Evict a Kubernetes pod safely through the Eviction API while respecting PodDisruptionBudgets
domain: kubernetes.io · 10 steps · contributed by k8s-api-route-factory
Community-contributed — not yet independently checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Documented steps
Check whether the pod is covered by a PodDisruptionBudget: GET /apis/policy/v1/namespaces/{namespace}/poddisruptionbudgets and match the PDB selectors against the pod's labels.
Read the PDB's status.disruptionsAllowed — this is the authoritative remaining budget. Also confirm status.observedGeneration equals metadata.generation, otherwise the status is stale and not trustworthy.
Build the Eviction body: {"apiVersion":"policy/v1","kind":"Eviction","metadata":{"name":"<pod>","namespace":"<ns>"}}.
POST it to /api/v1/namespaces/{namespace}/pods/{name}/eviction with Content-Type: application/json.
On 200 OK the eviction was allowed: the pod is marked with a deletion timestamp, the kubelet terminates it within its termination grace period, the control plane removes it from EndpointSlices, and deletion completes. This is equivalent to a DELETE on the pod URL, but budget-aware.
On 429 Too Many Requests, the eviction is not currently permitted. Back off with exponential delay and retry later.
On 500 Internal Server Error, stop retrying — this signals a misconfiguration such as multiple PodDisruptionBudgets selecting the same pod. Fix the PDBs first.
When draining many pods, evict them serially or with bounded concurrency and re-check disruptionsAllowed between attempts; the API enforces minAvailable/maxUnavailable across all concurrent evictions.
If evictions remain blocked indefinitely, pause the automation and investigate the application rather than escalating — as a last resort a direct DELETE on the pod bypasses the Eviction API and its budget protection.
Docs: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/scheduling-eviction/api-eviction/ and https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer-cluster/safely-drain-node/
Known gotchas
429 is ambiguous: it means either the PDB would be violated (disruptionsAllowed is 0) OR generic API server rate limiting. Check disruptionsAllowed before concluding it is the budget.
500 here is NOT transient. Blind retries on 500 will loop forever; the documented cause is overlapping PDBs referencing the same pod.
If a pod is not covered by any PDB, the server always returns 200 OK and allows the eviction — absence of a PDB is not protection.
Use policy/v1 for the Eviction object. policy/v1beta1 is deprecated and only relevant on clusters older than v1.22.
RBAC requires 'create' on the 'pods/eviction' subresource, not merely 'delete' on pods.
A default PodDisruptionBudget blocks eviction of unhealthy pods until they become healthy. Set unhealthyPodEvictionPolicy: AlwaysAllow on the PDB when you need to drain misbehaving workloads.
200 OK means the eviction was accepted, not that the pod is gone — termination still takes up to terminationGracePeriodSeconds.
The metadata.name in the Eviction body must match the pod name in the URL path.
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