Pod PreStop hook

When an Elasticsearch Pod is terminated, its Endpoint is removed from the Service and the Elasticsearch process is terminated. As these two operations happen in parallel, a race condition exists. If the Elasticsearch process is already shut down, but the Endpoint is still a part of the Service, any new connection might fail. For more information, see Termination of pods.

Moreover, kube-proxy resynchronizes its rules every 30 seconds by default. During that time window of 30 seconds, the terminating Pod IP may still be used when targeting the service. Please note the resync operation itself may take some time, especially if kube-proxy is configured to use iptables with a lot of services and rules to apply.

To address this issue and minimize unavailability, ECK relies on a PreStop lifecycle hook. This waits to terminate the Elasticsearch process until the Service DNS record does not contain the IP of the Pod. First, the PreStop lifecycle hook keeps querying DNS for PRE_STOP_MAX_WAIT_SECONDS (defaulting to 20) until the Pod IP is no longer referenced. Then, it waits for an additional PRE_STOP_ADDITIONAL_WAIT_SECONDS (defaulting to 30). Additional wait is used to:

The exact behavior is configurable using environment variables, for example:

spec:
  version: 8.16.1
  nodeSets:
    - name: default
      count: 1
      podTemplate:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: elasticsearch
            env:
            - name: PRE_STOP_MAX_WAIT_SECONDS
              value: "10"
            - name: PRE_STOP_ADDITIONAL_WAIT_SECONDS
              value: "5"