Kubernetes Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published Dec 21, 2025 4 min read

Sidecar Container Startup Order

K8s 1.28+ supports sidecar startup order. The pattern.

Idea

restartPolicy: Always on init container = sidecar.

Starts before main; runs alongside; restarts independently.

Service mesh proxies. Logging agents. Anything pre-main.

Standard pattern in 1.28+.

Pre-1.28: manual coordination via init containers.

Migrate when on supported version.