What is the use of a pause image in Kubernetes?

Question

It seems that on Windows Kubernetes starts a pause image for each pod that is created. What is the purpose of this pause image? Where can I find more documentation about it?

Answer 1

The pause container is a container which holds the network namespace for the pod. Kubernetes creates pause containers to acquire the respective pod’s IP address and set up the network namespace for all other containers that join that pod.

references:

1, https://www.ianlewis.org/en/almighty-pause-container

2, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/kubernetes-users/jVjv0QK4b_o

3, https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cri-o/issues/91