<p>Is it possible to restart pods automatically based on the time?</p>

<p>For example, I would like to restart the pods of my cluster every morning at 8.00 AM.</p>

<p>Use a cronjob, but not to run your pods, but to schedule a Kubernetes API command that will restart the deployment everyday (<code>kubectl rollout restart</code>). That way if something goes wrong, the old pods will not be down or removed.</p>

<p>Rollouts create new ReplicaSets, and wait for them to be up, before killing off old pods, and rerouting the traffic. Service will continue uninterrupted.</p>

<p>You have to setup RBAC, so that the Kubernetes client running from inside the cluster has permissions to do needed calls to the Kubernetes API.</p>

<pre><code>---
# Service account the client will use to reset the deployment,
# by default the pods running inside the cluster can do no such things.
kind: ServiceAccount
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: deployment-restart
  namespace: &lt;YOUR NAMESPACE&gt;
---
# allow getting status and patching only the one deployment you want
# to restart
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: Role
metadata:
  name: deployment-restart
  namespace: &lt;YOUR NAMESPACE&gt;
rules:
  - apiGroups: ["apps", "extensions"]
    resources: ["deployments"]
    resourceNames: ["&lt;YOUR DEPLOYMENT NAME&gt;"]
    verbs: ["get", "patch", "list", "watch"] # "list" and "watch" are only needed
                                             # if you want to use `rollout status`
---
# bind the role to the service account
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: RoleBinding
metadata:
  name: deployment-restart
  namespace: &lt;YOUR NAMESPACE&gt;
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: Role
  name: deployment-restart
subjects:
  - kind: ServiceAccount
    name: deployment-restart
    namespace: &lt;YOUR NAMESPACE&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>And the cronjob specification itself:</p>

<pre><code>apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: deployment-restart
  namespace: &lt;YOUR NAMESPACE&gt;
spec:
  concurrencyPolicy: Forbid
  schedule: '0 8 * * *' # cron spec of time, here, 8 o'clock
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      backoffLimit: 2 # this has very low chance of failing, as all this does
                      # is prompt kubernetes to schedule new replica set for
                      # the deployment
      activeDeadlineSeconds: 600 # timeout, makes most sense with 
                                 # "waiting for rollout" variant specified below
      template:
        spec:
          serviceAccountName: deployment-restart # name of the service
                                                 # account configured above
          restartPolicy: Never
          containers:
            - name: kubectl
              image: bitnami/kubectl # probably any kubectl image will do,
                                     # optionaly specify version, but this
                                     # should not be necessary, as long the
                                     # version of kubectl is new enough to
                                     # have `rollout restart`
              command:
                - 'kubectl'
                - 'rollout'
                - 'restart'
                - 'deployment/&lt;YOUR DEPLOYMENT NAME&gt;'
</code></pre>

<p>Optionally, if you want the cronjob to wait for the deployment to roll out, change the cronjob command to:</p>

<pre><code>command:
 - bash
 - -c
 - &gt;-
   kubectl rollout restart deployment/&lt;YOUR DEPLOYMENT NAME&gt; &amp;&amp;
   kubectl rollout status deployment/&lt;YOUR DEPLOYMENT NAME&gt;
</code></pre>
