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Concepts

The Concepts section helps you learn about the parts of the Kubernetes system and the abstractions Kubernetes uses to represent your cluster, and helps you obtain a deeper understanding of how Kubernetes works.

1 - Overview

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.

This page is an overview of Kubernetes.

The name Kubernetes originates from Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot. K8s as an abbreviation results from counting the eight letters between the "K" and the "s". Google open-sourced the Kubernetes project in 2014. Kubernetes combines over 15 years of Google's experience running production workloads at scale with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

Why you need Kubernetes and what it can do

Containers are a good way to bundle and run your applications. In a production environment, you need to manage the containers that run the applications and ensure that there is no downtime. For example, if a container goes down, another container needs to start. Wouldn't it be easier if this behavior was handled by a system?

That's how Kubernetes comes to the rescue! Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more. For example: Kubernetes can easily manage a canary deployment for your system.

Kubernetes provides you with:

  • Service discovery and load balancing Kubernetes can expose a container using the DNS name or using their own IP address. If traffic to a container is high, Kubernetes is able to load balance and distribute the network traffic so that the deployment is stable.
  • Storage orchestration Kubernetes allows you to automatically mount a storage system of your choice, such as local storages, public cloud providers, and more.
  • Automated rollouts and rollbacks You can describe the desired state for your deployed containers using Kubernetes, and it can change the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. For example, you can automate Kubernetes to create new containers for your deployment, remove existing containers and adopt all their resources to the new container.
  • Automatic bin packing You provide Kubernetes with a cluster of nodes that it can use to run containerized tasks. You tell Kubernetes how much CPU and memory (RAM) each container needs. Kubernetes can fit containers onto your nodes to make the best use of your resources.
  • Self-healing Kubernetes restarts containers that fail, replaces containers, kills containers that don't respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn't advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve.
  • Secret and configuration management Kubernetes lets you store and manage sensitive information, such as passwords, OAuth tokens, and SSH keys. You can deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your container images, and without exposing secrets in your stack configuration.
  • Batch execution In addition to services, Kubernetes can manage your batch and CI workloads, replacing containers that fail, if desired.
  • Horizontal scaling Scale your application up and down with a simple command, with a UI, or automatically based on CPU usage.
  • IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack Allocation of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to Pods and Services
  • Designed for extensibility Add features to your Kubernetes cluster without changing upstream source code.

What Kubernetes is not

Kubernetes is not a traditional, all-inclusive PaaS (Platform as a Service) system. Since Kubernetes operates at the container level rather than at the hardware level, it provides some generally applicable features common to PaaS offerings, such as deployment, scaling, load balancing, and lets users integrate their logging, monitoring, and alerting solutions. However, Kubernetes is not monolithic, and these default solutions are optional and pluggable. Kubernetes provides the building blocks for building developer platforms, but preserves user choice and flexibility where it is important.

Kubernetes:

  • Does not limit the types of applications supported. Kubernetes aims to support an extremely diverse variety of workloads, including stateless, stateful, and data-processing workloads. If an application can run in a container, it should run great on Kubernetes.
  • Does not deploy source code and does not build your application. Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment (CI/CD) workflows are determined by organization cultures and preferences as well as technical requirements.
  • Does not provide application-level services, such as middleware (for example, message buses), data-processing frameworks (for example, Spark), databases (for example, MySQL), caches, nor cluster storage systems (for example, Ceph) as built-in services. Such components can run on Kubernetes, and/or can be accessed by applications running on Kubernetes through portable mechanisms, such as the Open Service Broker.
  • Does not dictate logging, monitoring, or alerting solutions. It provides some integrations as proof of concept, and mechanisms to collect and export metrics.
  • Does not provide nor mandate a configuration language/system (for example, Jsonnet). It provides a declarative API that may be targeted by arbitrary forms of declarative specifications.
  • Does not provide nor adopt any comprehensive machine configuration, maintenance, management, or self-healing systems.
  • Additionally, Kubernetes is not a mere orchestration system. In fact, it eliminates the need for orchestration. The technical definition of orchestration is execution of a defined workflow: first do A, then B, then C. In contrast, Kubernetes comprises a set of independent, composable control processes that continuously drive the current state towards the provided desired state. It shouldn't matter how you get from A to C. Centralized control is also not required. This results in a system that is easier to use and more powerful, robust, resilient, and extensible.

Historical context for Kubernetes

Let's take a look at why Kubernetes is so useful by going back in time.

Deployment evolution

Traditional deployment era:

Early on, organizations ran applications on physical servers. There was no way to define resource boundaries for applications in a physical server, and this caused resource allocation issues. For example, if multiple applications run on a physical server, there can be instances where one application would take up most of the resources, and as a result, the other applications would underperform. A solution for this would be to run each application on a different physical server. But this did not scale as resources were underutilized, and it was expensive for organizations to maintain many physical servers.

Virtualized deployment era:

As a solution, virtualization was introduced. It allows you to run multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) on a single physical server's CPU. Virtualization allows applications to be isolated between VMs and provides a level of security as the information of one application cannot be freely accessed by another application.

Virtualization allows better utilization of resources in a physical server and allows better scalability because an application can be added or updated easily, reduces hardware costs, and much more. With virtualization you can present a set of physical resources as a cluster of disposable virtual machines.

Each VM is a full machine running all the components, including its own operating system, on top of the virtualized hardware.

Container deployment era:

Containers are similar to VMs, but they have relaxed isolation properties to share the Operating System (OS) among the applications. Therefore, containers are considered lightweight. Similar to a VM, a container has its own filesystem, share of CPU, memory, process space, and more. As they are decoupled from the underlying infrastructure, they are portable across clouds and OS distributions.

Containers have become popular because they provide extra benefits, such as:

  • Agile application creation and deployment: increased ease and efficiency of container image creation compared to VM image use.
  • Continuous development, integration, and deployment: provides for reliable and frequent container image build and deployment with quick and efficient rollbacks (due to image immutability).
  • Dev and Ops separation of concerns: create application container images at build/release time rather than deployment time, thereby decoupling applications from infrastructure.
  • Observability: not only surfaces OS-level information and metrics, but also application health and other signals.
  • Environmental consistency across development, testing, and production: runs the same on a laptop as it does in the cloud.
  • Cloud and OS distribution portability: runs on Ubuntu, RHEL, CoreOS, on-premises, on major public clouds, and anywhere else.
  • Application-centric management: raises the level of abstraction from running an OS on virtual hardware to running an application on an OS using logical resources.
  • Loosely coupled, distributed, elastic, liberated micro-services: applications are broken into smaller, independent pieces and can be deployed and managed dynamically – not a monolithic stack running on one big single-purpose machine.
  • Resource isolation: predictable application performance.
  • Resource utilization: high efficiency and density.

What's next

1.1 - Kubernetes Components

An overview of the key components that make up a Kubernetes cluster.

This page provides a high-level overview of the essential components that make up a Kubernetes cluster.

Components of Kubernetes

The components of a Kubernetes cluster

Core Components

A Kubernetes cluster consists of a control plane and one or more worker nodes. Here's a brief overview of the main components:

Control Plane Components

Manage the overall state of the cluster:

kube-apiserver
The core component server that exposes the Kubernetes HTTP API
etcd
Consistent and highly-available key value store for all API server data
kube-scheduler
Looks for Pods not yet bound to a node, and assigns each Pod to a suitable node.
kube-controller-manager
Runs controllers to implement Kubernetes API behavior.
cloud-controller-manager (optional)
Integrates with underlying cloud provider(s).

Node Components

Run on every node, maintaining running pods and providing the Kubernetes runtime environment:

kubelet
Ensures that Pods are running, including their containers.
kube-proxy (optional)
Maintains network rules on nodes to implement Services.
Container runtime
Software responsible for running containers. Read Container Runtimes to learn more.

Your cluster may require additional software on each node; for example, you might also run systemd on a Linux node to supervise local components.

Addons

Addons extend the functionality of Kubernetes. A few important examples include:

DNS
For cluster-wide DNS resolution
Web UI (Dashboard)
For cluster management via a web interface
Container Resource Monitoring
For collecting and storing container metrics
Cluster-level Logging
For saving container logs to a central log store

Flexibility in Architecture

Kubernetes allows for flexibility in how these components are deployed and managed. The architecture can be adapted to various needs, from small development environments to large-scale production deployments.

For more detailed information about each component and various ways to configure your cluster architecture, see the Cluster Architecture page.

1.2 - Objects In Kubernetes

Kubernetes objects are persistent entities in the Kubernetes system. Kubernetes uses these entities to represent the state of your cluster. Learn about the Kubernetes object model and how to work with these objects.

This page explains how Kubernetes objects are represented in the Kubernetes API, and how you can express them in .yaml format.

Understanding Kubernetes objects

Kubernetes objects are persistent entities in the Kubernetes system. Kubernetes uses these entities to represent the state of your cluster. Specifically, they can describe:

  • What containerized applications are running (and on which nodes)
  • The resources available to those applications
  • The policies around how those applications behave, such as restart policies, upgrades, and fault-tolerance

A Kubernetes object is a "record of intent"--once you create the object, the Kubernetes system will constantly work to ensure that the object exists. By creating an object, you're effectively telling the Kubernetes system what you want your cluster's workload to look like; this is your cluster's desired state.

To work with Kubernetes objects—whether to create, modify, or delete them—you'll need to use the Kubernetes API. When you use the kubectl command-line interface, for example, the CLI makes the necessary Kubernetes API calls for you. You can also use the Kubernetes API directly in your own programs using one of the Client Libraries.

Object spec and status

Almost every Kubernetes object includes two nested object fields that govern the object's configuration: the object spec and the object status. For objects that have a spec, you have to set this when you create the object, providing a description of the characteristics you want the resource to have: its desired state.

The status describes the current state of the object, supplied and updated by the Kubernetes system and its components. The Kubernetes control plane continually and actively manages every object's actual state to match the desired state you supplied.

For example: in Kubernetes, a Deployment is an object that can represent an application running on your cluster. When you create the Deployment, you might set the Deployment spec to specify that you want three replicas of the application to be running. The Kubernetes system reads the Deployment spec and starts three instances of your desired application--updating the status to match your spec. If any of those instances should fail (a status change), the Kubernetes system responds to the difference between spec and status by making a correction--in this case, starting a replacement instance.

For more information on the object spec, status, and metadata, see the Kubernetes API Conventions.

Describing a Kubernetes object

When you create an object in Kubernetes, you must provide the object spec that describes its desired state, as well as some basic information about the object (such as a name). When you use the Kubernetes API to create the object (either directly or via kubectl), that API request must include that information as JSON in the request body. Most often, you provide the information to kubectl in a file known as a manifest. By convention, manifests are YAML (you could also use JSON format). Tools such as kubectl convert the information from a manifest into JSON or another supported serialization format when making the API request over HTTP.

Here's an example manifest that shows the required fields and object spec for a Kubernetes Deployment:

application/deployment.yaml 
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: nginx-deployment
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  replicas: 2 # tells deployment to run 2 pods matching the template
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: nginx:1.14.2
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80

One way to create a Deployment using a manifest file like the one above is to use the kubectl apply command in the kubectl command-line interface, passing the .yaml file as an argument. Here's an example:

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/application/deployment.yaml

The output is similar to this:

deployment.apps/nginx-deployment created

Required fields

In the manifest (YAML or JSON file) for the Kubernetes object you want to create, you'll need to set values for the following fields:

  • apiVersion - Which version of the Kubernetes API you're using to create this object
  • kind - What kind of object you want to create
  • metadata - Data that helps uniquely identify the object, including a name string, UID, and optional namespace
  • spec - What state you desire for the object

The precise format of the object spec is different for every Kubernetes object, and contains nested fields specific to that object. The Kubernetes API Reference can help you find the spec format for all of the objects you can create using Kubernetes.

For example, see the spec field for the Pod API reference. For each Pod, the .spec field specifies the pod and its desired state (such as the container image name for each container within that pod). Another example of an object specification is the spec field for the StatefulSet API. For StatefulSet, the .spec field specifies the StatefulSet and its desired state. Within the .spec of a StatefulSet is a template for Pod objects. That template describes Pods that the StatefulSet controller will create in order to satisfy the StatefulSet specification. Different kinds of objects can also have different .status; again, the API reference pages detail the structure of that .status field, and its content for each different type of object.

Server side field validation

Starting with Kubernetes v1.25, the API server offers server side field validation that detects unrecognized or duplicate fields in an object. It provides all the functionality of kubectl --validate on the server side.

The kubectl tool uses the --validate flag to set the level of field validation. It accepts the values ignore, warn, and strict while also accepting the values true (equivalent to strict) and false (equivalent to ignore). The default validation setting for kubectl is --validate=true.

Strict
Strict field validation, errors on validation failure
Warn
Field validation is performed, but errors are exposed as warnings rather than failing the request
Ignore
No server side field validation is performed

When kubectl cannot connect to an API server that supports field validation it will fall back to using client-side validation. Kubernetes 1.27 and later versions always offer field validation; older Kubernetes releases might not. If your cluster is older than v1.27, check the documentation for your version of Kubernetes.

What's next

If you're new to Kubernetes, read more about the following:

Kubernetes Object Management explains how to use kubectl to manage objects. You might need to install kubectl if you don't already have it available.

To learn about the Kubernetes API in general, visit:

To learn about objects in Kubernetes in more depth, read other pages in this section:

1.2.1 - Kubernetes Object Management

The kubectl command-line tool supports several different ways to create and manage Kubernetes objects. This document provides an overview of the different approaches. Read the Kubectl book for details of managing objects by Kubectl.

Management techniques

Management technique Operates on Recommended environment Supported writers Learning curve
Imperative commands Live objects Development projects 1+ Lowest
Imperative object configuration Individual files Production projects 1 Moderate
Declarative object configuration Directories of files Production projects 1+ Highest

Imperative commands

When using imperative commands, a user operates directly on live objects in a cluster. The user provides operations to the kubectl command as arguments or flags.

This is the recommended way to get started or to run a one-off task in a cluster. Because this technique operates directly on live objects, it provides no history of previous configurations.

Examples

Run an instance of the nginx container by creating a Deployment object:

kubectl create deployment nginx --image nginx

Trade-offs

Advantages compared to object configuration:

  • Commands are expressed as a single action word.
  • Commands require only a single step to make changes to the cluster.

Disadvantages compared to object configuration:

  • Commands do not integrate with change review processes.
  • Commands do not provide an audit trail associated with changes.
  • Commands do not provide a source of records except for what is live.
  • Commands do not provide a template for creating new objects.

Imperative object configuration

In imperative object configuration, the kubectl command specifies the operation (create, replace, etc.), optional flags and at least one file name. The file specified must contain a full definition of the object in YAML or JSON format.

See the API reference for more details on object definitions.

Examples

Create the objects defined in a configuration file:

kubectl create -f nginx.yaml

Delete the objects defined in two configuration files:

kubectl delete -f nginx.yaml -f redis.yaml

Update the objects defined in a configuration file by overwriting the live configuration:

kubectl replace -f nginx.yaml

Trade-offs

Advantages compared to imperative commands:

  • Object configuration can be stored in a source control system such as Git.
  • Object configuration can integrate with processes such as reviewing changes before push and audit trails.
  • Object configuration provides a template for creating new objects.

Disadvantages compared to imperative commands:

  • Object configuration requires basic understanding of the object schema.
  • Object configuration requires the additional step of writing a YAML file.

Advantages compared to declarative object configuration:

  • Imperative object configuration behavior is simpler and easier to understand.
  • As of Kubernetes version 1.5, imperative object configuration is more mature.

Disadvantages compared to declarative object configuration:

  • Imperative object configuration works best on files, not directories.
  • Updates to live objects must be reflected in configuration files, or they will be lost during the next replacement.

Declarative object configuration

When using declarative object configuration, a user operates on object configuration files stored locally, however the user does not define the operations to be taken on the files. Create, update, and delete operations are automatically detected per-object by kubectl. This enables working on directories, where different operations might be needed for different objects.

Examples

Process all object configuration files in the configs directory, and create or patch the live objects. You can first diff to see what changes are going to be made, and then apply:

kubectl diff -f configs/
kubectl apply -f configs/

Recursively process directories:

kubectl diff -R -f configs/
kubectl apply -R -f configs/

Trade-offs

Advantages compared to imperative object configuration:

  • Changes made directly to live objects are retained, even if they are not merged back into the configuration files.
  • Declarative object configuration has better support for operating on directories and automatically detecting operation types (create, patch, delete) per-object.

Disadvantages compared to imperative object configuration:

  • Declarative object configuration is harder to debug and understand results when they are unexpected.
  • Partial updates using diffs create complex merge and patch operations.

What's next

1.2.2 - Object Names and IDs

Each object in your cluster has a Name that is unique for that type of resource. Every Kubernetes object also has a UID that is unique across your whole cluster.

For example, you can only have one Pod named myapp-1234 within the same namespace, but you can have one Pod and one Deployment that are each named myapp-1234.

For non-unique user-provided attributes, Kubernetes provides labels and annotations.

Names

A client-provided string that refers to an object in a resource URL, such as /api/v1/pods/some-name.

Only one object of a given kind can have a given name at a time. However, if you delete the object, you can make a new object with the same name.

Names must be unique across all API versions of the same resource. API resources are distinguished by their API group, resource type, namespace (for namespaced resources), and name. In other words, API version is irrelevant in this context.

The server may generate a name when generateName is provided instead of name in a resource create request. When generateName is used, the provided value is used as a name prefix, which server appends a generated suffix to. Even though the name is generated, it may conflict with existing names resulting in a HTTP 409 resopnse. This became far less likely to happen in Kubernetes v1.31 and later, since the server will make up to 8 attempt to generate a unique name before returning a HTTP 409 response.

Below are four types of commonly used name constraints for resources.

DNS Subdomain Names

Most resource types require a name that can be used as a DNS subdomain name as defined in RFC 1123. This means the name must:

  • contain no more than 253 characters
  • contain only lowercase alphanumeric characters, '-' or '.'
  • start with an alphanumeric character
  • end with an alphanumeric character

RFC 1123 Label Names

Some resource types require their names to follow the DNS label standard as defined in RFC 1123. This means the name must:

  • contain at most 63 characters
  • contain only lowercase alphanumeric characters or '-'
  • start with an alphanumeric character
  • end with an alphanumeric character

RFC 1035 Label Names

Some resource types require their names to follow the DNS label standard as defined in RFC 1035. This means the name must:

  • contain at most 63 characters
  • contain only lowercase alphanumeric characters or '-'
  • start with an alphabetic character
  • end with an alphanumeric character

Path Segment Names

Some resource types require their names to be able to be safely encoded as a path segment. In other words, the name may not be "." or ".." and the name may not contain "/" or "%".

Here's an example manifest for a Pod named nginx-demo.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: nginx-demo
spec:
  containers:
  - name: nginx
    image: nginx:1.14.2
    ports:
    - containerPort: 80

UIDs

A Kubernetes systems-generated string to uniquely identify objects.

Every object created over the whole lifetime of a Kubernetes cluster has a distinct UID. It is intended to distinguish between historical occurrences of similar entities.

Kubernetes UIDs are universally unique identifiers (also known as UUIDs). UUIDs are standardized as ISO/IEC 9834-8 and as ITU-T X.667.

What's next

1.2.3 - Labels and Selectors

Labels are key/value pairs that are attached to objects such as Pods. Labels are intended to be used to specify identifying attributes of objects that are meaningful and relevant to users, but do not directly imply semantics to the core system. Labels can be used to organize and to select subsets of objects. Labels can be attached to objects at creation time and subsequently added and modified at any time. Each object can have a set of key/value labels defined. Each Key must be unique for a given object.

"metadata": {
  "labels": {
    "key1" : "value1",
    "key2" : "value2"
  }
}

Labels allow for efficient queries and watches and are ideal for use in UIs and CLIs. Non-identifying information should be recorded using annotations.

Motivation

Labels enable users to map their own organizational structures onto system objects in a loosely coupled fashion, without requiring clients to store these mappings.

Service deployments and batch processing pipelines are often multi-dimensional entities (e.g., multiple partitions or deployments, multiple release tracks, multiple tiers, multiple micro-services per tier). Management often requires cross-cutting operations, which breaks encapsulation of strictly hierarchical representations, especially rigid hierarchies determined by the infrastructure rather than by users.

Example labels:

  • "release" : "stable", "release" : "canary"
  • "environment" : "dev", "environment" : "qa", "environment" : "production"
  • "tier" : "frontend", "tier" : "backend", "tier" : "cache"
  • "partition" : "customerA", "partition" : "customerB"
  • "track" : "daily", "track" : "weekly"

These are examples of commonly used labels; you are free to develop your own conventions. Keep in mind that label Key must be unique for a given object.

Syntax and character set

Labels are key/value pairs. Valid label keys have two segments: an optional prefix and name, separated by a slash (/). The name segment is required and must be 63 characters or less, beginning and ending with an alphanumeric character ([a-z0-9A-Z]) with dashes (-), underscores (_), dots (.), and alphanumerics between. The prefix is optional. If specified, the prefix must be a DNS subdomain: a series of DNS labels separated by dots (.), not longer than 253 characters in total, followed by a slash (/).

If the prefix is omitted, the label Key is presumed to be private to the user. Automated system components (e.g. kube-scheduler, kube-controller-manager, kube-apiserver, kubectl, or other third-party automation) which add labels to end-user objects must specify a prefix.

The kubernetes.io/ and k8s.io/ prefixes are reserved for Kubernetes core components.

Valid label value:

  • must be 63 characters or less (can be empty),
  • unless empty, must begin and end with an alphanumeric character ([a-z0-9A-Z]),
  • could contain dashes (-), underscores (_), dots (.), and alphanumerics between.

For example, here's a manifest for a Pod that has two labels environment: production and app: nginx:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: label-demo
  labels:
    environment: production
    app: nginx
spec:
  containers:
  - name: nginx
    image: nginx:1.14.2
    ports:
    - containerPort: 80

Label selectors

Unlike names and UIDs, labels do not provide uniqueness. In general, we expect many objects to carry the same label(s).

Via a label selector, the client/user can identify a set of objects. The label selector is the core grouping primitive in Kubernetes.

The API currently supports two types of selectors: equality-based and set-based. A label selector can be made of multiple requirements which are comma-separated. In the case of multiple requirements, all must be satisfied so the comma separator acts as a logical AND (&&) operator.

The semantics of empty or non-specified selectors are dependent on the context, and API types that use selectors should document the validity and meaning of them.

Equality-based requirement

Equality- or inequality-based requirements allow filtering by label keys and values. Matching objects must satisfy all of the specified label constraints, though they may have additional labels as well. Three kinds of operators are admitted =,==,!=. The first two represent equality (and are synonyms), while the latter represents inequality. For example:

environment = production
tier != frontend

The former selects all resources with key equal to environment and value equal to production. The latter selects all resources with key equal to tier and value distinct from frontend, and all resources with no labels with the tier key. One could filter for resources in production excluding frontend using the comma operator: environment=production,tier!=frontend

One usage scenario for equality-based label requirement is for Pods to specify node selection criteria. For example, the sample Pod below selects nodes where the accelerator label exists and is set to nvidia-tesla-p100.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: cuda-test
spec:
  containers:
    - name: cuda-test
      image: "registry.k8s.io/cuda-vector-add:v0.1"
      resources:
        limits:
          nvidia.com/gpu: 1
  nodeSelector:
    accelerator: nvidia-tesla-p100

Set-based requirement

Set-based label requirements allow filtering keys according to a set of values. Three kinds of operators are supported: in,notin and exists (only the key identifier). For example:

environment in (production, qa)
tier notin (frontend, backend)
partition
!partition
  • The first example selects all resources with key equal to environment and value equal to production or qa.
  • The second example selects all resources with key equal to tier and values other than frontend and backend, and all resources with no labels with the tier key.
  • The third example selects all resources including a label with key partition; no values are checked.
  • The fourth example selects all resources without a label with key partition; no values are checked.

Similarly the comma separator acts as an AND operator. So filtering resources with a partition key (no matter the value) and with environment different than qa can be achieved using partition,environment notin (qa). The set-based label selector is a general form of equality since environment=production is equivalent to environment in (production); similarly for != and notin.

