<p><a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/pod/#force-deletion-of-pods" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/pod/#force-deletion-of-pods</a></p>

<p>This section of the kubernetes documentation points out that "Force deletions can be potentially dangerous for some pods", but doesn't really go into detail on the dangers.</p>

<p>I understand that force deleting a pod will immediately "deregister" the pod from the API before the kubelet container confirms the underlying container is actually deleted, which could lead to a bunch of orphaned containers running if the kubelet fails to delete them. However, I don't know how to tell if a pod is "dangerous" to force-delete before I do so, or if there is even a way to predict this.</p>

<p>Are there any guidelines on safely force-deleting a pod? Or is this just an inherently unsafe operation?</p>

<p>It really depends on what point of view.</p>

<p>From the K8s master and etcd which keeps the state in K8s it's safe as the entry is deleted in etcd. </p>

<p>However, the kube-scheduler tells the kubelet on the node to kill the pod and sometimes the kubelet might not be able to kill it (Most of the times it is). </p>

<p>A reason why it might not be able to kill the pod is if something like docker or your runtime isn't responding or a Linux system resource is not being released which could be anything like a deadlock, hardware failure, etc.</p>

<p>So most of the times it's safe but there might be a few specific cases where it's not due to the nature of your application and the state of your system.</p>
