<p>I recently had cause to restart a fluentd-elasticsearch pod for all my nodes.  Out of 7 nodes where the pods were deleted only 1 of them deleted and came back as "Running".  Is there a way to completely purge a pod in k8s?</p>

<p><code>fluentd-elasticsearch</code> pods are <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/4ca66d2aefa20c27b670b2fa890052daadc05294/docs/admin/static-pods.md" rel="nofollow">static pods</a> which are created via placing pod manifest files (<code>fluentd-es.yaml</code>) in a directory watched by Kubelet. The corresponding pod (a.k.a. the <em>mirror pod</em>) with the same name and namespace in the API server is created automatically for the purpose of introspection -- it reflects the status of the static pod.</p>

<p>Kubernetes treats the static pod (the pod manifest file) in the directory as the source of the truth; operations (deletion/update, etc) on the mirror pod will <em>not</em> have any effect on the static pod.</p>

<p>You are encouraged to move away from static pods and use <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/4ca66d2aefa20c27b670b2fa890052daadc05294/docs/admin/daemons.md" rel="nofollow">DaemonSet</a>, except for a few particular use cases (e.g., standalone Kubelets). The system add-on pods such as <code>fluentd-elasticsearch</code> will be converted to <code>DaemonSet</code> eventually. </p>