Set-based requirements can be mixed with equality-based requirements. For example: partition in (customerA, customerB),environment!=qa.

API

LIST and WATCH filtering

For list and watch operations, you can specify label selectors to filter the sets of objects returned; you specify the filter using a query parameter. (To learn in detail about watches in Kubernetes, read efficient detection of changes). Both requirements are permitted (presented here as they would appear in a URL query string):

  • equality-based requirements: ?labelSelector=environment%3Dproduction,tier%3Dfrontend
  • set-based requirements: ?labelSelector=environment+in+%28production%2Cqa%29%2Ctier+in+%28frontend%29

Both label selector styles can be used to list or watch resources via a REST client. For example, targeting apiserver with kubectl and using equality-based one may write:

kubectl get pods -l environment=production,tier=frontend

or using set-based requirements:

kubectl get pods -l 'environment in (production),tier in (frontend)'

As already mentioned set-based requirements are more expressive. For instance, they can implement the OR operator on values:

kubectl get pods -l 'environment in (production, qa)'

or restricting negative matching via notin operator:

kubectl get pods -l 'environment,environment notin (frontend)'

Set references in API objects

Some Kubernetes objects, such as services and replicationcontrollers, also use label selectors to specify sets of other resources, such as pods.

Service and ReplicationController

The set of pods that a service targets is defined with a label selector. Similarly, the population of pods that a replicationcontroller should manage is also defined with a label selector.

Label selectors for both objects are defined in json or yaml files using maps, and only equality-based requirement selectors are supported:

"selector": {
    "component" : "redis",
}

or

selector:
  component: redis

This selector (respectively in json or yaml format) is equivalent to component=redis or component in (redis).

Resources that support set-based requirements

Newer resources, such as Job, Deployment, ReplicaSet, and DaemonSet, support set-based requirements as well.

selector:
  matchLabels:
    component: redis
  matchExpressions:
    - { key: tier, operator: In, values: [cache] }
    - { key: environment, operator: NotIn, values: [dev] }

matchLabels is a map of {key,value} pairs. A single {key,value} in the matchLabels map is equivalent to an element of matchExpressions, whose key field is "key", the operator is "In", and the values array contains only "value". matchExpressions is a list of pod selector requirements. Valid operators include In, NotIn, Exists, and DoesNotExist. The values set must be non-empty in the case of In and NotIn. All of the requirements, from both matchLabels and matchExpressions are ANDed together -- they must all be satisfied in order to match.

Selecting sets of nodes

One use case for selecting over labels is to constrain the set of nodes onto which a pod can schedule. See the documentation on node selection for more information.

Using labels effectively

You can apply a single label to any resources, but this is not always the best practice. There are many scenarios where multiple labels should be used to distinguish resource sets from one another.

For instance, different applications would use different values for the app label, but a multi-tier application, such as the guestbook example, would additionally need to distinguish each tier. The frontend could carry the following labels:

labels:
  app: guestbook
  tier: frontend

while the Redis master and replica would have different tier labels, and perhaps even an additional role label:

labels:
  app: guestbook
  tier: backend
  role: master

and

labels:
  app: guestbook
  tier: backend
  role: replica

The labels allow for slicing and dicing the resources along any dimension specified by a label:

kubectl apply -f examples/guestbook/all-in-one/guestbook-all-in-one.yaml
kubectl get pods -Lapp -Ltier -Lrole

NAME                           READY  STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   APP         TIER       ROLE
guestbook-fe-4nlpb             1/1    Running   0          1m    guestbook   frontend   <none>
guestbook-fe-ght6d             1/1    Running   0          1m    guestbook   frontend   <none>
guestbook-fe-jpy62             1/1    Running   0          1m    guestbook   frontend   <none>
guestbook-redis-master-5pg3b   1/1    Running   0          1m    guestbook   backend    master
guestbook-redis-replica-2q2yf  1/1    Running   0          1m    guestbook   backend    replica
guestbook-redis-replica-qgazl  1/1    Running   0          1m    guestbook   backend    replica
my-nginx-divi2                 1/1    Running   0          29m   nginx       <none>     <none>
my-nginx-o0ef1                 1/1    Running   0          29m   nginx       <none>     <none>

kubectl get pods -lapp=guestbook,role=replica

NAME                           READY  STATUS   RESTARTS  AGE
guestbook-redis-replica-2q2yf  1/1    Running  0         3m
guestbook-redis-replica-qgazl  1/1    Running  0         3m

Updating labels

Sometimes you may want to relabel existing pods and other resources before creating new resources. This can be done with kubectl label. For example, if you want to label all your NGINX Pods as frontend tier, run:

kubectl label pods -l app=nginx tier=fe

pod/my-nginx-2035384211-j5fhi labeled
pod/my-nginx-2035384211-u2c7e labeled
pod/my-nginx-2035384211-u3t6x labeled

This first filters all pods with the label "app=nginx", and then labels them with the "tier=fe". To see the pods you labeled, run:

kubectl get pods -l app=nginx -L tier

NAME                        READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE       TIER
my-nginx-2035384211-j5fhi   1/1       Running   0          23m       fe
my-nginx-2035384211-u2c7e   1/1       Running   0          23m       fe
my-nginx-2035384211-u3t6x   1/1       Running   0          23m       fe

This outputs all "app=nginx" pods, with an additional label column of pods' tier (specified with -L or --label-columns).

For more information, please see kubectl label.

What's next

1.2.4 - Namespaces

In Kubernetes, namespaces provide a mechanism for isolating groups of resources within a single cluster. Names of resources need to be unique within a namespace, but not across namespaces. Namespace-based scoping is applicable only for namespaced objects (e.g. Deployments, Services, etc.) and not for cluster-wide objects (e.g. StorageClass, Nodes, PersistentVolumes, etc.).

When to Use Multiple Namespaces

Namespaces are intended for use in environments with many users spread across multiple teams, or projects. For clusters with a few to tens of users, you should not need to create or think about namespaces at all. Start using namespaces when you need the features they provide.

Namespaces provide a scope for names. Names of resources need to be unique within a namespace, but not across namespaces. Namespaces cannot be nested inside one another and each Kubernetes resource can only be in one namespace.

Namespaces are a way to divide cluster resources between multiple users (via resource quota).

It is not necessary to use multiple namespaces to separate slightly different resources, such as different versions of the same software: use labels to distinguish resources within the same namespace.

Initial namespaces

Kubernetes starts with four initial namespaces:

default
Kubernetes includes this namespace so that you can start using your new cluster without first creating a namespace.
kube-node-lease
This namespace holds Lease objects associated with each node. Node leases allow the kubelet to send heartbeats so that the control plane can detect node failure.
kube-public
This namespace is readable by all clients (including those not authenticated). This namespace is mostly reserved for cluster usage, in case that some resources should be visible and readable publicly throughout the whole cluster. The public aspect of this namespace is only a convention, not a requirement.
kube-system
The namespace for objects created by the Kubernetes system.

Working with Namespaces

Creation and deletion of namespaces are described in the Admin Guide documentation for namespaces.

Viewing namespaces

You can list the current namespaces in a cluster using:

kubectl get namespace

NAME              STATUS   AGE
default           Active   1d
kube-node-lease   Active   1d
kube-public       Active   1d
kube-system       Active   1d

Setting the namespace for a request

To set the namespace for a current request, use the --namespace flag.

For example:

kubectl run nginx --image=nginx --namespace=<insert-namespace-name-here>
kubectl get pods --namespace=<insert-namespace-name-here>

Setting the namespace preference

You can permanently save the namespace for all subsequent kubectl commands in that context.

kubectl config set-context --current --namespace=<insert-namespace-name-here>
# Validate it
kubectl config view --minify | grep namespace:

Namespaces and DNS

When you create a Service, it creates a corresponding DNS entry. This entry is of the form <service-name>.<namespace-name>.svc.cluster.local, which means that if a container only uses <service-name>, it will resolve to the service which is local to a namespace. This is useful for using the same configuration across multiple namespaces such as Development, Staging and Production. If you want to reach across namespaces, you need to use the fully qualified domain name (FQDN).

As a result, all namespace names must be valid RFC 1123 DNS labels.

Not all objects are in a namespace

Most Kubernetes resources (e.g. pods, services, replication controllers, and others) are in some namespaces. However namespace resources are not themselves in a namespace. And low-level resources, such as nodes and persistentVolumes, are not in any namespace.

To see which Kubernetes resources are and aren't in a namespace:

# In a namespace
kubectl api-resources --namespaced=true

# Not in a namespace
kubectl api-resources --namespaced=false

Automatic labelling

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes 1.22 [stable]

The Kubernetes control plane sets an immutable label kubernetes.io/metadata.name on all namespaces. The value of the label is the namespace name.

What's next

1.2.5 - Annotations

You can use Kubernetes annotations to attach arbitrary non-identifying metadata to objects. Clients such as tools and libraries can retrieve this metadata.

Attaching metadata to objects

You can use either labels or annotations to attach metadata to Kubernetes objects. Labels can be used to select objects and to find collections of objects that satisfy certain conditions. In contrast, annotations are not used to identify and select objects. The metadata in an annotation can be small or large, structured or unstructured, and can include characters not permitted by labels. It is possible to use labels as well as annotations in the metadata of the same object.

Annotations, like labels, are key/value maps:

"metadata": {
  "annotations": {
    "key1" : "value1",
    "key2" : "value2"
  }
}

Here are some examples of information that could be recorded in annotations:

  • Fields managed by a declarative configuration layer. Attaching these fields as annotations distinguishes them from default values set by clients or servers, and from auto-generated fields and fields set by auto-sizing or auto-scaling systems.

  • Build, release, or image information like timestamps, release IDs, git branch, PR numbers, image hashes, and registry address.

  • Pointers to logging, monitoring, analytics, or audit repositories.

  • Client library or tool information that can be used for debugging purposes: for example, name, version, and build information.

  • User or tool/system provenance information, such as URLs of related objects from other ecosystem components.

  • Lightweight rollout tool metadata: for example, config or checkpoints.

  • Phone or pager numbers of persons responsible, or directory entries that specify where that information can be found, such as a team web site.

  • Directives from the end-user to the implementations to modify behavior or engage non-standard features.

Instead of using annotations, you could store this type of information in an external database or directory, but that would make it much harder to produce shared client libraries and tools for deployment, management, introspection, and the like.

Syntax and character set

Annotations are key/value pairs. Valid annotation keys have two segments: an optional prefix and name, separated by a slash (/). The name segment is required and must be 63 characters or less, beginning and ending with an alphanumeric character ([a-z0-9A-Z]) with dashes (-), underscores (_), dots (.), and alphanumerics between. The prefix is optional. If specified, the prefix must be a DNS subdomain: a series of DNS labels separated by dots (.), not longer than 253 characters in total, followed by a slash (/).

If the prefix is omitted, the annotation Key is presumed to be private to the user. Automated system components (e.g. kube-scheduler, kube-controller-manager, kube-apiserver, kubectl, or other third-party automation) which add annotations to end-user objects must specify a prefix.

The kubernetes.io/ and k8s.io/ prefixes are reserved for Kubernetes core components.

For example, here's a manifest for a Pod that has the annotation imageregistry: https://hub.docker.com/ :

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: annotations-demo
  annotations:
    imageregistry: "https://hub.docker.com/"
spec:
  containers:
  - name: nginx
    image: nginx:1.14.2
    ports:
    - containerPort: 80

What's next

1.2.6 - Field Selectors

Field selectors let you select Kubernetes objects based on the value of one or more resource fields. Here are some examples of field selector queries:

  • metadata.name=my-service
  • metadata.namespace!=default
  • status.phase=Pending

This kubectl command selects all Pods for which the value of the status.phase field is Running:

kubectl get pods --field-selector status.phase=Running

Supported fields

Supported field selectors vary by Kubernetes resource type. All resource types support the metadata.name and metadata.namespace fields. Using unsupported field selectors produces an error. For example:

kubectl get ingress --field-selector foo.bar=baz

Error from server (BadRequest): Unable to find "ingresses" that match label selector "", field selector "foo.bar=baz": "foo.bar" is not a known field selector: only "metadata.name", "metadata.namespace"

List of supported fields

Kind Fields
Pod spec.nodeName
spec.restartPolicy
spec.schedulerName
spec.serviceAccountName
spec.hostNetwork
status.phase
status.podIP
status.nominatedNodeName
Event involvedObject.kind
involvedObject.namespace
involvedObject.name
involvedObject.uid
involvedObject.apiVersion
involvedObject.resourceVersion
involvedObject.fieldPath
reason
reportingComponent
source
type
Secret type
Namespace status.phase
ReplicaSet status.replicas
ReplicationController status.replicas
Job status.successful
Node spec.unschedulable
CertificateSigningRequest spec.signerName

Custom resources fields

All custom resource types support the metadata.name and metadata.namespace fields.

Additionally, the spec.versions[*].selectableFields field of a CustomResourceDefinition declares which other fields in a custom resource may be used in field selectors. See selectable fields for custom resources for more information about how to use field selectors with CustomResourceDefinitions.

Supported operators

You can use the =, ==, and != operators with field selectors (= and == mean the same thing). This kubectl command, for example, selects all Kubernetes Services that aren't in the default namespace:

kubectl get services  --all-namespaces --field-selector metadata.namespace!=default

Chained selectors

As with label and other selectors, field selectors can be chained together as a comma-separated list. This kubectl command selects all Pods for which the status.phase does not equal Running and the spec.restartPolicy field equals Always:

kubectl get pods --field-selector=status.phase!=Running,spec.restartPolicy=Always

Multiple resource types

You can use field selectors across multiple resource types. This kubectl command selects all Statefulsets and Services that are not in the default namespace:

kubectl get statefulsets,services --all-namespaces --field-selector metadata.namespace!=default

1.2.7 - Finalizers

Finalizers are namespaced keys that tell Kubernetes to wait until specific conditions are met before it fully deletes resources marked for deletion. Finalizers alert controllers to clean up resources the deleted object owned.

When you tell Kubernetes to delete an object that has finalizers specified for it, the Kubernetes API marks the object for deletion by populating .metadata.deletionTimestamp, and returns a 202 status code (HTTP "Accepted"). The target object remains in a terminating state while the control plane, or other components, take the actions defined by the finalizers. After these actions are complete, the controller removes the relevant finalizers from the target object. When the metadata.finalizers field is empty, Kubernetes considers the deletion complete and deletes the object.

You can use finalizers to control garbage collection of resources. For example, you can define a finalizer to clean up related resources or infrastructure before the controller deletes the target resource.

You can use finalizers to control garbage collection of objects by alerting controllers to perform specific cleanup tasks before deleting the target resource.

Finalizers don't usually specify the code to execute. Instead, they are typically lists of keys on a specific resource similar to annotations. Kubernetes specifies some finalizers automatically, but you can also specify your own.

How finalizers work

When you create a resource using a manifest file, you can specify finalizers in the metadata.finalizers field. When you attempt to delete the resource, the API server handling the delete request notices the values in the finalizers field and does the following:

  • Modifies the object to add a metadata.deletionTimestamp field with the time you started the deletion.
  • Prevents the object from being removed until all items are removed from its metadata.finalizers field
  • Returns a 202 status code (HTTP "Accepted")

The controller managing that finalizer notices the update to the object setting the metadata.deletionTimestamp, indicating deletion of the object has been requested. The controller then attempts to satisfy the requirements of the finalizers specified for that resource. Each time a finalizer condition is satisfied, the controller removes that key from the resource's finalizers field. When the finalizers field is emptied, an object with a deletionTimestamp field set is automatically deleted. You can also use finalizers to prevent deletion of unmanaged resources.

A common example of a finalizer is kubernetes.io/pv-protection, which prevents accidental deletion of PersistentVolume objects. When a PersistentVolume object is in use by a Pod, Kubernetes adds the pv-protection finalizer. If you try to delete the PersistentVolume, it enters a Terminating status, but the controller can't delete it because the finalizer exists. When the Pod stops using the PersistentVolume, Kubernetes clears the pv-protection finalizer, and the controller deletes the volume.

Owner references, labels, and finalizers

Like labels, owner references describe the relationships between objects in Kubernetes, but are used for a different purpose. When a controller manages objects like Pods, it uses labels to track changes to groups of related objects. For example, when a Job creates one or more Pods, the Job controller applies labels to those pods and tracks changes to any Pods in the cluster with the same label.

The Job controller also adds owner references to those Pods, pointing at the Job that created the Pods. If you delete the Job while these Pods are running, Kubernetes uses the owner references (not labels) to determine which Pods in the cluster need cleanup.

Kubernetes also processes finalizers when it identifies owner references on a resource targeted for deletion.

In some situations, finalizers can block the deletion of dependent objects, which can cause the targeted owner object to remain for longer than expected without being fully deleted. In these situations, you should check finalizers and owner references on the target owner and dependent objects to troubleshoot the cause.

What's next

1.2.8 - Owners and Dependents

In Kubernetes, some objects are owners of other objects. For example, a ReplicaSet is the owner of a set of Pods. These owned objects are dependents of their owner.

Ownership is different from the labels and selectors mechanism that some resources also use. For example, consider a Service that creates EndpointSlice objects. The Service uses labels to allow the control plane to determine which EndpointSlice objects are used for that Service. In addition to the labels, each EndpointSlice that is managed on behalf of a Service has an owner reference. Owner references help different parts of Kubernetes avoid interfering with objects they don’t control.

Owner references in object specifications

Dependent objects have a metadata.ownerReferences field that references their owner object. A valid owner reference consists of the object name and a UID within the same namespace as the dependent object. Kubernetes sets the value of this field automatically for objects that are dependents of other objects like ReplicaSets, DaemonSets, Deployments, Jobs and CronJobs, and ReplicationControllers. You can also configure these relationships manually by changing the value of this field. However, you usually don't need to and can allow Kubernetes to automatically manage the relationships.

Dependent objects also have an ownerReferences.blockOwnerDeletion field that takes a boolean value and controls whether specific dependents can block garbage collection from deleting their owner object. Kubernetes automatically sets this field to true if a controller (for example, the Deployment controller) sets the value of the metadata.ownerReferences field. You can also set the value of the blockOwnerDeletion field manually to control which dependents block garbage collection.

A Kubernetes admission controller controls user access to change this field for dependent resources, based on the delete permissions of the owner. This control prevents unauthorized users from delaying owner object deletion.

Ownership and finalizers

When you tell Kubernetes to delete a resource, the API server allows the managing controller to process any finalizer rules for the resource. Finalizers prevent accidental deletion of resources your cluster may still need to function correctly. For example, if you try to delete a PersistentVolume that is still in use by a Pod, the deletion does not happen immediately because the PersistentVolume has the kubernetes.io/pv-protection finalizer on it. Instead, the volume remains in the Terminating status until Kubernetes clears the finalizer, which only happens after the PersistentVolume is no longer bound to a Pod.

Kubernetes also adds finalizers to an owner resource when you use either foreground or orphan cascading deletion. In foreground deletion, it adds the foreground finalizer so that the controller must delete dependent resources that also have ownerReferences.blockOwnerDeletion=true before it deletes the owner. If you specify an orphan deletion policy, Kubernetes adds the orphan finalizer so that the controller ignores dependent resources after it deletes the owner object.

What's next

1.2.9 - Recommended Labels

You can visualize and manage Kubernetes objects with more tools than kubectl and the dashboard. A common set of labels allows tools to work interoperably, describing objects in a common manner that all tools can understand.

In addition to supporting tooling, the recommended labels describe applications in a way that can be queried.

The metadata is organized around the concept of an application. Kubernetes is not a platform as a service (PaaS) and doesn't have or enforce a formal notion of an application. Instead, applications are informal and described with metadata. The definition of what an application contains is loose.

Shared labels and annotations share a common prefix: app.kubernetes.io. Labels without a prefix are private to users. The shared prefix ensures that shared labels do not interfere with custom user labels.

Labels

In order to take full advantage of using these labels, they should be applied on every resource object.

Key Description Example Type
app.kubernetes.io/name The name of the application mysql string
app.kubernetes.io/instance A unique name identifying the instance of an application mysql-abcxyz string
app.kubernetes.io/version The current version of the application (e.g., a SemVer 1.0, revision hash, etc.) 5.7.21 string
app.kubernetes.io/component The component within the architecture database string
app.kubernetes.io/part-of The name of a higher level application this one is part of wordpress string
app.kubernetes.io/managed-by The tool being used to manage the operation of an application Helm string

To illustrate these labels in action, consider the following StatefulSet object:

# This is an excerpt
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: mysql
    app.kubernetes.io/instance: mysql-abcxyz
    app.kubernetes.io/version: "5.7.21"
    app.kubernetes.io/component: database
    app.kubernetes.io/part-of: wordpress
    app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: Helm

Applications And Instances Of Applications

An application can be installed one or more times into a Kubernetes cluster and, in some cases, the same namespace. For example, WordPress can be installed more than once where different websites are different installations of WordPress.

The name of an application and the instance name are recorded separately. For example, WordPress has a app.kubernetes.io/name of wordpress while it has an instance name, represented as app.kubernetes.io/instance with a value of wordpress-abcxyz. This enables the application and instance of the application to be identifiable. Every instance of an application must have a unique name.

Examples

To illustrate different ways to use these labels the following examples have varying complexity.

A Simple Stateless Service

Consider the case for a simple stateless service deployed using Deployment and Service objects. The following two snippets represent how the labels could be used in their simplest form.

The Deployment is used to oversee the pods running the application itself.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: myservice
    app.kubernetes.io/instance: myservice-abcxyz
...

The Service is used to expose the application.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: myservice
    app.kubernetes.io/instance: myservice-abcxyz
...

Web Application With A Database

Consider a slightly more complicated application: a web application (WordPress) using a database (MySQL), installed using Helm. The following snippets illustrate the start of objects used to deploy this application.

The start to the following Deployment is used for WordPress:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: wordpress
    app.kubernetes.io/instance: wordpress-abcxyz
    app.kubernetes.io/version: "4.9.4"
    app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: Helm
    app.kubernetes.io/component: server
    app.kubernetes.io/part-of: wordpress
...

The Service is used to expose WordPress:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: wordpress
    app.kubernetes.io/instance: wordpress-abcxyz
    app.kubernetes.io/version: "4.9.4"
    app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: Helm
    app.kubernetes.io/component: server
    app.kubernetes.io/part-of: wordpress
...

MySQL is exposed as a StatefulSet with metadata for both it and the larger application it belongs to:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: mysql
    app.kubernetes.io/instance: mysql-abcxyz
    app.kubernetes.io/version: "5.7.21"
    app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: Helm
    app.kubernetes.io/component: database
    app.kubernetes.io/part-of: wordpress
...

The Service is used to expose MySQL as part of WordPress:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: mysql
    app.kubernetes.io/instance: mysql-abcxyz
    app.kubernetes.io/version: "5.7.21"
    app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: Helm
    app.kubernetes.io/component: database
    app.kubernetes.io/part-of: wordpress
...

With the MySQL StatefulSet and Service you'll notice information about both MySQL and WordPress, the broader application, are included.

1.3 - The Kubernetes API

The Kubernetes API lets you query and manipulate the state of objects in Kubernetes. The core of Kubernetes' control plane is the API server and the HTTP API that it exposes. Users, the different parts of your cluster, and external components all communicate with one another through the API server.

The core of Kubernetes' control plane is the API server. The API server exposes an HTTP API that lets end users, different parts of your cluster, and external components communicate with one another.

The Kubernetes API lets you query and manipulate the state of API objects in Kubernetes (for example: Pods, Namespaces, ConfigMaps, and Events).

Most operations can be performed through the kubectl command-line interface or other command-line tools, such as kubeadm, which in turn use the API. However, you can also access the API directly using REST calls. Kubernetes provides a set of client libraries for those looking to write applications using the Kubernetes API.

Each Kubernetes cluster publishes the specification of the APIs that the cluster serves. There are two mechanisms that Kubernetes uses to publish these API specifications; both are useful to enable automatic interoperability. For example, the kubectl tool fetches and caches the API specification for enabling command-line completion and other features. The two supported mechanisms are as follows:

  • The Discovery API provides information about the Kubernetes APIs: API names, resources, versions, and supported operations. This is a Kubernetes specific term as it is a separate API from the Kubernetes OpenAPI. It is intended to be a brief summary of the available resources and it does not detail specific schema for the resources. For reference about resource schemas, please refer to the OpenAPI document.

