The 'pause' container is a container which holds the network namespace for the pod. Kubernetes creates pause containers to acquire the respective pod’s IP address and set up the network namespace for all other containers that join that pod.
It is part of each pod that is responsible to create shared network, assign ip address within the pod for all business containers inside this pod, also the pause container shared the volume for entire pod. If the pause container is dead, kubernetes consider the pod died and kill it and reschedule a new one.
In Kubernetes, the pause container serves as the "parent container" for all of the containers in your pod. The pause container has two core responsibilities. First, it serves as the basis of Linux namespace sharing in the pod. And second, with PID (process ID) namespace sharing enabled, it serves as PID 1 for each pod and reaps zombie processes.
Pause containers hold the cgroups, reservations, and namespaces of a pod before its individual containers are created. The pause container’s image is always present, so the allocation of the pod’s resources is instantaneous.
By default, pause containers are hidden, but you can see them by running docker ps -a.