What is the reason for Back-off restarting failed container for elasticsearch kubernetes pod?

I had the same problem, there can be couple of reasons for this issue. In my case the jar file was missing. @Lakshya has already answered this problem, I would like to add the steps that you can take to troubleshoot it.

1. Get the pod status, Command - kubectl get pods
2. Describe pod to have further look - kubectl describe pod "pod-name"The last few lines of output gives you events and where your deployment failed
3. Get logs for more details - kubectl logs "pod-name"
4. Get container logs - kubectl logs "pod-name" -c "container-name"Get the container name from the output of describe pod command

If your container is up, you can use the kubectl exec -it command to further analyse the container

Hope it helps community members in future issues.

I found the logs using docker logs for the es container and found that es was not starting because of the vm.max_map_count set to very low value.I changed the vm.max_map_count to desired value using sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144 and the pod has started after that.

This thread is old but will help others. Below is the list of Kubernetes Error Exit codes with reasons.

https://kashifraza.guru/2021/08/23/use-exit-code-to-identify-pod-exceptions/

#define EX_CONFIG   78  configuration error#define EX__MAX 78  78  maximum listed value

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