  • The Kubernetes OpenAPI Document provides (full) OpenAPI v2.0 and 3.0 schemas for all Kubernetes API endpoints. The OpenAPI v3 is the preferred method for accessing OpenAPI as it provides a more comprehensive and accurate view of the API. It includes all the available API paths, as well as all resources consumed and produced for every operations on every endpoints. It also includes any extensibility components that a cluster supports. The data is a complete specification and is significantly larger than that from the Discovery API.

Discovery API

Kubernetes publishes a list of all group versions and resources supported via the Discovery API. This includes the following for each resource:

  • Name
  • Cluster or namespaced scope
  • Endpoint URL and supported verbs
  • Alternative names
  • Group, version, kind

The API is available in both aggregated and unaggregated form. The aggregated discovery serves two endpoints, while the unaggregated discovery serves a separate endpoint for each group version.

Aggregated discovery

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.30 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

Kubernetes offers stable support for aggregated discovery, publishing all resources supported by a cluster through two endpoints (/api and /apis). Requesting this endpoint drastically reduces the number of requests sent to fetch the discovery data from the cluster. You can access the data by requesting the respective endpoints with an Accept header indicating the aggregated discovery resource: Accept: application/json;v=v2;g=apidiscovery.k8s.io;as=APIGroupDiscoveryList.

Without indicating the resource type using the Accept header, the default response for the /api and /apis endpoint is an unaggregated discovery document.

The discovery document for the built-in resources can be found in the Kubernetes GitHub repository. This Github document can be used as a reference of the base set of the available resources if a Kubernetes cluster is not available to query.

The endpoint also supports ETag and protobuf encoding.

Unaggregated discovery

Without discovery aggregation, discovery is published in levels, with the root endpoints publishing discovery information for downstream documents.

A list of all group versions supported by a cluster is published at the /api and /apis endpoints. Example:

{
  "kind": "APIGroupList",
  "apiVersion": "v1",
  "groups": [
    {
      "name": "apiregistration.k8s.io",
      "versions": [
        {
          "groupVersion": "apiregistration.k8s.io/v1",
          "version": "v1"
        }
      ],
      "preferredVersion": {
        "groupVersion": "apiregistration.k8s.io/v1",
        "version": "v1"
      }
    },
    {
      "name": "apps",
      "versions": [
        {
          "groupVersion": "apps/v1",
          "version": "v1"
        }
      ],
      "preferredVersion": {
        "groupVersion": "apps/v1",
        "version": "v1"
      }
    },
    ...
}

Additional requests are needed to obtain the discovery document for each group version at /apis/<group>/<version> (for example: /apis/rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1alpha1), which advertises the list of resources served under a particular group version. These endpoints are used by kubectl to fetch the list of resources supported by a cluster.

OpenAPI interface definition

For details about the OpenAPI specifications, see the OpenAPI documentation.

Kubernetes serves both OpenAPI v2.0 and OpenAPI v3.0. OpenAPI v3 is the preferred method of accessing the OpenAPI because it offers a more comprehensive (lossless) representation of Kubernetes resources. Due to limitations of OpenAPI version 2, certain fields are dropped from the published OpenAPI including but not limited to default, nullable, oneOf.

OpenAPI V2

The Kubernetes API server serves an aggregated OpenAPI v2 spec via the /openapi/v2 endpoint. You can request the response format using request headers as follows:

Valid request header values for OpenAPI v2 queries
Header Possible values Notes
Accept-Encoding gzip not supplying this header is also acceptable
Accept application/com.github.proto-openapi.spec.v2@v1.0+protobuf mainly for intra-cluster use
application/json default
* serves application/json

OpenAPI V3

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

Kubernetes supports publishing a description of its APIs as OpenAPI v3.

A discovery endpoint /openapi/v3 is provided to see a list of all group/versions available. This endpoint only returns JSON. These group/versions are provided in the following format:

{
    "paths": {
        ...,
        "api/v1": {
            "serverRelativeURL": "/openapi/v3/api/v1?hash=CC0E9BFD992D8C59AEC98A1E2336F899E8318D3CF4C68944C3DEC640AF5AB52D864AC50DAA8D145B3494F75FA3CFF939FCBDDA431DAD3CA79738B297795818CF"
        },
        "apis/admissionregistration.k8s.io/v1": {
            "serverRelativeURL": "/openapi/v3/apis/admissionregistration.k8s.io/v1?hash=E19CC93A116982CE5422FC42B590A8AFAD92CDE9AE4D59B5CAAD568F083AD07946E6CB5817531680BCE6E215C16973CD39003B0425F3477CFD854E89A9DB6597"
        },
        ....
    }
}

The relative URLs are pointing to immutable OpenAPI descriptions, in order to improve client-side caching. The proper HTTP caching headers are also set by the API server for that purpose (Expires to 1 year in the future, and Cache-Control to immutable). When an obsolete URL is used, the API server returns a redirect to the newest URL.

The Kubernetes API server publishes an OpenAPI v3 spec per Kubernetes group version at the /openapi/v3/apis/<group>/<version>?hash=<hash> endpoint.

Refer to the table below for accepted request headers.

Valid request header values for OpenAPI v3 queries
Header Possible values Notes
Accept-Encoding gzip not supplying this header is also acceptable
Accept application/com.github.proto-openapi.spec.v3@v1.0+protobuf mainly for intra-cluster use
application/json default
* serves application/json

A Golang implementation to fetch the OpenAPI V3 is provided in the package k8s.io/client-go/openapi3.

Kubernetes 1.32 publishes OpenAPI v2.0 and v3.0; there are no plans to support 3.1 in the near future.

Protobuf serialization

Kubernetes implements an alternative Protobuf based serialization format that is primarily intended for intra-cluster communication. For more information about this format, see the Kubernetes Protobuf serialization design proposal and the Interface Definition Language (IDL) files for each schema located in the Go packages that define the API objects.

Persistence

Kubernetes stores the serialized state of objects by writing them into etcd.

API groups and versioning

To make it easier to eliminate fields or restructure resource representations, Kubernetes supports multiple API versions, each at a different API path, such as /api/v1 or /apis/rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1alpha1.

Versioning is done at the API level rather than at the resource or field level to ensure that the API presents a clear, consistent view of system resources and behavior, and to enable controlling access to end-of-life and/or experimental APIs.

To make it easier to evolve and to extend its API, Kubernetes implements API groups that can be enabled or disabled.

API resources are distinguished by their API group, resource type, namespace (for namespaced resources), and name. The API server handles the conversion between API versions transparently: all the different versions are actually representations of the same persisted data. The API server may serve the same underlying data through multiple API versions.

For example, suppose there are two API versions, v1 and v1beta1, for the same resource. If you originally created an object using the v1beta1 version of its API, you can later read, update, or delete that object using either the v1beta1 or the v1 API version, until the v1beta1 version is deprecated and removed. At that point you can continue accessing and modifying the object using the v1 API.

API changes

Any system that is successful needs to grow and change as new use cases emerge or existing ones change. Therefore, Kubernetes has designed the Kubernetes API to continuously change and grow. The Kubernetes project aims to not break compatibility with existing clients, and to maintain that compatibility for a length of time so that other projects have an opportunity to adapt.

In general, new API resources and new resource fields can be added often and frequently. Elimination of resources or fields requires following the API deprecation policy.

Kubernetes makes a strong commitment to maintain compatibility for official Kubernetes APIs once they reach general availability (GA), typically at API version v1. Additionally, Kubernetes maintains compatibility with data persisted via beta API versions of official Kubernetes APIs, and ensures that data can be converted and accessed via GA API versions when the feature goes stable.

If you adopt a beta API version, you will need to transition to a subsequent beta or stable API version once the API graduates. The best time to do this is while the beta API is in its deprecation period, since objects are simultaneously accessible via both API versions. Once the beta API completes its deprecation period and is no longer served, the replacement API version must be used.

Refer to API versions reference for more details on the API version level definitions.

API Extension

The Kubernetes API can be extended in one of two ways:

  1. Custom resources let you declaratively define how the API server should provide your chosen resource API.
  2. You can also extend the Kubernetes API by implementing an aggregation layer.

What's next

2 - Cluster Architecture

The architectural concepts behind Kubernetes.

A Kubernetes cluster consists of a control plane plus a set of worker machines, called nodes, that run containerized applications. Every cluster needs at least one worker node in order to run Pods.

The worker node(s) host the Pods that are the components of the application workload. The control plane manages the worker nodes and the Pods in the cluster. In production environments, the control plane usually runs across multiple computers and a cluster usually runs multiple nodes, providing fault-tolerance and high availability.

This document outlines the various components you need to have for a complete and working Kubernetes cluster.

The control plane (kube-apiserver, etcd, kube-controller-manager, kube-scheduler) and several nodes. Each node is running a kubelet and kube-proxy.

Figure 1. Kubernetes cluster components.

About this architecture

The diagram in Figure 1 presents an example reference architecture for a Kubernetes cluster. The actual distribution of components can vary based on specific cluster setups and requirements.

In the diagram, each node runs the kube-proxy component. You need a network proxy component on each node to ensure that the Service API and associated behaviors are available on your cluster network. However, some network plugins provide their own, third party implementation of proxying. When you use that kind of network plugin, the node does not need to run kube-proxy.

Control plane components

The control plane's components make global decisions about the cluster (for example, scheduling), as well as detecting and responding to cluster events (for example, starting up a new pod when a Deployment's replicas field is unsatisfied).

Control plane components can be run on any machine in the cluster. However, for simplicity, setup scripts typically start all control plane components on the same machine, and do not run user containers on this machine. See Creating Highly Available clusters with kubeadm for an example control plane setup that runs across multiple machines.

kube-apiserver

The API server is a component of the Kubernetes control plane that exposes the Kubernetes API. The API server is the front end for the Kubernetes control plane.

The main implementation of a Kubernetes API server is kube-apiserver. kube-apiserver is designed to scale horizontally—that is, it scales by deploying more instances. You can run several instances of kube-apiserver and balance traffic between those instances.

etcd

Consistent and highly-available key value store used as Kubernetes' backing store for all cluster data.

If your Kubernetes cluster uses etcd as its backing store, make sure you have a back up plan for the data.

You can find in-depth information about etcd in the official documentation.

kube-scheduler

Control plane component that watches for newly created Pods with no assigned node, and selects a node for them to run on.

Factors taken into account for scheduling decisions include: individual and collective resource requirements, hardware/software/policy constraints, affinity and anti-affinity specifications, data locality, inter-workload interference, and deadlines.

kube-controller-manager

Control plane component that runs controller processes.

Logically, each controller is a separate process, but to reduce complexity, they are all compiled into a single binary and run in a single process.

There are many different types of controllers. Some examples of them are:

  • Node controller: Responsible for noticing and responding when nodes go down.
  • Job controller: Watches for Job objects that represent one-off tasks, then creates Pods to run those tasks to completion.
  • EndpointSlice controller: Populates EndpointSlice objects (to provide a link between Services and Pods).
  • ServiceAccount controller: Create default ServiceAccounts for new namespaces.

The above is not an exhaustive list.

cloud-controller-manager

A Kubernetes control plane component that embeds cloud-specific control logic. The cloud controller manager lets you link your cluster into your cloud provider's API, and separates out the components that interact with that cloud platform from components that only interact with your cluster.

The cloud-controller-manager only runs controllers that are specific to your cloud provider. If you are running Kubernetes on your own premises, or in a learning environment inside your own PC, the cluster does not have a cloud controller manager.

As with the kube-controller-manager, the cloud-controller-manager combines several logically independent control loops into a single binary that you run as a single process. You can scale horizontally (run more than one copy) to improve performance or to help tolerate failures.

The following controllers can have cloud provider dependencies:

  • Node controller: For checking the cloud provider to determine if a node has been deleted in the cloud after it stops responding
  • Route controller: For setting up routes in the underlying cloud infrastructure
  • Service controller: For creating, updating and deleting cloud provider load balancers

Node components

Node components run on every node, maintaining running pods and providing the Kubernetes runtime environment.

kubelet

An agent that runs on each node in the cluster. It makes sure that containers are running in a Pod.

The kubelet takes a set of PodSpecs that are provided through various mechanisms and ensures that the containers described in those PodSpecs are running and healthy. The kubelet doesn't manage containers which were not created by Kubernetes.

kube-proxy (optional)

kube-proxy is a network proxy that runs on each node in your cluster, implementing part of the Kubernetes Service concept.

kube-proxy maintains network rules on nodes. These network rules allow network communication to your Pods from network sessions inside or outside of your cluster.

kube-proxy uses the operating system packet filtering layer if there is one and it's available. Otherwise, kube-proxy forwards the traffic itself.

If you use a network plugin that implements packet forwarding for Services by itself, and providing equivalent behavior to kube-proxy, then you do not need to run kube-proxy on the nodes in your cluster.

Container runtime

A fundamental component that empowers Kubernetes to run containers effectively. It is responsible for managing the execution and lifecycle of containers within the Kubernetes environment.

Kubernetes supports container runtimes such as containerd, CRI-O, and any other implementation of the Kubernetes CRI (Container Runtime Interface).

Addons

Addons use Kubernetes resources (DaemonSet, Deployment, etc) to implement cluster features. Because these are providing cluster-level features, namespaced resources for addons belong within the kube-system namespace.

Selected addons are described below; for an extended list of available addons, please see Addons.

DNS

While the other addons are not strictly required, all Kubernetes clusters should have cluster DNS, as many examples rely on it.

Cluster DNS is a DNS server, in addition to the other DNS server(s) in your environment, which serves DNS records for Kubernetes services.

Containers started by Kubernetes automatically include this DNS server in their DNS searches.

Web UI (Dashboard)

Dashboard is a general purpose, web-based UI for Kubernetes clusters. It allows users to manage and troubleshoot applications running in the cluster, as well as the cluster itself.

Container resource monitoring

Container Resource Monitoring records generic time-series metrics about containers in a central database, and provides a UI for browsing that data.

Cluster-level Logging

A cluster-level logging mechanism is responsible for saving container logs to a central log store with a search/browsing interface.

Network plugins

Network plugins are software components that implement the container network interface (CNI) specification. They are responsible for allocating IP addresses to pods and enabling them to communicate with each other within the cluster.

Architecture variations

While the core components of Kubernetes remain consistent, the way they are deployed and managed can vary. Understanding these variations is crucial for designing and maintaining Kubernetes clusters that meet specific operational needs.

Control plane deployment options

The control plane components can be deployed in several ways:

Traditional deployment
Control plane components run directly on dedicated machines or VMs, often managed as systemd services.
Static Pods
Control plane components are deployed as static Pods, managed by the kubelet on specific nodes. This is a common approach used by tools like kubeadm.
Self-hosted
The control plane runs as Pods within the Kubernetes cluster itself, managed by Deployments and StatefulSets or other Kubernetes primitives.
Managed Kubernetes services
Cloud providers often abstract away the control plane, managing its components as part of their service offering.

Workload placement considerations

The placement of workloads, including the control plane components, can vary based on cluster size, performance requirements, and operational policies:

  • In smaller or development clusters, control plane components and user workloads might run on the same nodes.
  • Larger production clusters often dedicate specific nodes to control plane components, separating them from user workloads.
  • Some organizations run critical add-ons or monitoring tools on control plane nodes.

Cluster management tools

Tools like kubeadm, kops, and Kubespray offer different approaches to deploying and managing clusters, each with its own method of component layout and management.

The flexibility of Kubernetes architecture allows organizations to tailor their clusters to specific needs, balancing factors such as operational complexity, performance, and management overhead.

Customization and extensibility

Kubernetes architecture allows for significant customization:

  • Custom schedulers can be deployed to work alongside the default Kubernetes scheduler or to replace it entirely.
  • API servers can be extended with CustomResourceDefinitions and API Aggregation.
  • Cloud providers can integrate deeply with Kubernetes using the cloud-controller-manager.

The flexibility of Kubernetes architecture allows organizations to tailor their clusters to specific needs, balancing factors such as operational complexity, performance, and management overhead.

What's next

Learn more about the following:

2.1 - Nodes

Kubernetes runs your workload by placing containers into Pods to run on Nodes. A node may be a virtual or physical machine, depending on the cluster. Each node is managed by the control plane and contains the services necessary to run Pods.

Typically you have several nodes in a cluster; in a learning or resource-limited environment, you might have only one node.

The components on a node include the kubelet, a container runtime, and the kube-proxy.

Management

There are two main ways to have Nodes added to the API server:

  1. The kubelet on a node self-registers to the control plane
  2. You (or another human user) manually add a Node object

After you create a Node object, or the kubelet on a node self-registers, the control plane checks whether the new Node object is valid. For example, if you try to create a Node from the following JSON manifest:

{
  "kind": "Node",
  "apiVersion": "v1",
  "metadata": {
    "name": "10.240.79.157",
    "labels": {
      "name": "my-first-k8s-node"
    }
  }
}

Kubernetes creates a Node object internally (the representation). Kubernetes checks that a kubelet has registered to the API server that matches the metadata.name field of the Node. If the node is healthy (i.e. all necessary services are running), then it is eligible to run a Pod. Otherwise, that node is ignored for any cluster activity until it becomes healthy.

The name of a Node object must be a valid DNS subdomain name.

Node name uniqueness

The name identifies a Node. Two Nodes cannot have the same name at the same time. Kubernetes also assumes that a resource with the same name is the same object. In case of a Node, it is implicitly assumed that an instance using the same name will have the same state (e.g. network settings, root disk contents) and attributes like node labels. This may lead to inconsistencies if an instance was modified without changing its name. If the Node needs to be replaced or updated significantly, the existing Node object needs to be removed from API server first and re-added after the update.

Self-registration of Nodes

When the kubelet flag --register-node is true (the default), the kubelet will attempt to register itself with the API server. This is the preferred pattern, used by most distros.

For self-registration, the kubelet is started with the following options:

  • --kubeconfig - Path to credentials to authenticate itself to the API server.

  • --cloud-provider - How to talk to a cloud provider to read metadata about itself.

  • --register-node - Automatically register with the API server.

  • --register-with-taints - Register the node with the given list of taints (comma separated <key>=<value>:<effect>).

    No-op if register-node is false.

  • --node-ip - Optional comma-separated list of the IP addresses for the node. You can only specify a single address for each address family. For example, in a single-stack IPv4 cluster, you set this value to be the IPv4 address that the kubelet should use for the node. See configure IPv4/IPv6 dual stack for details of running a dual-stack cluster.

    If you don't provide this argument, the kubelet uses the node's default IPv4 address, if any; if the node has no IPv4 addresses then the kubelet uses the node's default IPv6 address.

  • --node-labels - Labels to add when registering the node in the cluster (see label restrictions enforced by the NodeRestriction admission plugin).

  • --node-status-update-frequency - Specifies how often kubelet posts its node status to the API server.

When the Node authorization mode and NodeRestriction admission plugin are enabled, kubelets are only authorized to create/modify their own Node resource.

Manual Node administration

You can create and modify Node objects using kubectl.

When you want to create Node objects manually, set the kubelet flag --register-node=false.

You can modify Node objects regardless of the setting of --register-node. For example, you can set labels on an existing Node or mark it unschedulable.

You can use labels on Nodes in conjunction with node selectors on Pods to control scheduling. For example, you can constrain a Pod to only be eligible to run on a subset of the available nodes.

Marking a node as unschedulable prevents the scheduler from placing new pods onto that Node but does not affect existing Pods on the Node. This is useful as a preparatory step before a node reboot or other maintenance.

To mark a Node unschedulable, run:

kubectl cordon $NODENAME

See Safely Drain a Node for more details.

Node status

A Node's status contains the following information:

You can use kubectl to view a Node's status and other details:

kubectl describe node <insert-node-name-here>

See Node Status for more details.

Node heartbeats

Heartbeats, sent by Kubernetes nodes, help your cluster determine the availability of each node, and to take action when failures are detected.

For nodes there are two forms of heartbeats:

  • Updates to the .status of a Node.
  • Lease objects within the kube-node-lease namespace. Each Node has an associated Lease object.

Node controller

The node controller is a Kubernetes control plane component that manages various aspects of nodes.

The node controller has multiple roles in a node's life. The first is assigning a CIDR block to the node when it is registered (if CIDR assignment is turned on).

The second is keeping the node controller's internal list of nodes up to date with the cloud provider's list of available machines. When running in a cloud environment and whenever a node is unhealthy, the node controller asks the cloud provider if the VM for that node is still available. If not, the node controller deletes the node from its list of nodes.

The third is monitoring the nodes' health. The node controller is responsible for:

  • In the case that a node becomes unreachable, updating the Ready condition in the Node's .status field. In this case the node controller sets the Ready condition to Unknown.
  • If a node remains unreachable: triggering API-initiated eviction for all of the Pods on the unreachable node. By default, the node controller waits 5 minutes between marking the node as Unknown and submitting the first eviction request.

By default, the node controller checks the state of each node every 5 seconds. This period can be configured using the --node-monitor-period flag on the kube-controller-manager component.

Rate limits on eviction

In most cases, the node controller limits the eviction rate to --node-eviction-rate (default 0.1) per second, meaning it won't evict pods from more than 1 node per 10 seconds.

The node eviction behavior changes when a node in a given availability zone becomes unhealthy. The node controller checks what percentage of nodes in the zone are unhealthy (the Ready condition is Unknown or False) at the same time:

  • If the fraction of unhealthy nodes is at least --unhealthy-zone-threshold (default 0.55), then the eviction rate is reduced.
  • If the cluster is small (i.e. has less than or equal to --large-cluster-size-threshold nodes - default 50), then evictions are stopped.
  • Otherwise, the eviction rate is reduced to --secondary-node-eviction-rate (default 0.01) per second.

The reason these policies are implemented per availability zone is because one availability zone might become partitioned from the control plane while the others remain connected. If your cluster does not span multiple cloud provider availability zones, then the eviction mechanism does not take per-zone unavailability into account.

A key reason for spreading your nodes across availability zones is so that the workload can be shifted to healthy zones when one entire zone goes down. Therefore, if all nodes in a zone are unhealthy, then the node controller evicts at the normal rate of --node-eviction-rate. The corner case is when all zones are completely unhealthy (none of the nodes in the cluster are healthy). In such a case, the node controller assumes that there is some problem with connectivity between the control plane and the nodes, and doesn't perform any evictions. (If there has been an outage and some nodes reappear, the node controller does evict pods from the remaining nodes that are unhealthy or unreachable).

The node controller is also responsible for evicting pods running on nodes with NoExecute taints, unless those pods tolerate that taint. The node controller also adds taints corresponding to node problems like node unreachable or not ready. This means that the scheduler won't place Pods onto unhealthy nodes.

Resource capacity tracking

Node objects track information about the Node's resource capacity: for example, the amount of memory available and the number of CPUs. Nodes that self register report their capacity during registration. If you manually add a Node, then you need to set the node's capacity information when you add it.

The Kubernetes scheduler ensures that there are enough resources for all the Pods on a Node. The scheduler checks that the sum of the requests of containers on the node is no greater than the node's capacity. That sum of requests includes all containers managed by the kubelet, but excludes any containers started directly by the container runtime, and also excludes any processes running outside of the kubelet's control.

Node topology

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

If you have enabled the TopologyManager feature gate, then the kubelet can use topology hints when making resource assignment decisions. See Control Topology Management Policies on a Node for more information.

Swap memory management

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.30 [beta] (enabled by default: true)

To enable swap on a node, the NodeSwap feature gate must be enabled on the kubelet (default is true), and the --fail-swap-on command line flag or failSwapOn configuration setting must be set to false. To allow Pods to utilize swap, swapBehavior should not be set to NoSwap (which is the default behavior) in the kubelet config.

A user can also optionally configure memorySwap.swapBehavior in order to specify how a node will use swap memory. For example,

memorySwap:
  swapBehavior: LimitedSwap
  • NoSwap (default): Kubernetes workloads will not use swap.
  • LimitedSwap: The utilization of swap memory by Kubernetes workloads is subject to limitations. Only Pods of Burstable QoS are permitted to employ swap.

