# In-place pod restarts: Boosting efficiency and workload reliability in Kubernetes v1.35

DevFeed: [In-place pod restarts: Boosting efficiency and workload reliability in Kubernetes v1.35](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/in-place-pod-restarts-boosting-efficiency-and-workload-reliability-in-kubernetes-v1-35-34310.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://opensource.googleblog.com/2026/06/in-place-pod-restarts-boosting-efficiency-and-workload-reliability-in-kubernetes-v135.html>)

Author: Google Open Source (noreply@blogger.com)

Published: 2026-06-18T18:30:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Google Open Source Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/google-open-source-blog.md>)

Topics: [Kubernetes](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/kubernetes.md>), [reliability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/reliability.md>), [Resilience](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/resilience.md>), [Containers](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/containers.md>), [distributed-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/distributed-systems.md>), [etcd](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/etcd.md>), [benchmarking](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/benchmarking.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [containers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/containers.md>), [control-plane](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/control-plane.md>), [efficiency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/efficiency.md>), [etcd](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/etcd.md>), [google](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/google.md>), [kubernetes](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kubernetes.md>), [ml](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ml.md>), [reliability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/reliability.md>), [resilience](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/resilience.md>)

## AI overview

This article explains how Kubernetes v1.35 introduces the RestartAllContainers action for in-place Pod restarts. It describes how restarting containers while preserving the Pod's runtime identity can reduce resource waste, control-plane churn, scheduling races, and recovery delays for complex, batch, and AI/ML workloads.

## Source excerpt

by Duncan Campbell & Giuseppe Tinti Tomio, Kubernetes Operational efficiency and system resilience are critical when running scaled platforms. Yet, in Kubernetes, recovering from software crashes remains a headache because you couldn't trigger a clean restart of a Pod's containers without recreating the entire Pod object, leading to some amount of resource waste. To address this, Restart All Containers on Container Exits graduated to beta and is enabled by default in Kubernetes v1.36. Developed in close collaboration with the CNCF community, this capability represents Google's commitment to investing in the success of foundation-led open source projects. By sharing best practices from running large distributed systems internally, we are helping build a more resilient and efficient ecosystem. Letting containers restart while keeping the Pod's runtime identity provides a built-in way to perform in-place Pod recovery, boosting application reliability and saving resource costs. The Problem: The High Cost of Pod Re-creation Historically, Kubernetes managed failures using pod level restart policies. While sufficient for simple services, modern multi-container Pods often have complex dependencies. When a failure requires a full environment reset, your only option was deleting and recreating the entire Pod. This introduces massive control plane churn, causing latency and pressure on the etcd backend during large failures: Initialization Dependencies: If a main container corrupts a local environment, for example, single-use secrets that must be re-requested, restarting just that container is insufficient; the setup must run again. Watcher Interoperability: If a watcher sidecar detects a fatal error, it must trigger a full recreate of the entire pod and its infrastructure, including the sandbox. Stale States: If a database sidecar proxy restarts, the main application can get stuck attempting to use stale, broken connections. Resource Race Conditions: When a large job finds a