How can a sidecar restart the app container or its own pod?

Question

1.6k views Asked by V-Lamp At 11 April 2022 at 09:28

I want to have a sidecar manage secret rotation, which requires the app container to restart in order to force it to pick up the updated credentials.

How can a sidecar force a container within the same pod to restart or the whole pod to restart?

Detailed explanation:

Services of different tech stacks need to start using secrets. Secrets can either be injected via CI/CD or fetched at runtime from AWS Secrets Manager.
Secrets need to be rotated every 3 months for security compliance reasons.
Secrets are only used once at startup to create the related client. Since they are not used continuously, they are not naturally refreshed if updated at source storage.
To minimise per-service development time, custom logic within each service to refresh the secrets should be avoided or minimised

There are 1 answers

**Manmohan Mittal** · Answer 1 · 2022-04-11 10:43:23

There is a following pattern to rotate secrets without need to restart containers if you are running apps in EKS or ECS.