If configuration for memorySwap is not specified and the feature gate is enabled, by default the kubelet will apply the same behaviour as the NoSwap setting.

With LimitedSwap, Pods that do not fall under the Burstable QoS classification (i.e. BestEffort/Guaranteed Qos Pods) are prohibited from utilizing swap memory. To maintain the aforementioned security and node health guarantees, these Pods are not permitted to use swap memory when LimitedSwap is in effect.

Prior to detailing the calculation of the swap limit, it is necessary to define the following terms:

  • nodeTotalMemory: The total amount of physical memory available on the node.
  • totalPodsSwapAvailable: The total amount of swap memory on the node that is available for use by Pods (some swap memory may be reserved for system use).
  • containerMemoryRequest: The container's memory request.

Swap limitation is configured as: (containerMemoryRequest / nodeTotalMemory) * totalPodsSwapAvailable.

It is important to note that, for containers within Burstable QoS Pods, it is possible to opt-out of swap usage by specifying memory requests that are equal to memory limits. Containers configured in this manner will not have access to swap memory.

Swap is supported only with cgroup v2, cgroup v1 is not supported.

For more information, and to assist with testing and provide feedback, please see the blog-post about Kubernetes 1.28: NodeSwap graduates to Beta1, KEP-2400 and its design proposal.

What's next

Learn more about the following:

2.2 - Communication between Nodes and the Control Plane

This document catalogs the communication paths between the API server and the Kubernetes cluster. The intent is to allow users to customize their installation to harden the network configuration such that the cluster can be run on an untrusted network (or on fully public IPs on a cloud provider).

Node to Control Plane

Kubernetes has a "hub-and-spoke" API pattern. All API usage from nodes (or the pods they run) terminates at the API server. None of the other control plane components are designed to expose remote services. The API server is configured to listen for remote connections on a secure HTTPS port (typically 443) with one or more forms of client authentication enabled. One or more forms of authorization should be enabled, especially if anonymous requests or service account tokens are allowed.

Nodes should be provisioned with the public root certificate for the cluster such that they can connect securely to the API server along with valid client credentials. A good approach is that the client credentials provided to the kubelet are in the form of a client certificate. See kubelet TLS bootstrapping for automated provisioning of kubelet client certificates.

Pods that wish to connect to the API server can do so securely by leveraging a service account so that Kubernetes will automatically inject the public root certificate and a valid bearer token into the pod when it is instantiated. The kubernetes service (in default namespace) is configured with a virtual IP address that is redirected (via kube-proxy) to the HTTPS endpoint on the API server.

The control plane components also communicate with the API server over the secure port.

As a result, the default operating mode for connections from the nodes and pod running on the nodes to the control plane is secured by default and can run over untrusted and/or public networks.

Control plane to node

There are two primary communication paths from the control plane (the API server) to the nodes. The first is from the API server to the kubelet process which runs on each node in the cluster. The second is from the API server to any node, pod, or service through the API server's proxy functionality.

API server to kubelet

The connections from the API server to the kubelet are used for:

  • Fetching logs for pods.
  • Attaching (usually through kubectl) to running pods.
  • Providing the kubelet's port-forwarding functionality.

These connections terminate at the kubelet's HTTPS endpoint. By default, the API server does not verify the kubelet's serving certificate, which makes the connection subject to man-in-the-middle attacks and unsafe to run over untrusted and/or public networks.

To verify this connection, use the --kubelet-certificate-authority flag to provide the API server with a root certificate bundle to use to verify the kubelet's serving certificate.

If that is not possible, use SSH tunneling between the API server and kubelet if required to avoid connecting over an untrusted or public network.

Finally, Kubelet authentication and/or authorization should be enabled to secure the kubelet API.

API server to nodes, pods, and services

The connections from the API server to a node, pod, or service default to plain HTTP connections and are therefore neither authenticated nor encrypted. They can be run over a secure HTTPS connection by prefixing https: to the node, pod, or service name in the API URL, but they will not validate the certificate provided by the HTTPS endpoint nor provide client credentials. So while the connection will be encrypted, it will not provide any guarantees of integrity. These connections are not currently safe to run over untrusted or public networks.

SSH tunnels

Kubernetes supports SSH tunnels to protect the control plane to nodes communication paths. In this configuration, the API server initiates an SSH tunnel to each node in the cluster (connecting to the SSH server listening on port 22) and passes all traffic destined for a kubelet, node, pod, or service through the tunnel. This tunnel ensures that the traffic is not exposed outside of the network in which the nodes are running.

Konnectivity service

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.18 [beta]

As a replacement to the SSH tunnels, the Konnectivity service provides TCP level proxy for the control plane to cluster communication. The Konnectivity service consists of two parts: the Konnectivity server in the control plane network and the Konnectivity agents in the nodes network. The Konnectivity agents initiate connections to the Konnectivity server and maintain the network connections. After enabling the Konnectivity service, all control plane to nodes traffic goes through these connections.

Follow the Konnectivity service task to set up the Konnectivity service in your cluster.

What's next

2.3 - Controllers

In robotics and automation, a control loop is a non-terminating loop that regulates the state of a system.

Here is one example of a control loop: a thermostat in a room.

When you set the temperature, that's telling the thermostat about your desired state. The actual room temperature is the current state. The thermostat acts to bring the current state closer to the desired state, by turning equipment on or off.

In Kubernetes, controllers are control loops that watch the state of your cluster, then make or request changes where needed. Each controller tries to move the current cluster state closer to the desired state.

Controller pattern

A controller tracks at least one Kubernetes resource type. These objects have a spec field that represents the desired state. The controller(s) for that resource are responsible for making the current state come closer to that desired state.

The controller might carry the action out itself; more commonly, in Kubernetes, a controller will send messages to the API server that have useful side effects. You'll see examples of this below.

Control via API server

The Job controller is an example of a Kubernetes built-in controller. Built-in controllers manage state by interacting with the cluster API server.

Job is a Kubernetes resource that runs a Pod, or perhaps several Pods, to carry out a task and then stop.

(Once scheduled, Pod objects become part of the desired state for a kubelet).

When the Job controller sees a new task it makes sure that, somewhere in your cluster, the kubelets on a set of Nodes are running the right number of Pods to get the work done. The Job controller does not run any Pods or containers itself. Instead, the Job controller tells the API server to create or remove Pods. Other components in the control plane act on the new information (there are new Pods to schedule and run), and eventually the work is done.

After you create a new Job, the desired state is for that Job to be completed. The Job controller makes the current state for that Job be nearer to your desired state: creating Pods that do the work you wanted for that Job, so that the Job is closer to completion.

Controllers also update the objects that configure them. For example: once the work is done for a Job, the Job controller updates that Job object to mark it Finished.

(This is a bit like how some thermostats turn a light off to indicate that your room is now at the temperature you set).

Direct control

In contrast with Job, some controllers need to make changes to things outside of your cluster.

For example, if you use a control loop to make sure there are enough Nodes in your cluster, then that controller needs something outside the current cluster to set up new Nodes when needed.

Controllers that interact with external state find their desired state from the API server, then communicate directly with an external system to bring the current state closer in line.

(There actually is a controller that horizontally scales the nodes in your cluster.)

The important point here is that the controller makes some changes to bring about your desired state, and then reports the current state back to your cluster's API server. Other control loops can observe that reported data and take their own actions.

In the thermostat example, if the room is very cold then a different controller might also turn on a frost protection heater. With Kubernetes clusters, the control plane indirectly works with IP address management tools, storage services, cloud provider APIs, and other services by extending Kubernetes to implement that.

Desired versus current state

Kubernetes takes a cloud-native view of systems, and is able to handle constant change.

Your cluster could be changing at any point as work happens and control loops automatically fix failures. This means that, potentially, your cluster never reaches a stable state.

As long as the controllers for your cluster are running and able to make useful changes, it doesn't matter if the overall state is stable or not.

Design

As a tenet of its design, Kubernetes uses lots of controllers that each manage a particular aspect of cluster state. Most commonly, a particular control loop (controller) uses one kind of resource as its desired state, and has a different kind of resource that it manages to make that desired state happen. For example, a controller for Jobs tracks Job objects (to discover new work) and Pod objects (to run the Jobs, and then to see when the work is finished). In this case something else creates the Jobs, whereas the Job controller creates Pods.

It's useful to have simple controllers rather than one, monolithic set of control loops that are interlinked. Controllers can fail, so Kubernetes is designed to allow for that.

Ways of running controllers

Kubernetes comes with a set of built-in controllers that run inside the kube-controller-manager. These built-in controllers provide important core behaviors.

The Deployment controller and Job controller are examples of controllers that come as part of Kubernetes itself ("built-in" controllers). Kubernetes lets you run a resilient control plane, so that if any of the built-in controllers were to fail, another part of the control plane will take over the work.

You can find controllers that run outside the control plane, to extend Kubernetes. Or, if you want, you can write a new controller yourself. You can run your own controller as a set of Pods, or externally to Kubernetes. What fits best will depend on what that particular controller does.

What's next

2.4 - Leases

Distributed systems often have a need for leases, which provide a mechanism to lock shared resources and coordinate activity between members of a set. In Kubernetes, the lease concept is represented by Lease objects in the coordination.k8s.io API Group, which are used for system-critical capabilities such as node heartbeats and component-level leader election.

Node heartbeats

Kubernetes uses the Lease API to communicate kubelet node heartbeats to the Kubernetes API server. For every Node , there is a Lease object with a matching name in the kube-node-lease namespace. Under the hood, every kubelet heartbeat is an update request to this Lease object, updating the spec.renewTime field for the Lease. The Kubernetes control plane uses the time stamp of this field to determine the availability of this Node.

See Node Lease objects for more details.

Leader election

Kubernetes also uses Leases to ensure only one instance of a component is running at any given time. This is used by control plane components like kube-controller-manager and kube-scheduler in HA configurations, where only one instance of the component should be actively running while the other instances are on stand-by.

Read coordinated leader election to learn about how Kubernetes builds on the Lease API to select which component instance acts as leader.

API server identity

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [beta] (enabled by default: true)

Starting in Kubernetes v1.26, each kube-apiserver uses the Lease API to publish its identity to the rest of the system. While not particularly useful on its own, this provides a mechanism for clients to discover how many instances of kube-apiserver are operating the Kubernetes control plane. Existence of kube-apiserver leases enables future capabilities that may require coordination between each kube-apiserver.

You can inspect Leases owned by each kube-apiserver by checking for lease objects in the kube-system namespace with the name kube-apiserver-<sha256-hash>. Alternatively you can use the label selector apiserver.kubernetes.io/identity=kube-apiserver:

kubectl -n kube-system get lease -l apiserver.kubernetes.io/identity=kube-apiserver

NAME                                        HOLDER                                                                           AGE
apiserver-07a5ea9b9b072c4a5f3d1c3702        apiserver-07a5ea9b9b072c4a5f3d1c3702_0c8914f7-0f35-440e-8676-7844977d3a05        5m33s
apiserver-7be9e061c59d368b3ddaf1376e        apiserver-7be9e061c59d368b3ddaf1376e_84f2a85d-37c1-4b14-b6b9-603e62e4896f        4m23s
apiserver-1dfef752bcb36637d2763d1868        apiserver-1dfef752bcb36637d2763d1868_c5ffa286-8a9a-45d4-91e7-61118ed58d2e        4m43s

The SHA256 hash used in the lease name is based on the OS hostname as seen by that API server. Each kube-apiserver should be configured to use a hostname that is unique within the cluster. New instances of kube-apiserver that use the same hostname will take over existing Leases using a new holder identity, as opposed to instantiating new Lease objects. You can check the hostname used by kube-apisever by checking the value of the kubernetes.io/hostname label:

kubectl -n kube-system get lease apiserver-07a5ea9b9b072c4a5f3d1c3702 -o yaml

apiVersion: coordination.k8s.io/v1
kind: Lease
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: "2023-07-02T13:16:48Z"
  labels:
    apiserver.kubernetes.io/identity: kube-apiserver
    kubernetes.io/hostname: master-1
  name: apiserver-07a5ea9b9b072c4a5f3d1c3702
  namespace: kube-system
  resourceVersion: "334899"
  uid: 90870ab5-1ba9-4523-b215-e4d4e662acb1
spec:
  holderIdentity: apiserver-07a5ea9b9b072c4a5f3d1c3702_0c8914f7-0f35-440e-8676-7844977d3a05
  leaseDurationSeconds: 3600
  renewTime: "2023-07-04T21:58:48.065888Z"

Expired leases from kube-apiservers that no longer exist are garbage collected by new kube-apiservers after 1 hour.

You can disable API server identity leases by disabling the APIServerIdentity feature gate.

Workloads

Your own workload can define its own use of Leases. For example, you might run a custom controller where a primary or leader member performs operations that its peers do not. You define a Lease so that the controller replicas can select or elect a leader, using the Kubernetes API for coordination. If you do use a Lease, it's a good practice to define a name for the Lease that is obviously linked to the product or component. For example, if you have a component named Example Foo, use a Lease named example-foo.

If a cluster operator or another end user could deploy multiple instances of a component, select a name prefix and pick a mechanism (such as hash of the name of the Deployment) to avoid name collisions for the Leases.

You can use another approach so long as it achieves the same outcome: different software products do not conflict with one another.

2.5 - Cloud Controller Manager

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.11 [beta]

Cloud infrastructure technologies let you run Kubernetes on public, private, and hybrid clouds. Kubernetes believes in automated, API-driven infrastructure without tight coupling between components.

The cloud-controller-manager is a Kubernetes control plane component that embeds cloud-specific control logic. The cloud controller manager lets you link your cluster into your cloud provider's API, and separates out the components that interact with that cloud platform from components that only interact with your cluster.

By decoupling the interoperability logic between Kubernetes and the underlying cloud infrastructure, the cloud-controller-manager component enables cloud providers to release features at a different pace compared to the main Kubernetes project.

The cloud-controller-manager is structured using a plugin mechanism that allows different cloud providers to integrate their platforms with Kubernetes.

Design

Kubernetes components

The cloud controller manager runs in the control plane as a replicated set of processes (usually, these are containers in Pods). Each cloud-controller-manager implements multiple controllers in a single process.

Cloud controller manager functions

The controllers inside the cloud controller manager include:

Node controller

The node controller is responsible for updating Node objects when new servers are created in your cloud infrastructure. The node controller obtains information about the hosts running inside your tenancy with the cloud provider. The node controller performs the following functions:

  1. Update a Node object with the corresponding server's unique identifier obtained from the cloud provider API.
  2. Annotating and labelling the Node object with cloud-specific information, such as the region the node is deployed into and the resources (CPU, memory, etc) that it has available.
  3. Obtain the node's hostname and network addresses.
  4. Verifying the node's health. In case a node becomes unresponsive, this controller checks with your cloud provider's API to see if the server has been deactivated / deleted / terminated. If the node has been deleted from the cloud, the controller deletes the Node object from your Kubernetes cluster.

Some cloud provider implementations split this into a node controller and a separate node lifecycle controller.

Route controller

The route controller is responsible for configuring routes in the cloud appropriately so that containers on different nodes in your Kubernetes cluster can communicate with each other.

Depending on the cloud provider, the route controller might also allocate blocks of IP addresses for the Pod network.

Service controller

Services integrate with cloud infrastructure components such as managed load balancers, IP addresses, network packet filtering, and target health checking. The service controller interacts with your cloud provider's APIs to set up load balancers and other infrastructure components when you declare a Service resource that requires them.

Authorization

This section breaks down the access that the cloud controller manager requires on various API objects, in order to perform its operations.

Node controller

The Node controller only works with Node objects. It requires full access to read and modify Node objects.

v1/Node:

  • get
  • list
  • create
  • update
  • patch
  • watch
  • delete

Route controller

The route controller listens to Node object creation and configures routes appropriately. It requires Get access to Node objects.

v1/Node:

  • get

Service controller

The service controller watches for Service object create, update and delete events and then configures Endpoints for those Services appropriately (for EndpointSlices, the kube-controller-manager manages these on demand).

To access Services, it requires list, and watch access. To update Services, it requires patch and update access.

To set up Endpoints resources for the Services, it requires access to create, list, get, watch, and update.

v1/Service:

  • list
  • get
  • watch
  • patch
  • update

Others

The implementation of the core of the cloud controller manager requires access to create Event objects, and to ensure secure operation, it requires access to create ServiceAccounts.

v1/Event:

  • create
  • patch
  • update

v1/ServiceAccount:

  • create

The RBAC ClusterRole for the cloud controller manager looks like:

apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: cloud-controller-manager
rules:
- apiGroups:
  - ""
  resources:
  - events
  verbs:
  - create
  - patch
  - update
- apiGroups:
  - ""
  resources:
  - nodes
  verbs:
  - '*'
- apiGroups:
  - ""
  resources:
  - nodes/status
  verbs:
  - patch
- apiGroups:
  - ""
  resources:
  - services
  verbs:
  - list
  - patch
  - update
  - watch
- apiGroups:
  - ""
  resources:
  - serviceaccounts
  verbs:
  - create
- apiGroups:
  - ""
  resources:
  - persistentvolumes
  verbs:
  - get
  - list
  - update
  - watch
- apiGroups:
  - ""
  resources:
  - endpoints
  verbs:
  - create
  - get
  - list
  - watch
  - update

What's next

  • Cloud Controller Manager Administration has instructions on running and managing the cloud controller manager.

  • To upgrade a HA control plane to use the cloud controller manager, see Migrate Replicated Control Plane To Use Cloud Controller Manager.

  • Want to know how to implement your own cloud controller manager, or extend an existing project?

    • The cloud controller manager uses Go interfaces, specifically, CloudProvider interface defined in cloud.go from kubernetes/cloud-provider to allow implementations from any cloud to be plugged in.
    • The implementation of the shared controllers highlighted in this document (Node, Route, and Service), and some scaffolding along with the shared cloudprovider interface, is part of the Kubernetes core. Implementations specific to cloud providers are outside the core of Kubernetes and implement the CloudProvider interface.
    • For more information about developing plugins, see Developing Cloud Controller Manager.

2.6 - About cgroup v2

On Linux, control groups constrain resources that are allocated to processes.

The kubelet and the underlying container runtime need to interface with cgroups to enforce resource management for pods and containers which includes cpu/memory requests and limits for containerized workloads.

There are two versions of cgroups in Linux: cgroup v1 and cgroup v2. cgroup v2 is the new generation of the cgroup API.

What is cgroup v2?

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable]

cgroup v2 is the next version of the Linux cgroup API. cgroup v2 provides a unified control system with enhanced resource management capabilities.

cgroup v2 offers several improvements over cgroup v1, such as the following:

  • Single unified hierarchy design in API
  • Safer sub-tree delegation to containers
  • Newer features like Pressure Stall Information
  • Enhanced resource allocation management and isolation across multiple resources
    • Unified accounting for different types of memory allocations (network memory, kernel memory, etc)
    • Accounting for non-immediate resource changes such as page cache write backs

Some Kubernetes features exclusively use cgroup v2 for enhanced resource management and isolation. For example, the MemoryQoS feature improves memory QoS and relies on cgroup v2 primitives.

Using cgroup v2

The recommended way to use cgroup v2 is to use a Linux distribution that enables and uses cgroup v2 by default.

To check if your distribution uses cgroup v2, refer to Identify cgroup version on Linux nodes.

Requirements

cgroup v2 has the following requirements:

  • OS distribution enables cgroup v2
  • Linux Kernel version is 5.8 or later
  • Container runtime supports cgroup v2. For example:
  • The kubelet and the container runtime are configured to use the systemd cgroup driver

Linux Distribution cgroup v2 support

For a list of Linux distributions that use cgroup v2, refer to the cgroup v2 documentation

  • Container Optimized OS (since M97)
  • Ubuntu (since 21.10, 22.04+ recommended)
  • Debian GNU/Linux (since Debian 11 bullseye)
  • Fedora (since 31)
  • Arch Linux (since April 2021)
  • RHEL and RHEL-like distributions (since 9)

To check if your distribution is using cgroup v2, refer to your distribution's documentation or follow the instructions in Identify the cgroup version on Linux nodes.

You can also enable cgroup v2 manually on your Linux distribution by modifying the kernel cmdline boot arguments. If your distribution uses GRUB, systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=1 should be added in GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX under /etc/default/grub, followed by sudo update-grub. However, the recommended approach is to use a distribution that already enables cgroup v2 by default.

Migrating to cgroup v2

To migrate to cgroup v2, ensure that you meet the requirements, then upgrade to a kernel version that enables cgroup v2 by default.

The kubelet automatically detects that the OS is running on cgroup v2 and performs accordingly with no additional configuration required.

There should not be any noticeable difference in the user experience when switching to cgroup v2, unless users are accessing the cgroup file system directly, either on the node or from within the containers.

cgroup v2 uses a different API than cgroup v1, so if there are any applications that directly access the cgroup file system, they need to be updated to newer versions that support cgroup v2. For example:

  • Some third-party monitoring and security agents may depend on the cgroup filesystem. Update these agents to versions that support cgroup v2.
  • If you run cAdvisor as a stand-alone DaemonSet for monitoring pods and containers, update it to v0.43.0 or later.
  • If you deploy Java applications, prefer to use versions which fully support cgroup v2:
  • If you are using the uber-go/automaxprocs package, make sure the version you use is v1.5.1 or higher.

Identify the cgroup version on Linux Nodes

The cgroup version depends on the Linux distribution being used and the default cgroup version configured on the OS. To check which cgroup version your distribution uses, run the stat -fc %T /sys/fs/cgroup/ command on the node:

stat -fc %T /sys/fs/cgroup/

For cgroup v2, the output is cgroup2fs.

For cgroup v1, the output is tmpfs.

What's next

2.7 - Container Runtime Interface (CRI)

The CRI is a plugin interface which enables the kubelet to use a wide variety of container runtimes, without having a need to recompile the cluster components.

You need a working container runtime on each Node in your cluster, so that the kubelet can launch Pods and their containers.

The Container Runtime Interface (CRI) is the main protocol for the communication between the kubelet and Container Runtime.

The Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface (CRI) defines the main gRPC protocol for the communication between the node components kubelet and container runtime.

The API

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.23 [stable]

The kubelet acts as a client when connecting to the container runtime via gRPC. The runtime and image service endpoints have to be available in the container runtime, which can be configured separately within the kubelet by using the --image-service-endpoint command line flags.

For Kubernetes v1.32, the kubelet prefers to use CRI v1. If a container runtime does not support v1 of the CRI, then the kubelet tries to negotiate any older supported version. The v1.32 kubelet can also negotiate CRI v1alpha2, but this version is considered as deprecated. If the kubelet cannot negotiate a supported CRI version, the kubelet gives up and doesn't register as a node.

Upgrading

When upgrading Kubernetes, the kubelet tries to automatically select the latest CRI version on restart of the component. If that fails, then the fallback will take place as mentioned above. If a gRPC re-dial was required because the container runtime has been upgraded, then the container runtime must also support the initially selected version or the redial is expected to fail. This requires a restart of the kubelet.

What's next

2.8 - Garbage Collection

Garbage collection is a collective term for the various mechanisms Kubernetes uses to clean up cluster resources. This allows the clean up of resources like the following:

Owners and dependents

Many objects in Kubernetes link to each other through owner references. Owner references tell the control plane which objects are dependent on others. Kubernetes uses owner references to give the control plane, and other API clients, the opportunity to clean up related resources before deleting an object. In most cases, Kubernetes manages owner references automatically.

Ownership is different from the labels and selectors mechanism that some resources also use. For example, consider a Service that creates EndpointSlice objects. The Service uses labels to allow the control plane to determine which EndpointSlice objects are used for that Service. In addition to the labels, each EndpointSlice that is managed on behalf of a Service has an owner reference. Owner references help different parts of Kubernetes avoid interfering with objects they don’t control.

Cascading deletion

Kubernetes checks for and deletes objects that no longer have owner references, like the pods left behind when you delete a ReplicaSet. When you delete an object, you can control whether Kubernetes deletes the object's dependents automatically, in a process called cascading deletion. There are two types of cascading deletion, as follows:

  • Foreground cascading deletion
  • Background cascading deletion

You can also control how and when garbage collection deletes resources that have owner references using Kubernetes finalizers.

