On one of the (newly created) Kubernetes nodes, all pods with private docker image fail with ImagePullBackOff

Posted on April 21, 2019

I have a k8s cluster with 2 nodes.

I have a few deployments and CronJobs running in this cluster, all these deployments and CronJobs use a docker image that is hosted in a private repo on dockerhub.

Some of the deployments gets scheduled on node A, where everything works fine, However, every pod that uses that private image that gets scheduled on node B, fails with ImagePullBackOff. For some reason, this node can not pull the image from the private repo. Even though imagePullSecrets is defined in all the yaml’s for these pods.

Any ideas on where to look or what might be going on here?

The funny/weird thing is, when I delete one of the running pod on node A that is running and that uses the same image + pull secret and it gets scheduled on node B. It gets pulled fine and all subsequent deploys also work fine.

I have a feeling this only happens when the node is newly created and the pods get scheduled on there for the first time, but I can’t figure out why.

Thanks in advance.

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John Kwiatkoski

June 4, 2019

Hi there,

I would try recycling Node B in this case as it sounds like there may be an issue with the docker instance running on node B. Do any workloads run fine on node B?

Regards,

John Kwiatkoski Senior Developer Support Engineer