In Kubernetes, how to set pods' names when using replication controllers?

Question

I have a simple replication controller yaml file which looks like this:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ReplicationController
metadata:
  name: nginx
spec:
  replicas: 3
           


        

Answer 1

If you're running stateless workloads, I cannot imagine why you would want to have fixed identities associated with each object if your intention is to run N replicas of a particular pod.

There is no way to do this using a ReplicaSet/ReplicationController. When the controller creates new pods, it will have a generated name suffix after the pod name.

If that is what you really want (fixed identity/ordinal index), the property is satisfied by the StatefulSet resource which is stable since Kubernetes v1.9. However, it also comes with additional guarantees that you probably do not need.