Foreground cascading deletion

In foreground cascading deletion, the owner object you're deleting first enters a deletion in progress state. In this state, the following happens to the owner object:

  • The Kubernetes API server sets the object's metadata.deletionTimestamp field to the time the object was marked for deletion.
  • The Kubernetes API server also sets the metadata.finalizers field to foregroundDeletion.
  • The object remains visible through the Kubernetes API until the deletion process is complete.

After the owner object enters the deletion in progress state, the controller deletes dependents it knows about. After deleting all the dependent objects it knows about, the controller deletes the owner object. At this point, the object is no longer visible in the Kubernetes API.

During foreground cascading deletion, the only dependents that block owner deletion are those that have the ownerReference.blockOwnerDeletion=true field and are in the garbage collection controller cache. The garbage collection controller cache may not contain objects whose resource type cannot be listed / watched successfully, or objects that are created concurrent with deletion of an owner object. See Use foreground cascading deletion to learn more.

Background cascading deletion

In background cascading deletion, the Kubernetes API server deletes the owner object immediately and the garbage collector controller (custom or default) cleans up the dependent objects in the background. If a finalizer exists, it ensures that objects are not deleted until all necessary clean-up tasks are completed. By default, Kubernetes uses background cascading deletion unless you manually use foreground deletion or choose to orphan the dependent objects.

See Use background cascading deletion to learn more.

Orphaned dependents

When Kubernetes deletes an owner object, the dependents left behind are called orphan objects. By default, Kubernetes deletes dependent objects. To learn how to override this behaviour, see Delete owner objects and orphan dependents.

Garbage collection of unused containers and images

The kubelet performs garbage collection on unused images every five minutes and on unused containers every minute. You should avoid using external garbage collection tools, as these can break the kubelet behavior and remove containers that should exist.

To configure options for unused container and image garbage collection, tune the kubelet using a configuration file and change the parameters related to garbage collection using the KubeletConfiguration resource type.

Container image lifecycle

Kubernetes manages the lifecycle of all images through its image manager, which is part of the kubelet, with the cooperation of cadvisor. The kubelet considers the following disk usage limits when making garbage collection decisions:

  • HighThresholdPercent
  • LowThresholdPercent

Disk usage above the configured HighThresholdPercent value triggers garbage collection, which deletes images in order based on the last time they were used, starting with the oldest first. The kubelet deletes images until disk usage reaches the LowThresholdPercent value.

Garbage collection for unused container images

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.30 [beta] (enabled by default: true)

As a beta feature, you can specify the maximum time a local image can be unused for, regardless of disk usage. This is a kubelet setting that you configure for each node.

To configure the setting, you need to set a value for the imageMaximumGCAge field in the kubelet configuration file.

The value is specified as a Kubernetes duration. See duration in the glossary for more details.

For example, you can set the configuration field to 12h45m, which means 12 hours and 45 minutes.

Container garbage collection

The kubelet garbage collects unused containers based on the following variables, which you can define:

  • MinAge: the minimum age at which the kubelet can garbage collect a container. Disable by setting to 0.
  • MaxPerPodContainer: the maximum number of dead containers each Pod can have. Disable by setting to less than 0.
  • MaxContainers: the maximum number of dead containers the cluster can have. Disable by setting to less than 0.

In addition to these variables, the kubelet garbage collects unidentified and deleted containers, typically starting with the oldest first.

MaxPerPodContainer and MaxContainers may potentially conflict with each other in situations where retaining the maximum number of containers per Pod (MaxPerPodContainer) would go outside the allowable total of global dead containers (MaxContainers). In this situation, the kubelet adjusts MaxPerPodContainer to address the conflict. A worst-case scenario would be to downgrade MaxPerPodContainer to 1 and evict the oldest containers. Additionally, containers owned by pods that have been deleted are removed once they are older than MinAge.

Configuring garbage collection

You can tune garbage collection of resources by configuring options specific to the controllers managing those resources. The following pages show you how to configure garbage collection:

What's next

2.9 - Mixed Version Proxy

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.28 [alpha] (enabled by default: false)

Kubernetes 1.32 includes an alpha feature that lets an API Server proxy a resource requests to other peer API servers. This is useful when there are multiple API servers running different versions of Kubernetes in one cluster (for example, during a long-lived rollout to a new release of Kubernetes).

This enables cluster administrators to configure highly available clusters that can be upgraded more safely, by directing resource requests (made during the upgrade) to the correct kube-apiserver. That proxying prevents users from seeing unexpected 404 Not Found errors that stem from the upgrade process.

This mechanism is called the Mixed Version Proxy.

Enabling the Mixed Version Proxy

Ensure that UnknownVersionInteroperabilityProxy feature gate is enabled when you start the API Server:

kube-apiserver \
--feature-gates=UnknownVersionInteroperabilityProxy=true \
# required command line arguments for this feature
--peer-ca-file=<path to kube-apiserver CA cert>
--proxy-client-cert-file=<path to aggregator proxy cert>,
--proxy-client-key-file=<path to aggregator proxy key>,
--requestheader-client-ca-file=<path to aggregator CA cert>,
# requestheader-allowed-names can be set to blank to allow any Common Name
--requestheader-allowed-names=<valid Common Names to verify proxy client cert against>,

# optional flags for this feature
--peer-advertise-ip=`IP of this kube-apiserver that should be used by peers to proxy requests`
--peer-advertise-port=`port of this kube-apiserver that should be used by peers to proxy requests`

# …and other flags as usual

Proxy transport and authentication between API servers

  • The source kube-apiserver reuses the existing APIserver client authentication flags --proxy-client-cert-file and --proxy-client-key-file to present its identity that will be verified by its peer (the destination kube-apiserver). The destination API server verifies that peer connection based on the configuration you specify using the --requestheader-client-ca-file command line argument.

  • To authenticate the destination server's serving certs, you must configure a certificate authority bundle by specifying the --peer-ca-file command line argument to the source API server.

Configuration for peer API server connectivity

To set the network location of a kube-apiserver that peers will use to proxy requests, use the --peer-advertise-ip and --peer-advertise-port command line arguments to kube-apiserver or specify these fields in the API server configuration file. If these flags are unspecified, peers will use the value from either --advertise-address or --bind-address command line argument to the kube-apiserver. If those too, are unset, the host's default interface is used.

Mixed version proxying

When you enable mixed version proxying, the aggregation layer loads a special filter that does the following:

  • When a resource request reaches an API server that cannot serve that API (either because it is at a version pre-dating the introduction of the API or the API is turned off on the API server) the API server attempts to send the request to a peer API server that can serve the requested API. It does so by identifying API groups / versions / resources that the local server doesn't recognise, and tries to proxy those requests to a peer API server that is capable of handling the request.
  • If the peer API server fails to respond, the source API server responds with 503 ("Service Unavailable") error.

How it works under the hood

When an API Server receives a resource request, it first checks which API servers can serve the requested resource. This check happens using the internal StorageVersion API.

  • If the resource is known to the API server that received the request (for example, GET /api/v1/pods/some-pod), the request is handled locally.

  • If there is no internal StorageVersion object found for the requested resource (for example, GET /my-api/v1/my-resource) and the configured APIService specifies proxying to an extension API server, that proxying happens following the usual flow for extension APIs.

  • If a valid internal StorageVersion object is found for the requested resource (for example, GET /batch/v1/jobs) and the API server trying to handle the request (the handling API server) has the batch API disabled, then the handling API server fetches the peer API servers that do serve the relevant API group / version / resource (api/v1/batch in this case) using the information in the fetched StorageVersion object. The handling API server then proxies the request to one of the matching peer kube-apiservers that are aware of the requested resource.

    • If there is no peer known for that API group / version / resource, the handling API server passes the request to its own handler chain which should eventually return a 404 ("Not Found") response.

    • If the handling API server has identified and selected a peer API server, but that peer fails to respond (for reasons such as network connectivity issues, or a data race between the request being received and a controller registering the peer's info into the control plane), then the handling API server responds with a 503 ("Service Unavailable") error.

3 - Containers

Technology for packaging an application along with its runtime dependencies.

This page will discuss containers and container images, as well as their use in operations and solution development.

The word container is an overloaded term. Whenever you use the word, check whether your audience uses the same definition.

Each container that you run is repeatable; the standardization from having dependencies included means that you get the same behavior wherever you run it.

Containers decouple applications from the underlying host infrastructure. This makes deployment easier in different cloud or OS environments.

Each node in a Kubernetes cluster runs the containers that form the Pods assigned to that node. Containers in a Pod are co-located and co-scheduled to run on the same node.

Container images

A container image is a ready-to-run software package containing everything needed to run an application: the code and any runtime it requires, application and system libraries, and default values for any essential settings.

Containers are intended to be stateless and immutable: you should not change the code of a container that is already running. If you have a containerized application and want to make changes, the correct process is to build a new image that includes the change, then recreate the container to start from the updated image.

Container runtimes

A fundamental component that empowers Kubernetes to run containers effectively. It is responsible for managing the execution and lifecycle of containers within the Kubernetes environment.

Kubernetes supports container runtimes such as containerd, CRI-O, and any other implementation of the Kubernetes CRI (Container Runtime Interface).

Usually, you can allow your cluster to pick the default container runtime for a Pod. If you need to use more than one container runtime in your cluster, you can specify the RuntimeClass for a Pod to make sure that Kubernetes runs those containers using a particular container runtime.

You can also use RuntimeClass to run different Pods with the same container runtime but with different settings.

3.1 - Images

A container image represents binary data that encapsulates an application and all its software dependencies. Container images are executable software bundles that can run standalone and that make very well defined assumptions about their runtime environment.

You typically create a container image of your application and push it to a registry before referring to it in a Pod.

This page provides an outline of the container image concept.

Image names

Container images are usually given a name such as pause, example/mycontainer, or kube-apiserver. Images can also include a registry hostname; for example: fictional.registry.example/imagename, and possibly a port number as well; for example: fictional.registry.example:10443/imagename.

If you don't specify a registry hostname, Kubernetes assumes that you mean the Docker public registry. You can change this behaviour by setting default image registry in container runtime configuration.

After the image name part you can add a tag or digest (in the same way you would when using with commands like docker or podman). Tags let you identify different versions of the same series of images. Digests are a unique identifier for a specific version of an image. Digests are hashes of the image's content, and are immutable. Tags can be moved to point to different images, but digests are fixed.

Image tags consist of lowercase and uppercase letters, digits, underscores (_), periods (.), and dashes (-). It can be up to 128 characters long. And must follow the next regex pattern: [a-zA-Z0-9_][a-zA-Z0-9._-]{0,127} You can read more about and find validation regex in the OCI Distribution Specification. If you don't specify a tag, Kubernetes assumes you mean the tag latest.

Image digests consists of a hash algorithm (such as sha256) and a hash value. For example: sha256:1ff6c18fbef2045af6b9c16bf034cc421a29027b800e4f9b68ae9b1cb3e9ae07 You can find more information about digests format in the OCI Image Specification.

Some image name examples that Kubernetes can use are:

  • busybox - Image name only, no tag or digest. Kubernetes will use Docker public registry and latest tag. (Same as docker.io/library/busybox:latest)
  • busybox:1.32.0 - Image name with tag. Kubernetes will use Docker public registry. (Same as docker.io/library/busybox:1.32.0)
  • registry.k8s.io/pause:latest - Image name with a custom registry and latest tag.
  • registry.k8s.io/pause:3.5 - Image name with a custom registry and non-latest tag.
  • registry.k8s.io/pause@sha256:1ff6c18fbef2045af6b9c16bf034cc421a29027b800e4f9b68ae9b1cb3e9ae07 - Image name with digest.
  • registry.k8s.io/pause:3.5@sha256:1ff6c18fbef2045af6b9c16bf034cc421a29027b800e4f9b68ae9b1cb3e9ae07 - Image name with tag and digest. Only digest will be used for pulling.

Updating images

When you first create a Deployment, StatefulSet, Pod, or other object that includes a Pod template, then by default the pull policy of all containers in that pod will be set to IfNotPresent if it is not explicitly specified. This policy causes the kubelet to skip pulling an image if it already exists.

Image pull policy

The imagePullPolicy for a container and the tag of the image affect when the kubelet attempts to pull (download) the specified image.

Here's a list of the values you can set for imagePullPolicy and the effects these values have:

IfNotPresent
the image is pulled only if it is not already present locally.
Always
every time the kubelet launches a container, the kubelet queries the container image registry to resolve the name to an image digest. If the kubelet has a container image with that exact digest cached locally, the kubelet uses its cached image; otherwise, the kubelet pulls the image with the resolved digest, and uses that image to launch the container.
Never
the kubelet does not try fetching the image. If the image is somehow already present locally, the kubelet attempts to start the container; otherwise, startup fails. See pre-pulled images for more details.

The caching semantics of the underlying image provider make even imagePullPolicy: Always efficient, as long as the registry is reliably accessible. Your container runtime can notice that the image layers already exist on the node so that they don't need to be downloaded again.

To make sure the Pod always uses the same version of a container image, you can specify the image's digest; replace <image-name>:<tag> with <image-name>@<digest> (for example, image@sha256:45b23dee08af5e43a7fea6c4cf9c25ccf269ee113168c19722f87876677c5cb2).

When using image tags, if the image registry were to change the code that the tag on that image represents, you might end up with a mix of Pods running the old and new code. An image digest uniquely identifies a specific version of the image, so Kubernetes runs the same code every time it starts a container with that image name and digest specified. Specifying an image by digest fixes the code that you run so that a change at the registry cannot lead to that mix of versions.

There are third-party admission controllers that mutate Pods (and pod templates) when they are created, so that the running workload is defined based on an image digest rather than a tag. That might be useful if you want to make sure that all your workload is running the same code no matter what tag changes happen at the registry.

Default image pull policy

When you (or a controller) submit a new Pod to the API server, your cluster sets the imagePullPolicy field when specific conditions are met:

  • if you omit the imagePullPolicy field, and you specify the digest for the container image, the imagePullPolicy is automatically set to IfNotPresent.
  • if you omit the imagePullPolicy field, and the tag for the container image is :latest, imagePullPolicy is automatically set to Always;
  • if you omit the imagePullPolicy field, and you don't specify the tag for the container image, imagePullPolicy is automatically set to Always;
  • if you omit the imagePullPolicy field, and you specify the tag for the container image that isn't :latest, the imagePullPolicy is automatically set to IfNotPresent.

Required image pull

If you would like to always force a pull, you can do one of the following:

  • Set the imagePullPolicy of the container to Always.
  • Omit the imagePullPolicy and use :latest as the tag for the image to use; Kubernetes will set the policy to Always when you submit the Pod.
  • Omit the imagePullPolicy and the tag for the image to use; Kubernetes will set the policy to Always when you submit the Pod.
  • Enable the AlwaysPullImages admission controller.

ImagePullBackOff

When a kubelet starts creating containers for a Pod using a container runtime, it might be possible the container is in Waiting state because of ImagePullBackOff.

The status ImagePullBackOff means that a container could not start because Kubernetes could not pull a container image (for reasons such as invalid image name, or pulling from a private registry without imagePullSecret). The BackOff part indicates that Kubernetes will keep trying to pull the image, with an increasing back-off delay.

Kubernetes raises the delay between each attempt until it reaches a compiled-in limit, which is 300 seconds (5 minutes).

Image pull per runtime class

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [alpha] (enabled by default: false)
Kubernetes includes alpha support for performing image pulls based on the RuntimeClass of a Pod.

If you enable the RuntimeClassInImageCriApi feature gate, the kubelet references container images by a tuple of (image name, runtime handler) rather than just the image name or digest. Your container runtime may adapt its behavior based on the selected runtime handler. Pulling images based on runtime class will be helpful for VM based containers like windows hyperV containers.

Serial and parallel image pulls

By default, kubelet pulls images serially. In other words, kubelet sends only one image pull request to the image service at a time. Other image pull requests have to wait until the one being processed is complete.

Nodes make image pull decisions in isolation. Even when you use serialized image pulls, two different nodes can pull the same image in parallel.

If you would like to enable parallel image pulls, you can set the field serializeImagePulls to false in the kubelet configuration. With serializeImagePulls set to false, image pull requests will be sent to the image service immediately, and multiple images will be pulled at the same time.

When enabling parallel image pulls, please make sure the image service of your container runtime can handle parallel image pulls.

The kubelet never pulls multiple images in parallel on behalf of one Pod. For example, if you have a Pod that has an init container and an application container, the image pulls for the two containers will not be parallelized. However, if you have two Pods that use different images, the kubelet pulls the images in parallel on behalf of the two different Pods, when parallel image pulls is enabled.

Maximum parallel image pulls

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.32 [beta]

When serializeImagePulls is set to false, the kubelet defaults to no limit on the maximum number of images being pulled at the same time. If you would like to limit the number of parallel image pulls, you can set the field maxParallelImagePulls in kubelet configuration. With maxParallelImagePulls set to n, only n images can be pulled at the same time, and any image pull beyond n will have to wait until at least one ongoing image pull is complete.

Limiting the number parallel image pulls would prevent image pulling from consuming too much network bandwidth or disk I/O, when parallel image pulling is enabled.

You can set maxParallelImagePulls to a positive number that is greater than or equal to 1. If you set maxParallelImagePulls to be greater than or equal to 2, you must set the serializeImagePulls to false. The kubelet will fail to start with invalid maxParallelImagePulls settings.

Multi-architecture images with image indexes

As well as providing binary images, a container registry can also serve a container image index. An image index can point to multiple image manifests for architecture-specific versions of a container. The idea is that you can have a name for an image (for example: pause, example/mycontainer, kube-apiserver) and allow different systems to fetch the right binary image for the machine architecture they are using.

Kubernetes itself typically names container images with a suffix -$(ARCH). For backward compatibility, please generate the older images with suffixes. The idea is to generate say pause image which has the manifest for all the arch(es) and say pause-amd64 which is backwards compatible for older configurations or YAML files which may have hard coded the images with suffixes.

Using a private registry

Private registries may require keys to read images from them.
Credentials can be provided in several ways:

  • Configuring Nodes to Authenticate to a Private Registry
    • all pods can read any configured private registries
    • requires node configuration by cluster administrator
  • Kubelet Credential Provider to dynamically fetch credentials for private registries
    • kubelet can be configured to use credential provider exec plugin for the respective private registry.
  • Pre-pulled Images
    • all pods can use any images cached on a node
    • requires root access to all nodes to set up
  • Specifying ImagePullSecrets on a Pod
    • only pods which provide their own keys can access the private registry
  • Vendor-specific or local extensions
    • if you're using a custom node configuration, you (or your cloud provider) can implement your mechanism for authenticating the node to the container registry.

These options are explained in more detail below.

Configuring nodes to authenticate to a private registry

Specific instructions for setting credentials depends on the container runtime and registry you chose to use. You should refer to your solution's documentation for the most accurate information.

For an example of configuring a private container image registry, see the Pull an Image from a Private Registry task. That example uses a private registry in Docker Hub.

Kubelet credential provider for authenticated image pulls

You can configure the kubelet to invoke a plugin binary to dynamically fetch registry credentials for a container image. This is the most robust and versatile way to fetch credentials for private registries, but also requires kubelet-level configuration to enable.

See Configure a kubelet image credential provider for more details.

Interpretation of config.json

The interpretation of config.json varies between the original Docker implementation and the Kubernetes interpretation. In Docker, the auths keys can only specify root URLs, whereas Kubernetes allows glob URLs as well as prefix-matched paths. The only limitation is that glob patterns (*) have to include the dot (.) for each subdomain. The amount of matched subdomains has to be equal to the amount of glob patterns (*.), for example:

  • *.kubernetes.io will not match kubernetes.io, but abc.kubernetes.io
  • *.*.kubernetes.io will not match abc.kubernetes.io, but abc.def.kubernetes.io
  • prefix.*.io will match prefix.kubernetes.io
  • *-good.kubernetes.io will match prefix-good.kubernetes.io

This means that a config.json like this is valid:

{
    "auths": {
        "my-registry.io/images": { "auth": "…" },
        "*.my-registry.io/images": { "auth": "…" }
    }
}

Image pull operations would now pass the credentials to the CRI container runtime for every valid pattern. For example the following container image names would match successfully:

  • my-registry.io/images
  • my-registry.io/images/my-image
  • my-registry.io/images/another-image
  • sub.my-registry.io/images/my-image

But not:

  • a.sub.my-registry.io/images/my-image
  • a.b.sub.my-registry.io/images/my-image

The kubelet performs image pulls sequentially for every found credential. This means, that multiple entries in config.json for different paths are possible, too:

{
    "auths": {
        "my-registry.io/images": {
            "auth": "…"
        },
        "my-registry.io/images/subpath": {
            "auth": "…"
        }
    }
}

If now a container specifies an image my-registry.io/images/subpath/my-image to be pulled, then the kubelet will try to download them from both authentication sources if one of them fails.

Pre-pulled images

By default, the kubelet tries to pull each image from the specified registry. However, if the imagePullPolicy property of the container is set to IfNotPresent or Never, then a local image is used (preferentially or exclusively, respectively).

If you want to rely on pre-pulled images as a substitute for registry authentication, you must ensure all nodes in the cluster have the same pre-pulled images.

This can be used to preload certain images for speed or as an alternative to authenticating to a private registry.

All pods will have read access to any pre-pulled images.

Specifying imagePullSecrets on a Pod

Kubernetes supports specifying container image registry keys on a Pod. imagePullSecrets must all be in the same namespace as the Pod. The referenced Secrets must be of type kubernetes.io/dockercfg or kubernetes.io/dockerconfigjson.

Creating a Secret with a Docker config

You need to know the username, registry password and client email address for authenticating to the registry, as well as its hostname. Run the following command, substituting the appropriate uppercase values:

kubectl create secret docker-registry <name> \
  --docker-server=DOCKER_REGISTRY_SERVER \
  --docker-username=DOCKER_USER \
  --docker-password=DOCKER_PASSWORD \
  --docker-email=DOCKER_EMAIL

If you already have a Docker credentials file then, rather than using the above command, you can import the credentials file as a Kubernetes Secrets.
Create a Secret based on existing Docker credentials explains how to set this up.

This is particularly useful if you are using multiple private container registries, as kubectl create secret docker-registry creates a Secret that only works with a single private registry.

Referring to an imagePullSecrets on a Pod

Now, you can create pods which reference that secret by adding an imagePullSecrets section to a Pod definition. Each item in the imagePullSecrets array can only reference a Secret in the same namespace.

For example:

cat <<EOF > pod.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: foo
  namespace: awesomeapps
spec:
  containers:
    - name: foo
      image: janedoe/awesomeapp:v1
  imagePullSecrets:
    - name: myregistrykey
EOF

cat <<EOF >> ./kustomization.yaml
resources:
- pod.yaml
EOF

This needs to be done for each pod that is using a private registry.

However, setting of this field can be automated by setting the imagePullSecrets in a ServiceAccount resource.

Check Add ImagePullSecrets to a Service Account for detailed instructions.

You can use this in conjunction with a per-node .docker/config.json. The credentials will be merged.

Use cases

There are a number of solutions for configuring private registries. Here are some common use cases and suggested solutions.

  1. Cluster running only non-proprietary (e.g. open-source) images. No need to hide images.
    • Use public images from a public registry
      • No configuration required.
      • Some cloud providers automatically cache or mirror public images, which improves availability and reduces the time to pull images.
  2. Cluster running some proprietary images which should be hidden to those outside the company, but visible to all cluster users.
    • Use a hosted private registry
      • Manual configuration may be required on the nodes that need to access to private registry
    • Or, run an internal private registry behind your firewall with open read access.
      • No Kubernetes configuration is required.
    • Use a hosted container image registry service that controls image access
      • It will work better with cluster autoscaling than manual node configuration.
    • Or, on a cluster where changing the node configuration is inconvenient, use imagePullSecrets.
  3. Cluster with proprietary images, a few of which require stricter access control.
    • Ensure AlwaysPullImages admission controller is active. Otherwise, all Pods potentially have access to all images.
    • Move sensitive data into a "Secret" resource, instead of packaging it in an image.
  4. A multi-tenant cluster where each tenant needs own private registry.
    • Ensure AlwaysPullImages admission controller is active. Otherwise, all Pods of all tenants potentially have access to all images.
    • Run a private registry with authorization required.
    • Generate registry credential for each tenant, put into secret, and populate secret to each tenant namespace.
    • The tenant adds that secret to imagePullSecrets of each namespace.

