Pods stuck with containerCreating status in self-managed Kubernetes cluster in Google Compute Engine (GCE) with an external kube node

Solution 1:

On host volatile you appear to have cilium configured in /etc/cni/net.d/*.conf. It is a networking plugin, one of many available for Kubernetes. One of these files probably contains something like:

{
    "name": "cilium",
    "type": "cilium-cni"
}

If this is accidental, remove such file. You appear to be already running a competing networking plugin by Project Calico, which is seemingly sufficient. So, re-create the pod calico-kube-controllers in namespace kube-system, let it succeed, then re-create other pods.

If you intend to use Cilium on that host, go back to the Cillium installation guide. If you re-do it, you'll probably see that /var/run/cilium/cilium.sock has been created for you.