Kubernetes CrashLoopBackoff Demo

A demonstration environment for investigating and resolving Kubernetes pod crashes in a microservice deployment.

Overview

This demo deploys a payment processing microservice that fails to start properly in Kubernetes, resulting in a CrashLoopBackoff state. This represents a common production scenario where application pods repeatedly crash during startup.

Prerequisites

• Docker (with Kubernetes enabled) or kind
• kubectl
• A running Kubernetes cluster

Setup

Deploy the demo environment:

make scenario-crashloop

This will create the scenario-crashloop namespace and deploy all resources.

Investigating the Issue

Check the deployment status:

kubectl get pods -n scenario-crashloop

You should observe pods in CrashLoopBackoff state. Use standard Kubernetes troubleshooting techniques to investigate:

# View pod details
kubectl describe pod -n scenario-crashloop <pod-name>

# Check logs
kubectl logs -n scenario-crashloop <pod-name>

# View previous container logs if available
kubectl logs -n scenario-crashloop <pod-name> --previous

Architecture

The demo consists of:

• payment-service: A Node.js microservice handling payment processing
• ConfigMap: Application configuration
• Secret: Sensitive credentials
• Service: Internal cluster networking

Reset

To clean up and reset the demo:

kubectl delete ns scenario-crashloop

Then redeploy with make scenario-crashloop.

Expected Behavior

In a working state, the payment service should:

• Start successfully
• Respond to health check requests
• Process payment requests via REST API
• Connect to required backend services

Currently, the pods are failing to start. Investigate the logs and configuration to determine the root cause.