environment variables), in some cases, you may need to manually restart the pod for the changes to take effect.

There are many situations in which you may need to restart a pod:

K8 kubernetes