<p>I have seen the one-pod &lt;-&gt; one-container rule, which seems to apply to business logic pods, but has exceptions when it comes to shared network/volume related resources.</p>
<p>What are encountered production uses of deploying pods without a deployment configuration?</p>

<p>In our case, we use stand alone pods for debugging purposes only.
Otherwise you want your configuration to be stateless and written in YAML files.</p>
<p>For instance, debugging the dns resolution: <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer-cluster/dns-debugging-resolution/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer-cluster/dns-debugging-resolution/</a></p>
<pre><code>kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/admin/dns/dnsutils.yaml
kubectl exec -i -t dnsutils -- nslookup kubernetes.default
</code></pre>
