# Explore Termination Behavior for Pods And Their Endpoints LLMS index: [llms.txt](/llms.txt) --- Once you connected your Application with Service following steps like those outlined in [Connecting Applications with Services](/docs/tutorials/services/connect-applications-service/), you have a continuously running, replicated application, that is exposed on a network. This tutorial helps you look at the termination flow for Pods and to explore ways to implement graceful connection draining. ## Termination process for Pods and their endpoints There are often cases when you need to terminate a Pod - be it to upgrade or scale down. In order to improve application availability, it may be important to implement a proper active connections draining. This tutorial explains the flow of Pod termination in connection with the corresponding endpoint state and removal by using a simple nginx web server to demonstrate the concept. ## Example flow with endpoint termination The following is the example flow described in the [Termination of Pods](/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/pod-lifecycle/#pod-termination) document. Let's say you have a Deployment containing a single `nginx` replica (say just for the sake of demonstration purposes) and a Service:

    service/pod-with-graceful-termination.yaml
    
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: nginx-deployment
  labels:
    app: nginx
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 120 # extra long grace period
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: nginx:latest
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
        lifecycle:
          preStop:
            exec:
              # Real life termination may take any time up to terminationGracePeriodSeconds.
              # In this example - just hang around for at least the duration of terminationGracePeriodSeconds,
              # at 120 seconds container will be forcibly terminated.
              # Note, all this time nginx will keep processing requests.
              command: [
                "/bin/sh", "-c", "sleep 180"
              ]

    service/explore-graceful-termination-nginx.yaml
    
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: nginx-service
spec:
  selector:
    app: nginx
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80
      targetPort: 80

Now create the Deployment Pod and Service using the above files: ```shell kubectl apply -f pod-with-graceful-termination.yaml kubectl apply -f explore-graceful-termination-nginx.yaml ``` Once the Pod and Service are running, you can get the name of any associated EndpointSlices: ```shell kubectl get endpointslice ``` The output is similar to this: ```none NAME ADDRESSTYPE PORTS ENDPOINTS AGE nginx-service-6tjbr IPv4 80 10.12.1.199,10.12.1.201 22m ``` You can see its status, and validate that there is one endpoint registered: ```shell kubectl get endpointslices -o json -l kubernetes.io/service-name=nginx-service ``` The output is similar to this: ```none { "addressType": "IPv4", "apiVersion": "discovery.k8s.io/v1", "endpoints": [ { "addresses": [ "10.12.1.201" ], "conditions": { "ready": true, "serving": true, "terminating": false ``` Now let's terminate the Pod and validate that the Pod is being terminated respecting the graceful termination period configuration: ```shell kubectl delete pod nginx-deployment-7768647bf9-b4b9s ``` All pods: ```shell kubectl get pods ``` The output is similar to this: ```none NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE nginx-deployment-7768647bf9-b4b9s 1/1 Terminating 0 4m1s nginx-deployment-7768647bf9-rkxlw 1/1 Running 0 8s ``` You can see that the new pod got scheduled. While the new endpoint is being created for the new Pod, the old endpoint is still around in the terminating state: ```shell kubectl get endpointslice -o json nginx-service-6tjbr ``` The output is similar to this: ```none { "addressType": "IPv4", "apiVersion": "discovery.k8s.io/v1", "endpoints": [ { "addresses": [ "10.12.1.201" ], "conditions": { "ready": false, "serving": true, "terminating": true }, "nodeName": "gke-main-default-pool-dca1511c-d17b", "targetRef": { "kind": "Pod", "name": "nginx-deployment-7768647bf9-b4b9s", "namespace": "default", "uid": "66fa831c-7eb2-407f-bd2c-f96dfe841478" }, "zone": "us-central1-c" }, { "addresses": [ "10.12.1.202" ], "conditions": { "ready": true, "serving": true, "terminating": false }, "nodeName": "gke-main-default-pool-dca1511c-d17b", "targetRef": { "kind": "Pod", "name": "nginx-deployment-7768647bf9-rkxlw", "namespace": "default", "uid": "722b1cbe-dcd7-4ed4-8928-4a4d0e2bbe35" }, "zone": "us-central1-c" ``` This allows applications to communicate their state during termination and clients (such as load balancers) to implement connection draining functionality. These clients may detect terminating endpoints and implement a special logic for them. In Kubernetes, endpoints that are terminating always have their `ready` status set as `false`. This needs to happen for backward compatibility, so existing load balancers will not use it for regular traffic. If traffic draining on terminating pod is needed, the actual readiness can be checked as a condition `serving`. When Pod is deleted, the old endpoint will also be deleted. ## What's next * Learn how to [Connect Applications with Services](/docs/tutorials/services/connect-applications-service/) * Learn more about [Using a Service to Access an Application in a Cluster](/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/service-access-application-cluster/) * Learn more about [Connecting a Front End to a Back End Using a Service](/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/connecting-frontend-backend/) * Learn more about [Creating an External Load Balancer](/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/create-external-load-balancer/)