What to expect when a Kubernetes Node fails

This section is aimed to inform users of what happens during a node failure and what is expected during the recovery.

After one minute, kubectl get nodes will report NotReady for the failure node.

After about five minutes, the states of all the pods on the NotReady node will change to either Unknown or NodeLost.

If you’re deploying using a StatefulSet or Deployment, you need to decide is if it’s safe to force deletion the pod of the workload running on the lost node. See the official Kubernetes documentation about forcing the deletion of a StatefulSet.

StatefulSets have a stable identity, so Kubernetes won’t force delete the pod for the user.

Deployments don’t have a stable identity, but Longhorn is a Read-Write-Once type of storage, which means it can only be attached to one node. So the new pod created by Kubernetes won’t be able to start due to the Longhorn volume still attached to the old pod, on the lost node.

In both cases, Kubernetes will automatically evict the pod (set deletion timestamp for the pod) on the lost node, then try to recreate a new one with old volumes. Because the evicted pod gets stuck in Terminating state and the attached Longhorn volumes cannot be released/reused, the new pod will get stuck in ContainerCreating state. That’s why you’ll need to decide is if it’s safe to force deleting the pod.

If you decide to delete the pod manually (and forcefully), Kubernetes will take about another six minutes to delete the VolumeAttachment object associated with the Pod, then finally detach the Longhorn volume from the lost Node and allow it to be used by the new pod.

This six-minute period is hard-coded in Kubernetes: If the pod on the lost node is forced deleting, the related volumes won’t be unmounted correctly. Then Kubernetes will wait for this fixed timeout to directly clean up the VolumeAttachment object.

Volume Attachment recovery policy

Kubernetes will not remove a Volume Attachment from a failed node, it is the responsibility of the kubelet running on a node to clean up the pods from the api server. Since the node is dead kubelet cannot cleanup the terminating pods, and the Volume Attachment continues to be stuck on the failed node. This leads to the replacement pods, not being able to start since they are waiting for the volume to become available. To deal with this problem we provide 3 different Volume Attachment recovery policies.

StatefulSet Workloads

For StatefulSet workloads regardless of the chosen Volume Attachment recovery policy. The user needs to force delete the terminating pods, at which point Longhorn will recover the Volume Attachment from the failed node. Which then allows the pending replacement pods to start correctly with the requested volumes being available.

Deployment Workloads

For Deployment (ReplicaSet) workloads the Longhorn behavior depends on the chosen Volume Attachment recovery policy.

Volume Attachment recovery policy never (Kubernetes default)

Longhorn will not recover the Volume Attachment from a failed node, which is consistent with the default Kubernetes behavior. The user needs to force delete the terminating pods, at which point Longhorn will recover the Volume Attachment from the failed node. Which then allows the pending replacement pods to start correctly with the requested volumes being available.

Volume Attachment recovery policy wait (Longhorn default)

Longhorn will wait to recover the Volume Attachment till all the terminating pods deletion grace period has passed. Since the nodes kubelet is required to delete the pods by this point, and the pods are still available we can conclude that the failed nodes Kubelet is incapable of deleting the pods. At this point Longhorn will recover the Volume Attachment from the failed node. Which then allows the pending replacement pods to start correctly with the requested volumes being available.

Volume Attachment recovery policy immediate

Longhorn will recover the Volume Attachment from a failed node as soon as there are pending replacement pods available. Which then allows the pending replacement pods to start correctly with the requested volumes being available.

What to expect when recovering a failed Kubernetes Node

If the node is back online within 5 - 6 minutes of the failure, Kubernetes will restart pods, unmount, and re-mount volumes without volume re-attaching and VolumeAttachment cleanup.

Because the volume engines would be down after the node is down, this direct remount won’t work since the device no longer exists on the node.

In this case, Longhorn will detach and re-attach the volumes to recover the volume engines, so that the pods can remount/reuse the volumes safely.

If the node is not back online within 5 - 6 minutes of the failure, Kubernetes will try to delete all unreachable pods based on the pod eviction mechanism and these pods will be in a Terminating state. See pod eviction timeout for details.

Then if the failed node is recovered later, Kubernetes will restart those terminating pods, detach the volumes, wait for the old VolumeAttachment cleanup, and reuse(re-attach & re-mount) the volumes. Typically these steps may take 1 ~ 7 minutes.

In this case, detaching and re-attaching operations are already included in the Kubernetes recovery procedures. Hence no extra operation is needed and the Longhorn volumes will be available after the above steps.

For all above recovery scenarios, Longhorn will handle those steps automatically with the association of Kubernetes.