---
title: Pause orchestration on ECK
description: Learn how to temporarily pause ECK spec-driven orchestration during maintenance windows.
url: https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/7590/deploy-manage/deploy/cloud-on-k8s/k8s-pause-orchestration
products:
  - Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes
applies_to:
  - Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes: Planned
---

# Pause orchestration on ECK
During maintenance windows, such as draining Kubernetes nodes or applying infrastructure changes, you can temporarily prevent ECK from applying spec changes to your Elastic resources. The `eck.k8s.elastic.co/pause-orchestration` annotation lets you freeze spec-driven orchestration on any ECK-managed resource while ECK continues essential maintenance tasks such as certificate rotation and health monitoring (see [What continues and what pauses](#k8s-pause-orchestration-behaviour)).

## Paused versus fully unmanaged

ECK provides two annotations that affect reconciliation behavior:

| Annotation                                       | Availability                                                                  | Effect                                                                           |
|--------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| `eck.k8s.elastic.co/pause-orchestration: "true"` | <applies-to>Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes: Planned</applies-to>                 | Pauses spec-driven changes only. Housekeeping continues.                         |
| `eck.k8s.elastic.co/managed: "false"`            | <applies-to>Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes: Planned for deprecation</applies-to> | Stops all reconciliation entirely. Deprecated in favor of `pause-orchestration`. |

The key difference is that `pause-orchestration` keeps certificate rotation, service reconciliation, user and secret management, and health monitoring running. This avoids cluster degradation during extended maintenance windows. The annotation is supported on all ECK-managed resource types: Elasticsearch, Kibana, APM Server, Enterprise Search, Elastic Maps Server, Logstash, Elastic Agent, Beats, Elastic Package Registry, and AutoOps Agent Policy.

## How to pause orchestration

Set the annotation to `"true"` on any ECK resource:
```yaml
apiVersion: elasticsearch.k8s.elastic.co/v1
kind: Elasticsearch
metadata:
  name: quickstart
  annotations:
    eck.k8s.elastic.co/pause-orchestration: "true"
spec:
  version: 9.4.4
  nodeSets:
  - name: default
    count: 3
```

Or using `kubectl annotate`:
```sh
kubectl annotate elasticsearch quickstart eck.k8s.elastic.co/pause-orchestration=true --overwrite
```

The same annotation works on any other resource type. Only the exact string values `"true"` and `"false"` are accepted — the webhook rejects any other value (for example `"True"`, `"1"`, or an empty string).

## What continues and what pauses


| Operation                                 | Behavior when paused |
|-------------------------------------------|----------------------|
| Certificate rotation (HTTP and transport) | Continues            |
| Service reconciliation                    | Continues            |
| User and role reconciliation              | Continues            |
| Health monitoring and status updates      | Continues            |
| Keystore reconciliation                   | Continues            |
| Pod disruption budget reconciliation      | Continues            |
| StatefulSet or Deployment spec updates    | Paused               |
| Rolling upgrades                          | Paused               |
| Scale up and scale down                   | Paused               |
| Volume expansion                          | Paused               |


## Observability

When orchestration is paused, ECK sets an `OrchestrationPaused` condition on the resource status. If spec changes are pending at the time of the pause, ECK also emits a Kubernetes warning event indicating that changes will be applied once the annotation is removed.
```sh
kubectl get elasticsearch quickstart -o jsonpath='{.status.conditions}' | jq .
```

On resume (annotation removed or set to `"false"`), ECK clears the condition and immediately applies any pending spec changes through the normal reconciliation path.