What is Init Container?
A container that runs and completes before the main application containers start in a Pod.
Init containers run before app containers in a Pod and must complete successfully before any app container starts. They are used for setup tasks: waiting for a database to be ready, running migrations, fetching secrets from Vault, or rendering config templates. Init containers have separate images from app containers and run sequentially. If an init container fails, Kubernetes restarts the Pod according to its restartPolicy.
Related Terms
More Kubernetes Terms
Admission Controller
A Kubernetes plugin that intercepts API requests before objects are persisted.
Auto Scaling
Automatically adjusting the number of compute resources based on demand.
ClusterIP
The default Kubernetes Service type that exposes a service on an internal cluster IP.
ConfigMap
A Kubernetes object for storing non-sensitive configuration data as key-value pairs.
Controller Manager
Kubernetes control plane component running control loops to maintain desired state.
CoreDNS
The default DNS server in Kubernetes clusters for service discovery.
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