If you need access to multiple registries, you can create one secret for each registry.

Legacy built-in kubelet credential provider

In older versions of Kubernetes, the kubelet had a direct integration with cloud provider credentials. This gave it the ability to dynamically fetch credentials for image registries.

There were three built-in implementations of the kubelet credential provider integration: ACR (Azure Container Registry), ECR (Elastic Container Registry), and GCR (Google Container Registry).

For more information on the legacy mechanism, read the documentation for the version of Kubernetes that you are using. Kubernetes v1.26 through to v1.32 do not include the legacy mechanism, so you would need to either:

  • configure a kubelet image credential provider on each node
  • specify image pull credentials using imagePullSecrets and at least one Secret

What's next

3.2 - Container Environment

This page describes the resources available to Containers in the Container environment.

Container environment

The Kubernetes Container environment provides several important resources to Containers:

  • A filesystem, which is a combination of an image and one or more volumes.
  • Information about the Container itself.
  • Information about other objects in the cluster.

Container information

The hostname of a Container is the name of the Pod in which the Container is running. It is available through the hostname command or the gethostname function call in libc.

The Pod name and namespace are available as environment variables through the downward API.

User defined environment variables from the Pod definition are also available to the Container, as are any environment variables specified statically in the container image.

Cluster information

A list of all services that were running when a Container was created is available to that Container as environment variables. This list is limited to services within the same namespace as the new Container's Pod and Kubernetes control plane services.

For a service named foo that maps to a Container named bar, the following variables are defined:

FOO_SERVICE_HOST=<the host the service is running on>
FOO_SERVICE_PORT=<the port the service is running on>

Services have dedicated IP addresses and are available to the Container via DNS, if DNS addon is enabled. 

What's next

3.3 - Runtime Class

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.20 [stable]

This page describes the RuntimeClass resource and runtime selection mechanism.

RuntimeClass is a feature for selecting the container runtime configuration. The container runtime configuration is used to run a Pod's containers.

Motivation

You can set a different RuntimeClass between different Pods to provide a balance of performance versus security. For example, if part of your workload deserves a high level of information security assurance, you might choose to schedule those Pods so that they run in a container runtime that uses hardware virtualization. You'd then benefit from the extra isolation of the alternative runtime, at the expense of some additional overhead.

You can also use RuntimeClass to run different Pods with the same container runtime but with different settings.

Setup

  1. Configure the CRI implementation on nodes (runtime dependent)
  2. Create the corresponding RuntimeClass resources

1. Configure the CRI implementation on nodes

The configurations available through RuntimeClass are Container Runtime Interface (CRI) implementation dependent. See the corresponding documentation (below) for your CRI implementation for how to configure.

The configurations have a corresponding handler name, referenced by the RuntimeClass. The handler must be a valid DNS label name.

2. Create the corresponding RuntimeClass resources

The configurations setup in step 1 should each have an associated handler name, which identifies the configuration. For each handler, create a corresponding RuntimeClass object.

The RuntimeClass resource currently only has 2 significant fields: the RuntimeClass name (metadata.name) and the handler (handler). The object definition looks like this:

# RuntimeClass is defined in the node.k8s.io API group
apiVersion: node.k8s.io/v1
kind: RuntimeClass
metadata:
  # The name the RuntimeClass will be referenced by.
  # RuntimeClass is a non-namespaced resource.
  name: myclass 
# The name of the corresponding CRI configuration
handler: myconfiguration

The name of a RuntimeClass object must be a valid DNS subdomain name.

Usage

Once RuntimeClasses are configured for the cluster, you can specify a runtimeClassName in the Pod spec to use it. For example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: mypod
spec:
  runtimeClassName: myclass
  # ...

This will instruct the kubelet to use the named RuntimeClass to run this pod. If the named RuntimeClass does not exist, or the CRI cannot run the corresponding handler, the pod will enter the Failed terminal phase. Look for a corresponding event for an error message.

If no runtimeClassName is specified, the default RuntimeHandler will be used, which is equivalent to the behavior when the RuntimeClass feature is disabled.

CRI Configuration

For more details on setting up CRI runtimes, see CRI installation.

containerd

Runtime handlers are configured through containerd's configuration at /etc/containerd/config.toml. Valid handlers are configured under the runtimes section:

[plugins."io.containerd.grpc.v1.cri".containerd.runtimes.${HANDLER_NAME}]

See containerd's config documentation for more details:

CRI-O

Runtime handlers are configured through CRI-O's configuration at /etc/crio/crio.conf. Valid handlers are configured under the crio.runtime table:

[crio.runtime.runtimes.${HANDLER_NAME}]
  runtime_path = "${PATH_TO_BINARY}"

See CRI-O's config documentation for more details.

Scheduling

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.16 [beta]

By specifying the scheduling field for a RuntimeClass, you can set constraints to ensure that Pods running with this RuntimeClass are scheduled to nodes that support it. If scheduling is not set, this RuntimeClass is assumed to be supported by all nodes.

To ensure pods land on nodes supporting a specific RuntimeClass, that set of nodes should have a common label which is then selected by the runtimeclass.scheduling.nodeSelector field. The RuntimeClass's nodeSelector is merged with the pod's nodeSelector in admission, effectively taking the intersection of the set of nodes selected by each. If there is a conflict, the pod will be rejected.

If the supported nodes are tainted to prevent other RuntimeClass pods from running on the node, you can add tolerations to the RuntimeClass. As with the nodeSelector, the tolerations are merged with the pod's tolerations in admission, effectively taking the union of the set of nodes tolerated by each.

To learn more about configuring the node selector and tolerations, see Assigning Pods to Nodes.

Pod Overhead

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

You can specify overhead resources that are associated with running a Pod. Declaring overhead allows the cluster (including the scheduler) to account for it when making decisions about Pods and resources.

Pod overhead is defined in RuntimeClass through the overhead field. Through the use of this field, you can specify the overhead of running pods utilizing this RuntimeClass and ensure these overheads are accounted for in Kubernetes.

What's next

3.4 - Container Lifecycle Hooks

This page describes how kubelet managed Containers can use the Container lifecycle hook framework to run code triggered by events during their management lifecycle.

Overview

Analogous to many programming language frameworks that have component lifecycle hooks, such as Angular, Kubernetes provides Containers with lifecycle hooks. The hooks enable Containers to be aware of events in their management lifecycle and run code implemented in a handler when the corresponding lifecycle hook is executed.

Container hooks

There are two hooks that are exposed to Containers:

PostStart

This hook is executed immediately after a container is created. However, there is no guarantee that the hook will execute before the container ENTRYPOINT. No parameters are passed to the handler.

PreStop

This hook is called immediately before a container is terminated due to an API request or management event such as a liveness/startup probe failure, preemption, resource contention and others. A call to the PreStop hook fails if the container is already in a terminated or completed state and the hook must complete before the TERM signal to stop the container can be sent. The Pod's termination grace period countdown begins before the PreStop hook is executed, so regardless of the outcome of the handler, the container will eventually terminate within the Pod's termination grace period. No parameters are passed to the handler.

A more detailed description of the termination behavior can be found in Termination of Pods.

Hook handler implementations

Containers can access a hook by implementing and registering a handler for that hook. There are three types of hook handlers that can be implemented for Containers:

  • Exec - Executes a specific command, such as pre-stop.sh, inside the cgroups and namespaces of the Container. Resources consumed by the command are counted against the Container.
  • HTTP - Executes an HTTP request against a specific endpoint on the Container.
  • Sleep - Pauses the container for a specified duration. This is a beta-level feature default enabled by the PodLifecycleSleepAction feature gate.

Hook handler execution

When a Container lifecycle management hook is called, the Kubernetes management system executes the handler according to the hook action, httpGet , tcpSocket and sleep are executed by the kubelet process, and exec is executed in the container.

The PostStart hook handler call is initiated when a container is created, meaning the container ENTRYPOINT and the PostStart hook are triggered simultaneously. However, if the PostStart hook takes too long to execute or if it hangs, it can prevent the container from transitioning to a running state.

PreStop hooks are not executed asynchronously from the signal to stop the Container; the hook must complete its execution before the TERM signal can be sent. If a PreStop hook hangs during execution, the Pod's phase will be Terminating and remain there until the Pod is killed after its terminationGracePeriodSeconds expires. This grace period applies to the total time it takes for both the PreStop hook to execute and for the Container to stop normally. If, for example, terminationGracePeriodSeconds is 60, and the hook takes 55 seconds to complete, and the Container takes 10 seconds to stop normally after receiving the signal, then the Container will be killed before it can stop normally, since terminationGracePeriodSeconds is less than the total time (55+10) it takes for these two things to happen.

If either a PostStart or PreStop hook fails, it kills the Container.

Users should make their hook handlers as lightweight as possible. There are cases, however, when long running commands make sense, such as when saving state prior to stopping a Container.

Hook delivery guarantees

Hook delivery is intended to be at least once, which means that a hook may be called multiple times for any given event, such as for PostStart or PreStop. It is up to the hook implementation to handle this correctly.

Generally, only single deliveries are made. If, for example, an HTTP hook receiver is down and is unable to take traffic, there is no attempt to resend. In some rare cases, however, double delivery may occur. For instance, if a kubelet restarts in the middle of sending a hook, the hook might be resent after the kubelet comes back up.

Debugging Hook handlers

The logs for a Hook handler are not exposed in Pod events. If a handler fails for some reason, it broadcasts an event. For PostStart, this is the FailedPostStartHook event, and for PreStop, this is the FailedPreStopHook event. To generate a failed FailedPostStartHook event yourself, modify the lifecycle-events.yaml file to change the postStart command to "badcommand" and apply it. Here is some example output of the resulting events you see from running kubectl describe pod lifecycle-demo:

Events:
  Type     Reason               Age              From               Message
  ----     ------               ----             ----               -------
  Normal   Scheduled            7s               default-scheduler  Successfully assigned default/lifecycle-demo to ip-XXX-XXX-XX-XX.us-east-2...
  Normal   Pulled               6s               kubelet            Successfully pulled image "nginx" in 229.604315ms
  Normal   Pulling              4s (x2 over 6s)  kubelet            Pulling image "nginx"
  Normal   Created              4s (x2 over 5s)  kubelet            Created container lifecycle-demo-container
  Normal   Started              4s (x2 over 5s)  kubelet            Started container lifecycle-demo-container
  Warning  FailedPostStartHook  4s (x2 over 5s)  kubelet            Exec lifecycle hook ([badcommand]) for Container "lifecycle-demo-container" in Pod "lifecycle-demo_default(30229739-9651-4e5a-9a32-a8f1688862db)" failed - error: command 'badcommand' exited with 126: , message: "OCI runtime exec failed: exec failed: container_linux.go:380: starting container process caused: exec: \"badcommand\": executable file not found in $PATH: unknown\r\n"
  Normal   Killing              4s (x2 over 5s)  kubelet            FailedPostStartHook
  Normal   Pulled               4s               kubelet            Successfully pulled image "nginx" in 215.66395ms
  Warning  BackOff              2s (x2 over 3s)  kubelet            Back-off restarting failed container

What's next

4 - Workloads

Understand Pods, the smallest deployable compute object in Kubernetes, and the higher-level abstractions that help you to run them.

A workload is an application running on Kubernetes. Whether your workload is a single component or several that work together, on Kubernetes you run it inside a set of pods. In Kubernetes, a Pod represents a set of running containers on your cluster.

Kubernetes pods have a defined lifecycle. For example, once a pod is running in your cluster then a critical fault on the node where that pod is running means that all the pods on that node fail. Kubernetes treats that level of failure as final: you would need to create a new Pod to recover, even if the node later becomes healthy.

However, to make life considerably easier, you don't need to manage each Pod directly. Instead, you can use workload resources that manage a set of pods on your behalf. These resources configure controllers that make sure the right number of the right kind of pod are running, to match the state you specified.

Kubernetes provides several built-in workload resources:

  • Deployment and ReplicaSet (replacing the legacy resource ReplicationController). Deployment is a good fit for managing a stateless application workload on your cluster, where any Pod in the Deployment is interchangeable and can be replaced if needed.
  • StatefulSet lets you run one or more related Pods that do track state somehow. For example, if your workload records data persistently, you can run a StatefulSet that matches each Pod with a PersistentVolume. Your code, running in the Pods for that StatefulSet, can replicate data to other Pods in the same StatefulSet to improve overall resilience.
  • DaemonSet defines Pods that provide facilities that are local to nodes. Every time you add a node to your cluster that matches the specification in a DaemonSet, the control plane schedules a Pod for that DaemonSet onto the new node. Each pod in a DaemonSet performs a job similar to a system daemon on a classic Unix / POSIX server. A DaemonSet might be fundamental to the operation of your cluster, such as a plugin to run cluster networking, it might help you to manage the node, or it could provide optional behavior that enhances the container platform you are running.
  • Job and CronJob provide different ways to define tasks that run to completion and then stop. You can use a Job to define a task that runs to completion, just once. You can use a CronJob to run the same Job multiple times according a schedule.

In the wider Kubernetes ecosystem, you can find third-party workload resources that provide additional behaviors. Using a custom resource definition, you can add in a third-party workload resource if you want a specific behavior that's not part of Kubernetes' core. For example, if you wanted to run a group of Pods for your application but stop work unless all the Pods are available (perhaps for some high-throughput distributed task), then you can implement or install an extension that does provide that feature.

What's next

As well as reading about each API kind for workload management, you can read how to do specific tasks:

To learn about Kubernetes' mechanisms for separating code from configuration, visit Configuration.

There are two supporting concepts that provide backgrounds about how Kubernetes manages pods for applications:

Once your application is running, you might want to make it available on the internet as a Service or, for web application only, using an Ingress.

4.1 - Pods

Pods are the smallest deployable units of computing that you can create and manage in Kubernetes.

A Pod (as in a pod of whales or pea pod) is a group of one or more containers, with shared storage and network resources, and a specification for how to run the containers. A Pod's contents are always co-located and co-scheduled, and run in a shared context. A Pod models an application-specific "logical host": it contains one or more application containers which are relatively tightly coupled. In non-cloud contexts, applications executed on the same physical or virtual machine are analogous to cloud applications executed on the same logical host.

As well as application containers, a Pod can contain init containers that run during Pod startup. You can also inject ephemeral containers for debugging a running Pod.

What is a Pod?

The shared context of a Pod is a set of Linux namespaces, cgroups, and potentially other facets of isolation - the same things that isolate a container. Within a Pod's context, the individual applications may have further sub-isolations applied.

A Pod is similar to a set of containers with shared namespaces and shared filesystem volumes.

Pods in a Kubernetes cluster are used in two main ways:

  • Pods that run a single container. The "one-container-per-Pod" model is the most common Kubernetes use case; in this case, you can think of a Pod as a wrapper around a single container; Kubernetes manages Pods rather than managing the containers directly.

  • Pods that run multiple containers that need to work together. A Pod can encapsulate an application composed of multiple co-located containers that are tightly coupled and need to share resources. These co-located containers form a single cohesive unit.

    Grouping multiple co-located and co-managed containers in a single Pod is a relatively advanced use case. You should use this pattern only in specific instances in which your containers are tightly coupled.

    You don't need to run multiple containers to provide replication (for resilience or capacity); if you need multiple replicas, see Workload management.

Using Pods

The following is an example of a Pod which consists of a container running the image nginx:1.14.2.

pods/simple-pod.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: nginx
spec:
  containers:
  - name: nginx
    image: nginx:1.14.2
    ports:
    - containerPort: 80

To create the Pod shown above, run the following command:

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/pods/simple-pod.yaml

Pods are generally not created directly and are created using workload resources. See Working with Pods for more information on how Pods are used with workload resources.

Workload resources for managing pods

Usually you don't need to create Pods directly, even singleton Pods. Instead, create them using workload resources such as Deployment or Job. If your Pods need to track state, consider the StatefulSet resource.

Each Pod is meant to run a single instance of a given application. If you want to scale your application horizontally (to provide more overall resources by running more instances), you should use multiple Pods, one for each instance. In Kubernetes, this is typically referred to as replication. Replicated Pods are usually created and managed as a group by a workload resource and its controller.

See Pods and controllers for more information on how Kubernetes uses workload resources, and their controllers, to implement application scaling and auto-healing.

Pods natively provide two kinds of shared resources for their constituent containers: networking and storage.

Working with Pods

You'll rarely create individual Pods directly in Kubernetes—even singleton Pods. This is because Pods are designed as relatively ephemeral, disposable entities. When a Pod gets created (directly by you, or indirectly by a controller), the new Pod is scheduled to run on a Node in your cluster. The Pod remains on that node until the Pod finishes execution, the Pod object is deleted, the Pod is evicted for lack of resources, or the node fails.

The name of a Pod must be a valid DNS subdomain value, but this can produce unexpected results for the Pod hostname. For best compatibility, the name should follow the more restrictive rules for a DNS label.

Pod OS

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable]

You should set the .spec.os.name field to either windows or linux to indicate the OS on which you want the pod to run. These two are the only operating systems supported for now by Kubernetes. In the future, this list may be expanded.

In Kubernetes v1.32, the value of .spec.os.name does not affect how the kube-scheduler picks a node for the Pod to run on. In any cluster where there is more than one operating system for running nodes, you should set the kubernetes.io/os label correctly on each node, and define pods with a nodeSelector based on the operating system label. The kube-scheduler assigns your pod to a node based on other criteria and may or may not succeed in picking a suitable node placement where the node OS is right for the containers in that Pod. The Pod security standards also use this field to avoid enforcing policies that aren't relevant to the operating system.

Pods and controllers

You can use workload resources to create and manage multiple Pods for you. A controller for the resource handles replication and rollout and automatic healing in case of Pod failure. For example, if a Node fails, a controller notices that Pods on that Node have stopped working and creates a replacement Pod. The scheduler places the replacement Pod onto a healthy Node.

Here are some examples of workload resources that manage one or more Pods:

Pod templates

Controllers for workload resources create Pods from a pod template and manage those Pods on your behalf.

PodTemplates are specifications for creating Pods, and are included in workload resources such as Deployments, Jobs, and DaemonSets.

Each controller for a workload resource uses the PodTemplate inside the workload object to make actual Pods. The PodTemplate is part of the desired state of whatever workload resource you used to run your app.

When you create a Pod, you can include environment variables in the Pod template for the containers that run in the Pod.

The sample below is a manifest for a simple Job with a template that starts one container. The container in that Pod prints a message then pauses.

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: hello
spec:
  template:
    # This is the pod template
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: hello
        image: busybox:1.28
        command: ['sh', '-c', 'echo "Hello, Kubernetes!" && sleep 3600']
      restartPolicy: OnFailure
    # The pod template ends here

Modifying the pod template or switching to a new pod template has no direct effect on the Pods that already exist. If you change the pod template for a workload resource, that resource needs to create replacement Pods that use the updated template.

For example, the StatefulSet controller ensures that the running Pods match the current pod template for each StatefulSet object. If you edit the StatefulSet to change its pod template, the StatefulSet starts to create new Pods based on the updated template. Eventually, all of the old Pods are replaced with new Pods, and the update is complete.

Each workload resource implements its own rules for handling changes to the Pod template. If you want to read more about StatefulSet specifically, read Update strategy in the StatefulSet Basics tutorial.

On Nodes, the kubelet does not directly observe or manage any of the details around pod templates and updates; those details are abstracted away. That abstraction and separation of concerns simplifies system semantics, and makes it feasible to extend the cluster's behavior without changing existing code.

Pod update and replacement

As mentioned in the previous section, when the Pod template for a workload resource is changed, the controller creates new Pods based on the updated template instead of updating or patching the existing Pods.

Kubernetes doesn't prevent you from managing Pods directly. It is possible to update some fields of a running Pod, in place. However, Pod update operations like patch, and replace have some limitations:

  • Most of the metadata about a Pod is immutable. For example, you cannot change the namespace, name, uid, or creationTimestamp fields; the generation field is unique. It only accepts updates that increment the field's current value.

  • If the metadata.deletionTimestamp is set, no new entry can be added to the metadata.finalizers list.

  • Pod updates may not change fields other than spec.containers[*].image, spec.initContainers[*].image, spec.activeDeadlineSeconds or spec.tolerations. For spec.tolerations, you can only add new entries.

  • When updating the spec.activeDeadlineSeconds field, two types of updates are allowed:

    1. setting the unassigned field to a positive number;
    2. updating the field from a positive number to a smaller, non-negative number.

Resource sharing and communication

Pods enable data sharing and communication among their constituent containers.

Storage in Pods

A Pod can specify a set of shared storage volumes. All containers in the Pod can access the shared volumes, allowing those containers to share data. Volumes also allow persistent data in a Pod to survive in case one of the containers within needs to be restarted. See Storage for more information on how Kubernetes implements shared storage and makes it available to Pods.

Pod networking

Each Pod is assigned a unique IP address for each address family. Every container in a Pod shares the network namespace, including the IP address and network ports. Inside a Pod (and only then), the containers that belong to the Pod can communicate with one another using localhost. When containers in a Pod communicate with entities outside the Pod, they must coordinate how they use the shared network resources (such as ports). Within a Pod, containers share an IP address and port space, and can find each other via localhost. The containers in a Pod can also communicate with each other using standard inter-process communications like SystemV semaphores or POSIX shared memory. Containers in different Pods have distinct IP addresses and can not communicate by OS-level IPC without special configuration. Containers that want to interact with a container running in a different Pod can use IP networking to communicate.

Containers within the Pod see the system hostname as being the same as the configured name for the Pod. There's more about this in the networking section.

Pod security settings

To set security constraints on Pods and containers, you use the securityContext field in the Pod specification. This field gives you granular control over what a Pod or individual containers can do. For example:

  • Drop specific Linux capabilities to avoid the impact of a CVE.
  • Force all processes in the Pod to run as a non-root user or as a specific user or group ID.
  • Set a specific seccomp profile.
  • Set Windows security options, such as whether containers run as HostProcess.

Static Pods

Static Pods are managed directly by the kubelet daemon on a specific node, without the API server observing them. Whereas most Pods are managed by the control plane (for example, a Deployment), for static Pods, the kubelet directly supervises each static Pod (and restarts it if it fails).

Static Pods are always bound to one Kubelet on a specific node. The main use for static Pods is to run a self-hosted control plane: in other words, using the kubelet to supervise the individual control plane components.

The kubelet automatically tries to create a mirror Pod on the Kubernetes API server for each static Pod. This means that the Pods running on a node are visible on the API server, but cannot be controlled from there. See the guide Create static Pods for more information.

Pods with multiple containers

Pods are designed to support multiple cooperating processes (as containers) that form a cohesive unit of service. The containers in a Pod are automatically co-located and co-scheduled on the same physical or virtual machine in the cluster. The containers can share resources and dependencies, communicate with one another, and coordinate when and how they are terminated.

Pods in a Kubernetes cluster are used in two main ways:

  • Pods that run a single container. The "one-container-per-Pod" model is the most common Kubernetes use case; in this case, you can think of a Pod as a wrapper around a single container; Kubernetes manages Pods rather than managing the containers directly.
  • Pods that run multiple containers that need to work together. A Pod can encapsulate an application composed of multiple co-located containers that are tightly coupled and need to share resources. These co-located containers form a single cohesive unit of service—for example, one container serving data stored in a shared volume to the public, while a separate sidecar container refreshes or updates those files. The Pod wraps these containers, storage resources, and an ephemeral network identity together as a single unit.

For example, you might have a container that acts as a web server for files in a shared volume, and a separate sidecar container that updates those files from a remote source, as in the following diagram:

Pod creation diagram

Some Pods have init containers as well as app containers. By default, init containers run and complete before the app containers are started.

You can also have sidecar containers that provide auxiliary services to the main application Pod (for example: a service mesh).

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [beta]

Enabled by default, the SidecarContainers feature gate allows you to specify restartPolicy: Always for init containers. Setting the Always restart policy ensures that the containers where you set it are treated as sidecars that are kept running during the entire lifetime of the Pod. Containers that you explicitly define as sidecar containers start up before the main application Pod and remain running until the Pod is shut down.

