stack-overflow-container-readiness#pet-set-stateful-setPet Sets, soon to be replaced by Stateful Sets in Kubernetes v1.5, give you deterministic order of initialization of pods. stack-overflow-container-readiness#pet-set-stateful-set
stack-overflow-container-readiness#init-containersFor containers on a single pod, there are init-containers which run serially and in order prior to running the main container stack-overflow-container-readiness#init-containers