Kubernetes pod gets recreated when deleted

Instead of trying to figure out whether it is a deployment, deamonset, statefulset... or what (in my case it was a replication controller that kept spanning new pods :) In order to determine what it was that kept spanning up the image I got all the resources with this command:

kubectl get all

Of course you could also get all resources from all namespaces:

kubectl get all --all-namespaces

or define the namespace you would like to inspect:

kubectl get all -n NAMESPACE_NAME

Once I saw that the replication controller was responsible for my trouble I deleted it:

kubectl delete replicationcontroller/CONTROLLER_NAME

You need to delete the deployment, which should in turn delete the pods and the replica sets https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/24137

To list all deployments:

kubectl get deployments --all-namespaces

Then to delete the deployment:

kubectl delete -n NAMESPACE deployment DEPLOYMENT

Where NAMESPACE is the namespace it's in, and DEPLOYMENT is the name of the deployment. If NAMESPACE is default, leave off the -n option altogether.

In some cases it could also be running due to a job or daemonset. Check the following and run their appropriate delete command.

kubectl get jobs

kubectl get daemonsets.app --all-namespaces

kubectl get daemonsets.extensions --all-namespaces