Blog

Finalizers, ownerReferences and garbage collection

Every time we deleted a Deployment, the pods and ReplicaSet vanished with it — we called that garbage collection without dissecting it. This article digs into the mechanism: ownerReferences link parent and child, the garbage collector auto-cleans children when the parent is gone (background, foreground, or orphan), and finalizers block deletion until cleanup is done. All three tested for real — including an object stuck in Terminating because of a finalizer.