Container probes

A probe is a diagnostic performed periodically by the kubelet on a container. To perform a diagnostic, the kubelet can invoke different actions:

  • ExecAction (performed with the help of the container runtime)
  • TCPSocketAction (checked directly by the kubelet)
  • HTTPGetAction (checked directly by the kubelet)

You can read more about probes in the Pod Lifecycle documentation.

What's next

To understand the context for why Kubernetes wraps a common Pod API in other resources (such as StatefulSets or Deployments), you can read about the prior art, including:

4.1.1 - Pod Lifecycle

This page describes the lifecycle of a Pod. Pods follow a defined lifecycle, starting in the Pending phase, moving through Running if at least one of its primary containers starts OK, and then through either the Succeeded or Failed phases depending on whether any container in the Pod terminated in failure.

Like individual application containers, Pods are considered to be relatively ephemeral (rather than durable) entities. Pods are created, assigned a unique ID (UID), and scheduled to run on nodes where they remain until termination (according to restart policy) or deletion. If a Node dies, the Pods running on (or scheduled to run on) that node are marked for deletion. The control plane marks the Pods for removal after a timeout period.

Pod lifetime

Whilst a Pod is running, the kubelet is able to restart containers to handle some kind of faults. Within a Pod, Kubernetes tracks different container states and determines what action to take to make the Pod healthy again.

In the Kubernetes API, Pods have both a specification and an actual status. The status for a Pod object consists of a set of Pod conditions. You can also inject custom readiness information into the condition data for a Pod, if that is useful to your application.

Pods are only scheduled once in their lifetime; assigning a Pod to a specific node is called binding, and the process of selecting which node to use is called scheduling. Once a Pod has been scheduled and is bound to a node, Kubernetes tries to run that Pod on the node. The Pod runs on that node until it stops, or until the Pod is terminated; if Kubernetes isn't able to start the Pod on the selected node (for example, if the node crashes before the Pod starts), then that particular Pod never starts.

You can use Pod Scheduling Readiness to delay scheduling for a Pod until all its scheduling gates are removed. For example, you might want to define a set of Pods but only trigger scheduling once all the Pods have been created.

Pods and fault recovery

If one of the containers in the Pod fails, then Kubernetes may try to restart that specific container. Read How Pods handle problems with containers to learn more.

Pods can however fail in a way that the cluster cannot recover from, and in that case Kubernetes does not attempt to heal the Pod further; instead, Kubernetes deletes the Pod and relies on other components to provide automatic healing.

If a Pod is scheduled to a node and that node then fails, the Pod is treated as unhealthy and Kubernetes eventually deletes the Pod. A Pod won't survive an eviction due to a lack of resources or Node maintenance.

Kubernetes uses a higher-level abstraction, called a controller, that handles the work of managing the relatively disposable Pod instances.

A given Pod (as defined by a UID) is never "rescheduled" to a different node; instead, that Pod can be replaced by a new, near-identical Pod. If you make a replacement Pod, it can even have same name (as in .metadata.name) that the old Pod had, but the replacement would have a different .metadata.uid from the old Pod.

Kubernetes does not guarantee that a replacement for an existing Pod would be scheduled to the same node as the old Pod that was being replaced.

Associated lifetimes

When something is said to have the same lifetime as a Pod, such as a volume, that means that the thing exists as long as that specific Pod (with that exact UID) exists. If that Pod is deleted for any reason, and even if an identical replacement is created, the related thing (a volume, in this example) is also destroyed and created anew.

A multi-container Pod that contains a file puller sidecar and a web server. The Pod uses an ephemeral emptyDir volume for shared storage between the containers.

Figure 1.

A multi-container Pod that contains a file puller sidecar and a web server. The Pod uses an ephemeral emptyDir volume for shared storage between the containers.

Pod phase

A Pod's status field is a PodStatus object, which has a phase field.

The phase of a Pod is a simple, high-level summary of where the Pod is in its lifecycle. The phase is not intended to be a comprehensive rollup of observations of container or Pod state, nor is it intended to be a comprehensive state machine.

The number and meanings of Pod phase values are tightly guarded. Other than what is documented here, nothing should be assumed about Pods that have a given phase value.

Here are the possible values for phase:

Value Description
Pending The Pod has been accepted by the Kubernetes cluster, but one or more of the containers has not been set up and made ready to run. This includes time a Pod spends waiting to be scheduled as well as the time spent downloading container images over the network.
Running The Pod has been bound to a node, and all of the containers have been created. At least one container is still running, or is in the process of starting or restarting.
Succeeded All containers in the Pod have terminated in success, and will not be restarted.
Failed All containers in the Pod have terminated, and at least one container has terminated in failure. That is, the container either exited with non-zero status or was terminated by the system, and is not set for automatic restarting.
Unknown For some reason the state of the Pod could not be obtained. This phase typically occurs due to an error in communicating with the node where the Pod should be running.

Since Kubernetes 1.27, the kubelet transitions deleted Pods, except for static Pods and force-deleted Pods without a finalizer, to a terminal phase (Failed or Succeeded depending on the exit statuses of the pod containers) before their deletion from the API server.

If a node dies or is disconnected from the rest of the cluster, Kubernetes applies a policy for setting the phase of all Pods on the lost node to Failed.

Container states

As well as the phase of the Pod overall, Kubernetes tracks the state of each container inside a Pod. You can use container lifecycle hooks to trigger events to run at certain points in a container's lifecycle.

Once the scheduler assigns a Pod to a Node, the kubelet starts creating containers for that Pod using a container runtime. There are three possible container states: Waiting, Running, and Terminated.

To check the state of a Pod's containers, you can use kubectl describe pod <name-of-pod>. The output shows the state for each container within that Pod.

Each state has a specific meaning:

Waiting

If a container is not in either the Running or Terminated state, it is Waiting. A container in the Waiting state is still running the operations it requires in order to complete start up: for example, pulling the container image from a container image registry, or applying Secret data. When you use kubectl to query a Pod with a container that is Waiting, you also see a Reason field to summarize why the container is in that state.

Running

The Running status indicates that a container is executing without issues. If there was a postStart hook configured, it has already executed and finished. When you use kubectl to query a Pod with a container that is Running, you also see information about when the container entered the Running state.

Terminated

A container in the Terminated state began execution and then either ran to completion or failed for some reason. When you use kubectl to query a Pod with a container that is Terminated, you see a reason, an exit code, and the start and finish time for that container's period of execution.

If a container has a preStop hook configured, this hook runs before the container enters the Terminated state.

How Pods handle problems with containers

Kubernetes manages container failures within Pods using a restartPolicy defined in the Pod spec. This policy determines how Kubernetes reacts to containers exiting due to errors or other reasons, which falls in the following sequence:

  1. Initial crash: Kubernetes attempts an immediate restart based on the Pod restartPolicy.
  2. Repeated crashes: After the initial crash Kubernetes applies an exponential backoff delay for subsequent restarts, described in restartPolicy. This prevents rapid, repeated restart attempts from overloading the system.
  3. CrashLoopBackOff state: This indicates that the backoff delay mechanism is currently in effect for a given container that is in a crash loop, failing and restarting repeatedly.
  4. Backoff reset: If a container runs successfully for a certain duration (e.g., 10 minutes), Kubernetes resets the backoff delay, treating any new crash as the first one.

In practice, a CrashLoopBackOff is a condition or event that might be seen as output from the kubectl command, while describing or listing Pods, when a container in the Pod fails to start properly and then continually tries and fails in a loop.

In other words, when a container enters the crash loop, Kubernetes applies the exponential backoff delay mentioned in the Container restart policy. This mechanism prevents a faulty container from overwhelming the system with continuous failed start attempts.

The CrashLoopBackOff can be caused by issues like the following:

  • Application errors that cause the container to exit.
  • Configuration errors, such as incorrect environment variables or missing configuration files.
  • Resource constraints, where the container might not have enough memory or CPU to start properly.
  • Health checks failing if the application doesn't start serving within the expected time.
  • Container liveness probes or startup probes returning a Failure result as mentioned in the probes section.

To investigate the root cause of a CrashLoopBackOff issue, a user can:

  1. Check logs: Use kubectl logs <name-of-pod> to check the logs of the container. This is often the most direct way to diagnose the issue causing the crashes.
  2. Inspect events: Use kubectl describe pod <name-of-pod> to see events for the Pod, which can provide hints about configuration or resource issues.
  3. Review configuration: Ensure that the Pod configuration, including environment variables and mounted volumes, is correct and that all required external resources are available.
  4. Check resource limits: Make sure that the container has enough CPU and memory allocated. Sometimes, increasing the resources in the Pod definition can resolve the issue.
  5. Debug application: There might exist bugs or misconfigurations in the application code. Running this container image locally or in a development environment can help diagnose application specific issues.

Container restart policy

The spec of a Pod has a restartPolicy field with possible values Always, OnFailure, and Never. The default value is Always.

The restartPolicy for a Pod applies to app containers in the Pod and to regular init containers. Sidecar containers ignore the Pod-level restartPolicy field: in Kubernetes, a sidecar is defined as an entry inside initContainers that has its container-level restartPolicy set to Always. For init containers that exit with an error, the kubelet restarts the init container if the Pod level restartPolicy is either OnFailure or Always:

  • Always: Automatically restarts the container after any termination.
  • OnFailure: Only restarts the container if it exits with an error (non-zero exit status).
  • Never: Does not automatically restart the terminated container.

When the kubelet is handling container restarts according to the configured restart policy, that only applies to restarts that make replacement containers inside the same Pod and running on the same node. After containers in a Pod exit, the kubelet restarts them with an exponential backoff delay (10s, 20s, 40s, …), that is capped at 300 seconds (5 minutes). Once a container has executed for 10 minutes without any problems, the kubelet resets the restart backoff timer for that container. Sidecar containers and Pod lifecycle explains the behaviour of init containers when specify restartpolicy field on it.

Pod conditions

A Pod has a PodStatus, which has an array of PodConditions through which the Pod has or has not passed. Kubelet manages the following PodConditions:

  • PodScheduled: the Pod has been scheduled to a node.
  • PodReadyToStartContainers: (beta feature; enabled by default) the Pod sandbox has been successfully created and networking configured.
  • ContainersReady: all containers in the Pod are ready.
  • Initialized: all init containers have completed successfully.
  • Ready: the Pod is able to serve requests and should be added to the load balancing pools of all matching Services.
Field name Description
type Name of this Pod condition.
status Indicates whether that condition is applicable, with possible values "True", "False", or "Unknown".
lastProbeTime Timestamp of when the Pod condition was last probed.
lastTransitionTime Timestamp for when the Pod last transitioned from one status to another.
reason Machine-readable, UpperCamelCase text indicating the reason for the condition's last transition.
message Human-readable message indicating details about the last status transition.

Pod readiness

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.14 [stable]

Your application can inject extra feedback or signals into PodStatus: Pod readiness. To use this, set readinessGates in the Pod's spec to specify a list of additional conditions that the kubelet evaluates for Pod readiness.

Readiness gates are determined by the current state of status.condition fields for the Pod. If Kubernetes cannot find such a condition in the status.conditions field of a Pod, the status of the condition is defaulted to "False".

Here is an example:

kind: Pod
...
spec:
  readinessGates:
    - conditionType: "www.example.com/feature-1"
status:
  conditions:
    - type: Ready                              # a built in PodCondition
      status: "False"
      lastProbeTime: null
      lastTransitionTime: 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z
    - type: "www.example.com/feature-1"        # an extra PodCondition
      status: "False"
      lastProbeTime: null
      lastTransitionTime: 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z
  containerStatuses:
    - containerID: docker://abcd...
      ready: true
...

The Pod conditions you add must have names that meet the Kubernetes label key format.

Status for Pod readiness

The kubectl patch command does not support patching object status. To set these status.conditions for the Pod, applications and operators should use the PATCH action. You can use a Kubernetes client library to write code that sets custom Pod conditions for Pod readiness.

For a Pod that uses custom conditions, that Pod is evaluated to be ready only when both the following statements apply:

  • All containers in the Pod are ready.
  • All conditions specified in readinessGates are True.

When a Pod's containers are Ready but at least one custom condition is missing or False, the kubelet sets the Pod's condition to ContainersReady.

Pod network readiness

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [beta]

After a Pod gets scheduled on a node, it needs to be admitted by the kubelet and to have any required storage volumes mounted. Once these phases are complete, the kubelet works with a container runtime (using Container runtime interface (CRI)) to set up a runtime sandbox and configure networking for the Pod. If the PodReadyToStartContainersCondition feature gate is enabled (it is enabled by default for Kubernetes 1.32), the PodReadyToStartContainers condition will be added to the status.conditions field of a Pod.

The PodReadyToStartContainers condition is set to False by the Kubelet when it detects a Pod does not have a runtime sandbox with networking configured. This occurs in the following scenarios:

  • Early in the lifecycle of the Pod, when the kubelet has not yet begun to set up a sandbox for the Pod using the container runtime.
  • Later in the lifecycle of the Pod, when the Pod sandbox has been destroyed due to either:
    • the node rebooting, without the Pod getting evicted
    • for container runtimes that use virtual machines for isolation, the Pod sandbox virtual machine rebooting, which then requires creating a new sandbox and fresh container network configuration.

The PodReadyToStartContainers condition is set to True by the kubelet after the successful completion of sandbox creation and network configuration for the Pod by the runtime plugin. The kubelet can start pulling container images and create containers after PodReadyToStartContainers condition has been set to True.

For a Pod with init containers, the kubelet sets the Initialized condition to True after the init containers have successfully completed (which happens after successful sandbox creation and network configuration by the runtime plugin). For a Pod without init containers, the kubelet sets the Initialized condition to True before sandbox creation and network configuration starts.

Container probes

A probe is a diagnostic performed periodically by the kubelet on a container. To perform a diagnostic, the kubelet either executes code within the container, or makes a network request.

Check mechanisms

There are four different ways to check a container using a probe. Each probe must define exactly one of these four mechanisms:

exec
Executes a specified command inside the container. The diagnostic is considered successful if the command exits with a status code of 0.
grpc
Performs a remote procedure call using gRPC. The target should implement gRPC health checks. The diagnostic is considered successful if the status of the response is SERVING.
httpGet
Performs an HTTP GET request against the Pod's IP address on a specified port and path. The diagnostic is considered successful if the response has a status code greater than or equal to 200 and less than 400.
tcpSocket
Performs a TCP check against the Pod's IP address on a specified port. The diagnostic is considered successful if the port is open. If the remote system (the container) closes the connection immediately after it opens, this counts as healthy.

Probe outcome

Each probe has one of three results:

Success
The container passed the diagnostic.
Failure
The container failed the diagnostic.
Unknown
The diagnostic failed (no action should be taken, and the kubelet will make further checks).

Types of probe

The kubelet can optionally perform and react to three kinds of probes on running containers:

livenessProbe
Indicates whether the container is running. If the liveness probe fails, the kubelet kills the container, and the container is subjected to its restart policy. If a container does not provide a liveness probe, the default state is Success.
readinessProbe
Indicates whether the container is ready to respond to requests. If the readiness probe fails, the endpoints controller removes the Pod's IP address from the endpoints of all Services that match the Pod. The default state of readiness before the initial delay is Failure. If a container does not provide a readiness probe, the default state is Success.
startupProbe
Indicates whether the application within the container is started. All other probes are disabled if a startup probe is provided, until it succeeds. If the startup probe fails, the kubelet kills the container, and the container is subjected to its restart policy. If a container does not provide a startup probe, the default state is Success.

For more information about how to set up a liveness, readiness, or startup probe, see Configure Liveness, Readiness and Startup Probes.

When should you use a liveness probe?

If the process in your container is able to crash on its own whenever it encounters an issue or becomes unhealthy, you do not necessarily need a liveness probe; the kubelet will automatically perform the correct action in accordance with the Pod's restartPolicy.

If you'd like your container to be killed and restarted if a probe fails, then specify a liveness probe, and specify a restartPolicy of Always or OnFailure.

When should you use a readiness probe?

If you'd like to start sending traffic to a Pod only when a probe succeeds, specify a readiness probe. In this case, the readiness probe might be the same as the liveness probe, but the existence of the readiness probe in the spec means that the Pod will start without receiving any traffic and only start receiving traffic after the probe starts succeeding.

If you want your container to be able to take itself down for maintenance, you can specify a readiness probe that checks an endpoint specific to readiness that is different from the liveness probe.

If your app has a strict dependency on back-end services, you can implement both a liveness and a readiness probe. The liveness probe passes when the app itself is healthy, but the readiness probe additionally checks that each required back-end service is available. This helps you avoid directing traffic to Pods that can only respond with error messages.

If your container needs to work on loading large data, configuration files, or migrations during startup, you can use a startup probe. However, if you want to detect the difference between an app that has failed and an app that is still processing its startup data, you might prefer a readiness probe.

When should you use a startup probe?

Startup probes are useful for Pods that have containers that take a long time to come into service. Rather than set a long liveness interval, you can configure a separate configuration for probing the container as it starts up, allowing a time longer than the liveness interval would allow.

If your container usually starts in more than initialDelaySeconds + failureThreshold × periodSeconds, you should specify a startup probe that checks the same endpoint as the liveness probe. The default for periodSeconds is 10s. You should then set its failureThreshold high enough to allow the container to start, without changing the default values of the liveness probe. This helps to protect against deadlocks.

Termination of Pods

Because Pods represent processes running on nodes in the cluster, it is important to allow those processes to gracefully terminate when they are no longer needed (rather than being abruptly stopped with a KILL signal and having no chance to clean up).

The design aim is for you to be able to request deletion and know when processes terminate, but also be able to ensure that deletes eventually complete. When you request deletion of a Pod, the cluster records and tracks the intended grace period before the Pod is allowed to be forcefully killed. With that forceful shutdown tracking in place, the kubelet attempts graceful shutdown.

Typically, with this graceful termination of the pod, kubelet makes requests to the container runtime to attempt to stop the containers in the pod by first sending a TERM (aka. SIGTERM) signal, with a grace period timeout, to the main process in each container. The requests to stop the containers are processed by the container runtime asynchronously. There is no guarantee to the order of processing for these requests. Many container runtimes respect the STOPSIGNAL value defined in the container image and, if different, send the container image configured STOPSIGNAL instead of TERM. Once the grace period has expired, the KILL signal is sent to any remaining processes, and the Pod is then deleted from the API Server. If the kubelet or the container runtime's management service is restarted while waiting for processes to terminate, the cluster retries from the start including the full original grace period.

Pod termination flow, illustrated with an example:

  1. You use the kubectl tool to manually delete a specific Pod, with the default grace period (30 seconds).

  2. The Pod in the API server is updated with the time beyond which the Pod is considered "dead" along with the grace period. If you use kubectl describe to check the Pod you're deleting, that Pod shows up as "Terminating". On the node where the Pod is running: as soon as the kubelet sees that a Pod has been marked as terminating (a graceful shutdown duration has been set), the kubelet begins the local Pod shutdown process.

    1. If one of the Pod's containers has defined a preStop hook and the terminationGracePeriodSeconds in the Pod spec is not set to 0, the kubelet runs that hook inside of the container. The default terminationGracePeriodSeconds setting is 30 seconds.

      If the preStop hook is still running after the grace period expires, the kubelet requests a small, one-off grace period extension of 2 seconds.

    2. The kubelet triggers the container runtime to send a TERM signal to process 1 inside each container.

      There is special ordering if the Pod has any sidecar containers defined. Otherwise, the containers in the Pod receive the TERM signal at different times and in an arbitrary order. If the order of shutdowns matters, consider using a preStop hook to synchronize (or switch to using sidecar containers).

  3. At the same time as the kubelet is starting graceful shutdown of the Pod, the control plane evaluates whether to remove that shutting-down Pod from EndpointSlice (and Endpoints) objects, where those objects represent a Service with a configured selector. ReplicaSets and other workload resources no longer treat the shutting-down Pod as a valid, in-service replica.

    Pods that shut down slowly should not continue to serve regular traffic and should start terminating and finish processing open connections. Some applications need to go beyond finishing open connections and need more graceful termination, for example, session draining and completion.

    Any endpoints that represent the terminating Pods are not immediately removed from EndpointSlices, and a status indicating terminating state is exposed from the EndpointSlice API (and the legacy Endpoints API). Terminating endpoints always have their ready status as false (for backward compatibility with versions before 1.26), so load balancers will not use it for regular traffic.

    If traffic draining on terminating Pod is needed, the actual readiness can be checked as a condition serving. You can find more details on how to implement connections draining in the tutorial Pods And Endpoints Termination Flow

  4. The kubelet ensures the Pod is shut down and terminated

    1. When the grace period expires, if there is still any container running in the Pod, the kubelet triggers forcible shutdown. The container runtime sends SIGKILL to any processes still running in any container in the Pod. The kubelet also cleans up a hidden pause container if that container runtime uses one.
    2. The kubelet transitions the Pod into a terminal phase (Failed or Succeeded depending on the end state of its containers).
    3. The kubelet triggers forcible removal of the Pod object from the API server, by setting grace period to 0 (immediate deletion).
    4. The API server deletes the Pod's API object, which is then no longer visible from any client.

Forced Pod termination

By default, all deletes are graceful within 30 seconds. The kubectl delete command supports the --grace-period=<seconds> option which allows you to override the default and specify your own value.

Setting the grace period to 0 forcibly and immediately deletes the Pod from the API server. If the Pod was still running on a node, that forcible deletion triggers the kubelet to begin immediate cleanup.

Using kubectl, You must specify an additional flag --force along with --grace-period=0 in order to perform force deletions.

When a force deletion is performed, the API server does not wait for confirmation from the kubelet that the Pod has been terminated on the node it was running on. It removes the Pod in the API immediately so a new Pod can be created with the same name. On the node, Pods that are set to terminate immediately will still be given a small grace period before being force killed.

If you need to force-delete Pods that are part of a StatefulSet, refer to the task documentation for deleting Pods from a StatefulSet.

Pod shutdown and sidecar containers

If your Pod includes one or more sidecar containers (init containers with an Always restart policy), the kubelet will delay sending the TERM signal to these sidecar containers until the last main container has fully terminated. The sidecar containers will be terminated in the reverse order they are defined in the Pod spec. This ensures that sidecar containers continue serving the other containers in the Pod until they are no longer needed.

This means that slow termination of a main container will also delay the termination of the sidecar containers. If the grace period expires before the termination process is complete, the Pod may enter forced termination. In this case, all remaining containers in the Pod will be terminated simultaneously with a short grace period.

Similarly, if the Pod has a preStop hook that exceeds the termination grace period, emergency termination may occur. In general, if you have used preStop hooks to control the termination order without sidecar containers, you can now remove them and allow the kubelet to manage sidecar termination automatically.

Garbage collection of Pods

For failed Pods, the API objects remain in the cluster's API until a human or controller process explicitly removes them.

The Pod garbage collector (PodGC), which is a controller in the control plane, cleans up terminated Pods (with a phase of Succeeded or Failed), when the number of Pods exceeds the configured threshold (determined by terminated-pod-gc-threshold in the kube-controller-manager). This avoids a resource leak as Pods are created and terminated over time.

Additionally, PodGC cleans up any Pods which satisfy any of the following conditions:

  1. are orphan Pods - bound to a node which no longer exists,
  2. are unscheduled terminating Pods,
  3. are terminating Pods, bound to a non-ready node tainted with node.kubernetes.io/out-of-service.

Along with cleaning up the Pods, PodGC will also mark them as failed if they are in a non-terminal phase. Also, PodGC adds a Pod disruption condition when cleaning up an orphan Pod. See Pod disruption conditions for more details.

What's next

4.1.2 - Init Containers

This page provides an overview of init containers: specialized containers that run before app containers in a Pod. Init containers can contain utilities or setup scripts not present in an app image.

You can specify init containers in the Pod specification alongside the containers array (which describes app containers).

In Kubernetes, a sidecar container is a container that starts before the main application container and continues to run. This document is about init containers: containers that run to completion during Pod initialization.

Understanding init containers

A Pod can have multiple containers running apps within it, but it can also have one or more init containers, which are run before the app containers are started.

