Kubernetes stuck on ContainerCreating

You can view the last restart logs of a container using:

kubectl logs podname -c containername --previous

As described by Sreekanth, kubectl get pods should show you number of restarts, but you can also run

kubectl describe pod podname

And it will show you events sent by the kubelet to the apiserver about the lifecycled events of the pod.

You can also write a final message to /dev/termination-log, and this will show up as described in the docs.

I had a no_proxy environment variable for the hostnames of the minion nodes in the kube-apiserver.yaml configuration file, but for some reason the kube-apiserver connected to the IP addresses of the minion nodes and not to the hostnames. It did not do this before in version 1.12.1, as it only connected to the master node via its IP address. I have added the IP addresses of all the minion nodes in the config, restarted kubelet (and thus kube-apiserver) and the issue is now solved.

Protip: If you need to use a http/https proxy to pull images from the internet. make sure you add both the hostname and IP address of all master and minion nodes in your no_proxy environment variable.