Starting container multiple times with different environment variables - kubernetes

Question

I have a container image that is loading multiple large files on startup. When restarting the container, all files have to be loaded again.
What I want to do now is to start six instances which only load one file each, given an environment variable. Now my question is how to configure this. What I could do is create a new deployment+service for each file, but that seems incorrect because 99% of the content is the same, only the environment variable is different. Another option would be to have one pod with multiple containers and one gateway-like containers. But then when the pod is restarting, all files are loaded again.
What's the best strategy to do this?

Answer 1

Ideally, you should have to keep it like deployment+service and make 5-6 different secret or configmap as per need storing the environment variables files your application require.
Inject this secret or configmap one by one to each different deployment.
Another option would be to have one pod with multiple containers and
one gateway-like containers.
that's didn't look like scalable approach, if you are running the 5- container inside single pod and one gateway container also.

Answer 2

Although this does not directly address the question, I am delivering an answer to how you could create multiple container instances from one deployment that only different in environmental variables because this question pops up if googling said approach.
For your question the answer of Harsh Manvar is the correct kubernetes approved way of handling that.
I had the same problem and found a solution which needs to be refined a bit more.
With Helm you can specify a key-value pair array inside your values.yaml, which would look like this:
envVars:
key1: value1
key2: value2
Now you need to modify your deployment.yaml to loop over this array and inject the values as environmental variables into your container :
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: {{ include "chart.fullname" . }}
labels:
{{- include "chart.labels" . | nindent 4 }}
spec:
{{- if not .Values.autoscaling.enabled }}
replicas: {{ .Values.replicaCount }}
{{- end }}
selector:
matchLabels:
{{- include "chart.selectorLabels" . | nindent 6 }}
template:
metadata:
{{- with .Values.podAnnotations }}
annotations:
{{- toYaml . | nindent 8 }}
{{- end }}
labels:
{{- include "chart.selectorLabels" . | nindent 8 }}
spec:
{{- with .Values.imagePullSecrets }}
imagePullSecrets:
{{- toYaml . | nindent 8 }}
{{- end }}
serviceAccountName: {{ include "chart.serviceAccountName" . }}
securityContext:
{{- toYaml .Values.podSecurityContext | nindent 8 }}
containers:
{{- range $key, $value := .Values.envVars }}
- name: {{ $.Chart.Name }}-{{ $key }}
securityContext:
{{- toYaml $.Values.securityContext | nindent 12 }}
image: "{{ $.Values.image.repository }}:{{ $.Values.image.tag | default $.Chart.AppVersion }}"
env:
- name: envVarName
value: {{ $value | quote }}
imagePullPolicy: {{ $.Values.image.pullPolicy }}
ports:
- name: http
containerPort: 80
protocol: TCP
resources:
{{- toYaml $.Values.resources | nindent 12 }}
{{- end }}
{{- with .Values.nodeSelector }}
nodeSelector:
{{- toYaml . | nindent 8 }}
{{- end }}
{{- with .Values.affinity }}
affinity:
{{- toYaml . | nindent 8 }}
{{- end }}
{{- with .Values.tolerations }}
tolerations:
{{- toYaml . | nindent 8 }}
{{- end }}
There are some notes that need to be considered tho:
We are using {{- range $key, $value := .Values.envVars }} inside the containers spec to create multiple containers inside one pod. This may not be wanted due to ressource restrictions
you can reference the key-value pairs with $key and $value as specified in the range command
As the scope inside the range environment is set to .Values.envVars every other call outside of that scope needs to be made from the root scope. In Helm the root scope of the values file is called with the $ sign e.g. {{ $.Chart.Name }}
You need to incooperate your key or value into the container name or you would be creating duplicated, hence the - name: {{ $.Chart.Name }}-{{ $key }} portion.
It should be possible to use the same range command to create multiple deployments based on one file if put at the top. Just keep in mind to fix the scope of other calls.
It should NOT be possible to create multiple (different) pods out of one deployment, due to the Kubernetes structure not expecting multiple template sections within the spec of a deployment. Multiple pods would simply be replicas. (The template inside the deployment.spec is of type PodTemplate)
Anyway, this took me quite some time to crack, I hope it is helpful to someone.