descheduler VS Reloader

maybe descheduler can help? https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/descheduler

Surprised this wasn't suggested yet, you can also use a software like the k8s Descheduler that executes periodically to rebalance your workloads across the existing nodes.

Here an example of coordination api in Go https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/descheduler/commit/3cbae5e72ba53447a609e6001755ff395e6eeceb https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/descheduler/commit/0a52af9ab82a52fd8c864a81f4033736f11aab34

This is something a (now former) colleague of mine pointed out: that the kubernetes descheduler can enforce a maximum lifetime[0] that sort of forces continual reboots. So if your system cannot tolerate running for a long time continously, this is one method to gracefully restart long running pods.

[0]: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/descheduler#podlifetime

no it does not... thats why tools like https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/descheduler exist..

You might want to take a look at descheduler: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/descheduler

You can combine this approach with something like https://github.com/stakater/Reloader to automatically restart pods when a certain secret value changes. So if your static code needs to be rebuilt when certain values change, you can use an init container to run the build on startup.

This is not a cron job? I'm not sure if it helps, but you can have pods do a rolling restart on secret updates: https://github.com/stakater/Reloader that would clear the resources each run, but I'm not entirely clear on what you're looking to achieve.

If you use secrets as Environment Variables you will need to use something to make workloads get the new credentials, if they just loose connection. You can use the Reloader project for that.

Reloader is designed to simplify the process of updating application configurations in Kubernetes. It monitors ConfigMaps and Secrets for changes and triggers rolling upgrades for associated resources such as Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, and more. Reloader eliminates the need for manual intervention and reduces the risk of errors during the configuration update process.

The go k8s packages are pretty bloated - this may also just be a niche case. If you are looking to get secrets with hot reloading, you might also consider mounting a file or setting env vars and coupling it with this reloading operator: https://github.com/stakater/Reloader

For the auto restart this has been a staple install in all clusters for years for me: https://github.com/stakater/Reloader

If you didn't want to use SOPS, for some reason, you can certainly take advantage of external secrets as another commenter proposed, but you won't be able to accomplish (2) without an external tool adding to the mix, like Reloader: https://github.com/stakater/Reloader – that's because something has to update the HelmRelease in order to trigger it to upgrade. (You could just wait for the reconciler to come along, but the tendency is to set the polling interval longer than the default, so Helm won't be re-trying as often, in case something goes wrong...)

You can install https://github.com/stakater/Reloader And then it's just matter of a single annotation and it restarts automatically when there are changes.