November 4, 2025
Paused by the Pause?
Preventing Kubernetes from Pulling the Pause Image from the Internet
Tiny ‘pause’ file could stall your apps — devs split between “bake it in” and “why use k8s”
TLDR: Kubernetes quietly downloads a small “pause” file from the internet by default, creating a hidden reliability risk; you can mirror it locally and reconfigure to avoid that. Commenters battled over design flaws, whether most teams should even use Kubernetes, and cloud workarounds—plus a surprise MITM scare added drama.
A spicy blog post warned that Kubernetes (software that runs apps in containers) quietly fetches a tiny “pause” image from the internet the first time a server starts a pod, risking an outage if that site hiccups. The fix: mirror it to your own registry and point your system at that. Boring? The comments were anything but.
The loudest voice: “This shouldn’t be pulled at runtime — bake it into the machine image,” fumed one engineer, slamming the design as a leaky detail of containerd (the software that actually runs containers). Meanwhile, a resident cynic dropped a grenade: “99.9% of people shouldn’t use Kubernetes.” Cue eye-rolls, applause, and a thousand ops teams quietly side-eyeing their clusters. Pragmatists chimed in that many companies still pull images from public hubs, while AWS fans flexed: EKS AMIs already bake the pause image, so you’re safe if you’re in Amazon’s walled garden.
Then the plot twist: one commenter saw a sketchy certificate and yelled “I’m getting MITMed!”—blaming a Fortinet box—turning a dry reliability PSA into a mini thriller about supply-chain trust. Add in registry.k8s.io admitting there’s no uptime guarantee, and the mood swung to “mirror or be owned.” The memes wrote themselves: press pause, crash everything.
Key Points
- •Stock Kubernetes nodes pull the pause image from registry.k8s.io on first pod creation, creating an external dependency.
- •The pause image backs the pod sandbox and holds Linux namespaces; acting as PID1 is no longer the default since k8s 1.8+.
- •This behavior derives from the CRI spec and the container runtime (e.g., containerd), not Kubernetes alone.
- •Containerd can be configured to use a locally mirrored pause image (different settings for 1.x and 2.x).
- •registry.k8s.io has no uptime SLA and recommends mirroring images to a controlled location.