What is the meaning of ImagePullBackOff status on a Kubernetes pod?

Question

I\'m trying to run my first kubernetes pod locally. I\'ve run the following command (from here):

export ARCH=amd64
docker run -d \\
    --volume=/:/rootfs:ro \\
         


        

Answer 1

I had this error when I tried to create a replicationcontroller. The issue was, I wrongly spelt the nginx image name in template definition.

Note: This error occurs when kubernetes is unable to pull the specified image from the repository.

Answer 2

You can specify also imagePullPolicy: Never in the container's spec:

containers:
- name: nginx
  imagePullPolicy: Never
  image: custom-nginx
  ports:
  - containerPort: 80

Answer 3

The issue arises when the image is not present on the cluster and k8s engine is going to pull the respective registry. k8s Engine enables 3 types of ImagePullPolicy mentioned :

1. Always : It always pull the image in container irrespective of changes in the image
2. Never : It will never pull the new image on the container
3. IfNotPresent : It will pull the new image in cluster if the image is not present.

Best Practices : It is always recommended to tag the new image in both docker file as well as k8s deployment file. So That it can pull the new image in container.

Answer 4

Despite all the other great answers none helped me until I found a comment that pointed out this Updating images:

The default pull policy is IfNotPresent which causes the kubelet to skip pulling an image if it already exists.

That's exactly what I wanted, but didn't seem to work.

Reading further said the following:

If you would like to always force a pull, you can do one of the following:

• omit the imagePullPolicy and use :latest as the tag for the image to use.

When I replaced latest with a version (that I had pushed to minikube's Docker daemon), it worked fine.

$ kubectl create deployment presto-coordinator \
    --image=warsaw-data-meetup/presto-coordinator:beta0
deployment.apps/presto-coordinator created

$ kubectl get deployments
NAME                 READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
presto-coordinator   1/1     1            1           3s

Find the pod of the deployment (using kubectl get pods) and use kubectl describe pod to find out more on the pod.

Answer 5

I had similar problem when using minikube over hyperv with 2048GB memory. I found that in HyperV manager the Memory Demand was higher than allocated.

So I stopped minikube and assigned somewhere between 4096-6144GB. It worked fine after that, all pods running!

I don't know if this can nail down the issue in every case. But just have a look at the memory and disk allocated to the minikube.

Answer 6

I too had this problem, when I checked I image that I was pulling from a private registry was removed If we describe pod it will show pulling event and the image it's trying to pull

kubectl describe pod <POD_NAME>

Events:
 Type     Reason   Age                  From              Message
 ----     ------   ----                 ----              -------
 Normal   Pulling  18h (x35 over 20h)   kubelet, gsk-kub  Pulling image "registeryName:tag"
 Normal   BackOff  11m (x822 over 20h)  kubelet, gsk-kub  Back-off pulling image "registeryName:tag"
 Warning  Failed   91s (x858 over 20h)  kubelet, gsk-kub  Error: ImagePullBackOff