Is there a kubernetes config parm (service or rc or other) to delay before using a pod
This is precisely what the readinessProbe option is :)
It's documented more here and here, and is part of the container definition in a pod specification.
For example, you might use a pod specification like the one below to ensure that your nginx pod won't be marked as ready (and thus won't have traffic sent to it) until it responds to an HTTP request for /index.html:
apiVersion: v1kind: ReplicationControllermetadata: name: my-nginxspec: replicas: 2 template: metadata: labels: app: nginx spec: containers: - name: nginx image: nginx ports: - containerPort: 80 lifecycle: httpGet: path: /index.html port: 80 initialDelaySeconds: 10 timeoutSeconds: 5