Init containers are exactly like regular containers, except:

  • Init containers always run to completion.
  • Each init container must complete successfully before the next one starts.

If a Pod's init container fails, the kubelet repeatedly restarts that init container until it succeeds. However, if the Pod has a restartPolicy of Never, and an init container fails during startup of that Pod, Kubernetes treats the overall Pod as failed.

To specify an init container for a Pod, add the initContainers field into the Pod specification, as an array of container items (similar to the app containers field and its contents). See Container in the API reference for more details.

The status of the init containers is returned in .status.initContainerStatuses field as an array of the container statuses (similar to the .status.containerStatuses field).

Differences from regular containers

Init containers support all the fields and features of app containers, including resource limits, volumes, and security settings. However, the resource requests and limits for an init container are handled differently, as documented in Resource sharing within containers.

Regular init containers (in other words: excluding sidecar containers) do not support the lifecycle, livenessProbe, readinessProbe, or startupProbe fields. Init containers must run to completion before the Pod can be ready; sidecar containers continue running during a Pod's lifetime, and do support some probes. See sidecar container for further details about sidecar containers.

If you specify multiple init containers for a Pod, kubelet runs each init container sequentially. Each init container must succeed before the next can run. When all of the init containers have run to completion, kubelet initializes the application containers for the Pod and runs them as usual.

Differences from sidecar containers

Init containers run and complete their tasks before the main application container starts. Unlike sidecar containers, init containers are not continuously running alongside the main containers.

Init containers run to completion sequentially, and the main container does not start until all the init containers have successfully completed.

init containers do not support lifecycle, livenessProbe, readinessProbe, or startupProbe whereas sidecar containers support all these probes to control their lifecycle.

Init containers share the same resources (CPU, memory, network) with the main application containers but do not interact directly with them. They can, however, use shared volumes for data exchange.

Using init containers

Because init containers have separate images from app containers, they have some advantages for start-up related code:

  • Init containers can contain utilities or custom code for setup that are not present in an app image. For example, there is no need to make an image FROM another image just to use a tool like sed, awk, python, or dig during setup.
  • The application image builder and deployer roles can work independently without the need to jointly build a single app image.
  • Init containers can run with a different view of the filesystem than app containers in the same Pod. Consequently, they can be given access to Secrets that app containers cannot access.
  • Because init containers run to completion before any app containers start, init containers offer a mechanism to block or delay app container startup until a set of preconditions are met. Once preconditions are met, all of the app containers in a Pod can start in parallel.
  • Init containers can securely run utilities or custom code that would otherwise make an app container image less secure. By keeping unnecessary tools separate you can limit the attack surface of your app container image.

Examples

Here are some ideas for how to use init containers:

  • Wait for a Service to be created, using a shell one-line command like:

    for i in {1..100}; do sleep 1; if nslookup myservice; then exit 0; fi; done; exit 1

  • Register this Pod with a remote server from the downward API with a command like:

    curl -X POST http://$MANAGEMENT_SERVICE_HOST:$MANAGEMENT_SERVICE_PORT/register -d 'instance=$(<POD_NAME>)&ip=$(<POD_IP>)'

  • Wait for some time before starting the app container with a command like

    sleep 60

  • Clone a Git repository into a Volume

  • Place values into a configuration file and run a template tool to dynamically generate a configuration file for the main app container. For example, place the POD_IP value in a configuration and generate the main app configuration file using Jinja.

Init containers in use

This example defines a simple Pod that has two init containers. The first waits for myservice, and the second waits for mydb. Once both init containers complete, the Pod runs the app container from its spec section.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: myapp-pod
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
spec:
  containers:
  - name: myapp-container
    image: busybox:1.28
    command: ['sh', '-c', 'echo The app is running! && sleep 3600']
  initContainers:
  - name: init-myservice
    image: busybox:1.28
    command: ['sh', '-c', "until nslookup myservice.$(cat /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/namespace).svc.cluster.local; do echo waiting for myservice; sleep 2; done"]
  - name: init-mydb
    image: busybox:1.28
    command: ['sh', '-c', "until nslookup mydb.$(cat /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/namespace).svc.cluster.local; do echo waiting for mydb; sleep 2; done"]

You can start this Pod by running:

kubectl apply -f myapp.yaml

The output is similar to this:

pod/myapp-pod created

And check on its status with:

kubectl get -f myapp.yaml

The output is similar to this:

NAME        READY     STATUS     RESTARTS   AGE
myapp-pod   0/1       Init:0/2   0          6m

or for more details:

kubectl describe -f myapp.yaml

The output is similar to this:

Name:          myapp-pod
Namespace:     default
[...]
Labels:        app.kubernetes.io/name=MyApp
Status:        Pending
[...]
Init Containers:
  init-myservice:
[...]
    State:         Running
[...]
  init-mydb:
[...]
    State:         Waiting
      Reason:      PodInitializing
    Ready:         False
[...]
Containers:
  myapp-container:
[...]
    State:         Waiting
      Reason:      PodInitializing
    Ready:         False
[...]
Events:
  FirstSeen    LastSeen    Count    From                      SubObjectPath                           Type          Reason        Message
  ---------    --------    -----    ----                      -------------                           --------      ------        -------
  16s          16s         1        {default-scheduler }                                              Normal        Scheduled     Successfully assigned myapp-pod to 172.17.4.201
  16s          16s         1        {kubelet 172.17.4.201}    spec.initContainers{init-myservice}     Normal        Pulling       pulling image "busybox"
  13s          13s         1        {kubelet 172.17.4.201}    spec.initContainers{init-myservice}     Normal        Pulled        Successfully pulled image "busybox"
  13s          13s         1        {kubelet 172.17.4.201}    spec.initContainers{init-myservice}     Normal        Created       Created container init-myservice
  13s          13s         1        {kubelet 172.17.4.201}    spec.initContainers{init-myservice}     Normal        Started       Started container init-myservice

To see logs for the init containers in this Pod, run:

kubectl logs myapp-pod -c init-myservice # Inspect the first init container
kubectl logs myapp-pod -c init-mydb      # Inspect the second init container

At this point, those init containers will be waiting to discover Services named mydb and myservice.

Here's a configuration you can use to make those Services appear:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: myservice
spec:
  ports:
  - protocol: TCP
    port: 80
    targetPort: 9376
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: mydb
spec:
  ports:
  - protocol: TCP
    port: 80
    targetPort: 9377

To create the mydb and myservice services:

kubectl apply -f services.yaml

The output is similar to this:

service/myservice created
service/mydb created

You'll then see that those init containers complete, and that the myapp-pod Pod moves into the Running state:

kubectl get -f myapp.yaml

The output is similar to this:

NAME        READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
myapp-pod   1/1       Running   0          9m

This simple example should provide some inspiration for you to create your own init containers. What's next contains a link to a more detailed example.

Detailed behavior

During Pod startup, the kubelet delays running init containers until the networking and storage are ready. Then the kubelet runs the Pod's init containers in the order they appear in the Pod's spec.

Each init container must exit successfully before the next container starts. If a container fails to start due to the runtime or exits with failure, it is retried according to the Pod restartPolicy. However, if the Pod restartPolicy is set to Always, the init containers use restartPolicy OnFailure.

A Pod cannot be Ready until all init containers have succeeded. The ports on an init container are not aggregated under a Service. A Pod that is initializing is in the Pending state but should have a condition Initialized set to false.

If the Pod restarts, or is restarted, all init containers must execute again.

Changes to the init container spec are limited to the container image field. Directly altering the image field of an init container does not restart the Pod or trigger its recreation. If the Pod has yet to start, that change may have an effect on how the Pod boots up.

For a pod template you can typically change any field for an init container; the impact of making that change depends on where the pod template is used.

Because init containers can be restarted, retried, or re-executed, init container code should be idempotent. In particular, code that writes into any emptyDir volume should be prepared for the possibility that an output file already exists.

Init containers have all of the fields of an app container. However, Kubernetes prohibits readinessProbe from being used because init containers cannot define readiness distinct from completion. This is enforced during validation.

Use activeDeadlineSeconds on the Pod to prevent init containers from failing forever. The active deadline includes init containers. However it is recommended to use activeDeadlineSeconds only if teams deploy their application as a Job, because activeDeadlineSeconds has an effect even after initContainer finished. The Pod which is already running correctly would be killed by activeDeadlineSeconds if you set.

The name of each app and init container in a Pod must be unique; a validation error is thrown for any container sharing a name with another.

Resource sharing within containers

Given the order of execution for init, sidecar and app containers, the following rules for resource usage apply:

  • The highest of any particular resource request or limit defined on all init containers is the effective init request/limit. If any resource has no resource limit specified this is considered as the highest limit.
  • The Pod's effective request/limit for a resource is the higher of:
    • the sum of all app containers request/limit for a resource
    • the effective init request/limit for a resource
  • Scheduling is done based on effective requests/limits, which means init containers can reserve resources for initialization that are not used during the life of the Pod.
  • The QoS (quality of service) tier of the Pod's effective QoS tier is the QoS tier for init containers and app containers alike.

Quota and limits are applied based on the effective Pod request and limit.

Init containers and Linux cgroups

On Linux, resource allocations for Pod level control groups (cgroups) are based on the effective Pod request and limit, the same as the scheduler.

Pod restart reasons

A Pod can restart, causing re-execution of init containers, for the following reasons:

  • The Pod infrastructure container is restarted. This is uncommon and would have to be done by someone with root access to nodes.
  • All containers in a Pod are terminated while restartPolicy is set to Always, forcing a restart, and the init container completion record has been lost due to garbage collection.

The Pod will not be restarted when the init container image is changed, or the init container completion record has been lost due to garbage collection. This applies for Kubernetes v1.20 and later. If you are using an earlier version of Kubernetes, consult the documentation for the version you are using.

What's next

Learn more about the following:

4.1.3 - Sidecar Containers

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [beta]

Sidecar containers are the secondary containers that run along with the main application container within the same Pod. These containers are used to enhance or to extend the functionality of the primary app container by providing additional services, or functionality such as logging, monitoring, security, or data synchronization, without directly altering the primary application code.

Typically, you only have one app container in a Pod. For example, if you have a web application that requires a local webserver, the local webserver is a sidecar and the web application itself is the app container.

Sidecar containers in Kubernetes

Kubernetes implements sidecar containers as a special case of init containers; sidecar containers remain running after Pod startup. This document uses the term regular init containers to clearly refer to containers that only run during Pod startup.

Provided that your cluster has the SidecarContainers feature gate enabled (the feature is active by default since Kubernetes v1.29), you can specify a restartPolicy for containers listed in a Pod's initContainers field. These restartable sidecar containers are independent from other init containers and from the main application container(s) within the same pod. These can be started, stopped, or restarted without effecting the main application container and other init containers.

You can also run a Pod with multiple containers that are not marked as init or sidecar containers. This is appropriate if the containers within the Pod are required for the Pod to work overall, but you don't need to control which containers start or stop first. You could also do this if you need to support older versions of Kubernetes that don't support a container-level restartPolicy field.

Example application

Here's an example of a Deployment with two containers, one of which is a sidecar:

application/deployment-sidecar.yaml 
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: myapp
  labels:
    app: myapp
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: myapp
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: myapp
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: myapp
          image: alpine:latest
          command: ['sh', '-c', 'while true; do echo "logging" >> /opt/logs.txt; sleep 1; done']
          volumeMounts:
            - name: data
              mountPath: /opt
      initContainers:
        - name: logshipper
          image: alpine:latest
          restartPolicy: Always
          command: ['sh', '-c', 'tail -F /opt/logs.txt']
          volumeMounts:
            - name: data
              mountPath: /opt
      volumes:
        - name: data
          emptyDir: {}

Sidecar containers and Pod lifecycle

If an init container is created with its restartPolicy set to Always, it will start and remain running during the entire life of the Pod. This can be helpful for running supporting services separated from the main application containers.

If a readinessProbe is specified for this init container, its result will be used to determine the ready state of the Pod.

Since these containers are defined as init containers, they benefit from the same ordering and sequential guarantees as regular init containers, allowing you to mix sidecar containers with regular init containers for complex Pod initialization flows.

Compared to regular init containers, sidecars defined within initContainers continue to run after they have started. This is important when there is more than one entry inside .spec.initContainers for a Pod. After a sidecar-style init container is running (the kubelet has set the started status for that init container to true), the kubelet then starts the next init container from the ordered .spec.initContainers list. That status either becomes true because there is a process running in the container and no startup probe defined, or as a result of its startupProbe succeeding.

Upon Pod termination, the kubelet postpones terminating sidecar containers until the main application container has fully stopped. The sidecar containers are then shut down in the opposite order of their appearance in the Pod specification. This approach ensures that the sidecars remain operational, supporting other containers within the Pod, until their service is no longer required.

Jobs with sidecar containers

If you define a Job that uses sidecar using Kubernetes-style init containers, the sidecar container in each Pod does not prevent the Job from completing after the main container has finished.

Here's an example of a Job with two containers, one of which is a sidecar:

application/job/job-sidecar.yaml 
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: myjob
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: myjob
          image: alpine:latest
          command: ['sh', '-c', 'echo "logging" > /opt/logs.txt']
          volumeMounts:
            - name: data
              mountPath: /opt
      initContainers:
        - name: logshipper
          image: alpine:latest
          restartPolicy: Always
          command: ['sh', '-c', 'tail -F /opt/logs.txt']
          volumeMounts:
            - name: data
              mountPath: /opt
      restartPolicy: Never
      volumes:
        - name: data
          emptyDir: {}

Differences from application containers

Sidecar containers run alongside app containers in the same pod. However, they do not execute the primary application logic; instead, they provide supporting functionality to the main application.

Sidecar containers have their own independent lifecycles. They can be started, stopped, and restarted independently of app containers. This means you can update, scale, or maintain sidecar containers without affecting the primary application.

Sidecar containers share the same network and storage namespaces with the primary container. This co-location allows them to interact closely and share resources.

From Kubernetes perspective, sidecars graceful termination is less important. When other containers took all alloted graceful termination time, sidecar containers will receive the SIGTERM following with SIGKILL faster than may be expected. So exit codes different from 0 (0 indicates successful exit), for sidecar containers are normal on Pod termination and should be generally ignored by the external tooling.

Differences from init containers

Sidecar containers work alongside the main container, extending its functionality and providing additional services.

Sidecar containers run concurrently with the main application container. They are active throughout the lifecycle of the pod and can be started and stopped independently of the main container. Unlike init containers, sidecar containers support probes to control their lifecycle.

Sidecar containers can interact directly with the main application containers, because like init containers they always share the same network, and can optionally also share volumes (filesystems).

Init containers stop before the main containers start up, so init containers cannot exchange messages with the app container in a Pod. Any data passing is one-way (for example, an init container can put information inside an emptyDir volume).

Resource sharing within containers

Given the order of execution for init, sidecar and app containers, the following rules for resource usage apply:

  • The highest of any particular resource request or limit defined on all init containers is the effective init request/limit. If any resource has no resource limit specified this is considered as the highest limit.
  • The Pod's effective request/limit for a resource is the sum of pod overhead and the higher of:
    • the sum of all non-init containers(app and sidecar containers) request/limit for a resource
    • the effective init request/limit for a resource
  • Scheduling is done based on effective requests/limits, which means init containers can reserve resources for initialization that are not used during the life of the Pod.
  • The QoS (quality of service) tier of the Pod's effective QoS tier is the QoS tier for all init, sidecar and app containers alike.

Quota and limits are applied based on the effective Pod request and limit.

Sidecar containers and Linux cgroups

On Linux, resource allocations for Pod level control groups (cgroups) are based on the effective Pod request and limit, the same as the scheduler.

What's next

4.1.4 - Ephemeral Containers

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable]

This page provides an overview of ephemeral containers: a special type of container that runs temporarily in an existing Pod to accomplish user-initiated actions such as troubleshooting. You use ephemeral containers to inspect services rather than to build applications.

Understanding ephemeral containers

Pods are the fundamental building block of Kubernetes applications. Since Pods are intended to be disposable and replaceable, you cannot add a container to a Pod once it has been created. Instead, you usually delete and replace Pods in a controlled fashion using deployments.

Sometimes it's necessary to inspect the state of an existing Pod, however, for example to troubleshoot a hard-to-reproduce bug. In these cases you can run an ephemeral container in an existing Pod to inspect its state and run arbitrary commands.

What is an ephemeral container?

Ephemeral containers differ from other containers in that they lack guarantees for resources or execution, and they will never be automatically restarted, so they are not appropriate for building applications. Ephemeral containers are described using the same ContainerSpec as regular containers, but many fields are incompatible and disallowed for ephemeral containers.

  • Ephemeral containers may not have ports, so fields such as ports, livenessProbe, readinessProbe are disallowed.
  • Pod resource allocations are immutable, so setting resources is disallowed.
  • For a complete list of allowed fields, see the EphemeralContainer reference documentation.

Ephemeral containers are created using a special ephemeralcontainers handler in the API rather than by adding them directly to pod.spec, so it's not possible to add an ephemeral container using kubectl edit.

Like regular containers, you may not change or remove an ephemeral container after you have added it to a Pod.

Uses for ephemeral containers

Ephemeral containers are useful for interactive troubleshooting when kubectl exec is insufficient because a container has crashed or a container image doesn't include debugging utilities.

In particular, distroless images enable you to deploy minimal container images that reduce attack surface and exposure to bugs and vulnerabilities. Since distroless images do not include a shell or any debugging utilities, it's difficult to troubleshoot distroless images using kubectl exec alone.

When using ephemeral containers, it's helpful to enable process namespace sharing so you can view processes in other containers.

What's next

4.1.5 - Disruptions

This guide is for application owners who want to build highly available applications, and thus need to understand what types of disruptions can happen to Pods.

It is also for cluster administrators who want to perform automated cluster actions, like upgrading and autoscaling clusters.

Voluntary and involuntary disruptions

Pods do not disappear until someone (a person or a controller) destroys them, or there is an unavoidable hardware or system software error.

We call these unavoidable cases involuntary disruptions to an application. Examples are:

  • a hardware failure of the physical machine backing the node
  • cluster administrator deletes VM (instance) by mistake
  • cloud provider or hypervisor failure makes VM disappear
  • a kernel panic
  • the node disappears from the cluster due to cluster network partition
  • eviction of a pod due to the node being out-of-resources.

Except for the out-of-resources condition, all these conditions should be familiar to most users; they are not specific to Kubernetes.

We call other cases voluntary disruptions. These include both actions initiated by the application owner and those initiated by a Cluster Administrator. Typical application owner actions include:

  • deleting the deployment or other controller that manages the pod
  • updating a deployment's pod template causing a restart
  • directly deleting a pod (e.g. by accident)

Cluster administrator actions include:

  • Draining a node for repair or upgrade.
  • Draining a node from a cluster to scale the cluster down (learn about Cluster Autoscaling).
  • Removing a pod from a node to permit something else to fit on that node.

These actions might be taken directly by the cluster administrator, or by automation run by the cluster administrator, or by your cluster hosting provider.

Ask your cluster administrator or consult your cloud provider or distribution documentation to determine if any sources of voluntary disruptions are enabled for your cluster. If none are enabled, you can skip creating Pod Disruption Budgets.

Dealing with disruptions

Here are some ways to mitigate involuntary disruptions:

  • Ensure your pod requests the resources it needs.
  • Replicate your application if you need higher availability. (Learn about running replicated stateless and stateful applications.)
  • For even higher availability when running replicated applications, spread applications across racks (using anti-affinity) or across zones (if using a multi-zone cluster.)

The frequency of voluntary disruptions varies. On a basic Kubernetes cluster, there are no automated voluntary disruptions (only user-triggered ones). However, your cluster administrator or hosting provider may run some additional services which cause voluntary disruptions. For example, rolling out node software updates can cause voluntary disruptions. Also, some implementations of cluster (node) autoscaling may cause voluntary disruptions to defragment and compact nodes. Your cluster administrator or hosting provider should have documented what level of voluntary disruptions, if any, to expect. Certain configuration options, such as using PriorityClasses in your pod spec can also cause voluntary (and involuntary) disruptions.

Pod disruption budgets

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.21 [stable]

Kubernetes offers features to help you run highly available applications even when you introduce frequent voluntary disruptions.

As an application owner, you can create a PodDisruptionBudget (PDB) for each application. A PDB limits the number of Pods of a replicated application that are down simultaneously from voluntary disruptions. For example, a quorum-based application would like to ensure that the number of replicas running is never brought below the number needed for a quorum. A web front end might want to ensure that the number of replicas serving load never falls below a certain percentage of the total.

Cluster managers and hosting providers should use tools which respect PodDisruptionBudgets by calling the Eviction API instead of directly deleting pods or deployments.

For example, the kubectl drain subcommand lets you mark a node as going out of service. When you run kubectl drain, the tool tries to evict all of the Pods on the Node you're taking out of service. The eviction request that kubectl submits on your behalf may be temporarily rejected, so the tool periodically retries all failed requests until all Pods on the target node are terminated, or until a configurable timeout is reached.

A PDB specifies the number of replicas that an application can tolerate having, relative to how many it is intended to have. For example, a Deployment which has a .spec.replicas: 5 is supposed to have 5 pods at any given time. If its PDB allows for there to be 4 at a time, then the Eviction API will allow voluntary disruption of one (but not two) pods at a time.

The group of pods that comprise the application is specified using a label selector, the same as the one used by the application's controller (deployment, stateful-set, etc).

The "intended" number of pods is computed from the .spec.replicas of the workload resource that is managing those pods. The control plane discovers the owning workload resource by examining the .metadata.ownerReferences of the Pod.

Involuntary disruptions cannot be prevented by PDBs; however they do count against the budget.

Pods which are deleted or unavailable due to a rolling upgrade to an application do count against the disruption budget, but workload resources (such as Deployment and StatefulSet) are not limited by PDBs when doing rolling upgrades. Instead, the handling of failures during application updates is configured in the spec for the specific workload resource.

It is recommended to set AlwaysAllow Unhealthy Pod Eviction Policy to your PodDisruptionBudgets to support eviction of misbehaving applications during a node drain. The default behavior is to wait for the application pods to become healthy before the drain can proceed.

When a pod is evicted using the eviction API, it is gracefully terminated, honoring the terminationGracePeriodSeconds setting in its PodSpec.

PodDisruptionBudget example

Consider a cluster with 3 nodes, node-1 through node-3. The cluster is running several applications. One of them has 3 replicas initially called pod-a, pod-b, and pod-c. Another, unrelated pod without a PDB, called pod-x, is also shown. Initially, the pods are laid out as follows:

node-1 node-2 node-3
pod-a available pod-b available pod-c available
pod-x available

All 3 pods are part of a deployment, and they collectively have a PDB which requires there be at least 2 of the 3 pods to be available at all times.

For example, assume the cluster administrator wants to reboot into a new kernel version to fix a bug in the kernel. The cluster administrator first tries to drain node-1 using the kubectl drain command. That tool tries to evict pod-a and pod-x. This succeeds immediately. Both pods go into the terminating state at the same time. This puts the cluster in this state:

node-1 draining node-2 node-3
pod-a terminating pod-b available pod-c available
pod-x terminating

The deployment notices that one of the pods is terminating, so it creates a replacement called pod-d. Since node-1 is cordoned, it lands on another node. Something has also created pod-y as a replacement for pod-x.

(Note: for a StatefulSet, pod-a, which would be called something like pod-0, would need to terminate completely before its replacement, which is also called pod-0 but has a different UID, could be created. Otherwise, the example applies to a StatefulSet as well.)

Now the cluster is in this state:

node-1 draining node-2 node-3
pod-a terminating pod-b available pod-c available
pod-x terminating pod-d starting pod-y

At some point, the pods terminate, and the cluster looks like this:

node-1 drained node-2 node-3
pod-b available pod-c available
pod-d starting pod-y

At this point, if an impatient cluster administrator tries to drain node-2 or node-3, the drain command will block, because there are only 2 available pods for the deployment, and its PDB requires at least 2. After some time passes, pod-d becomes available.

The cluster state now looks like this:

node-1 drained node-2 node-3
pod-b available pod-c available
pod-d available pod-y

Now, the cluster administrator tries to drain node-2. The drain command will try to evict the two pods in some order, say pod-b first and then pod-d. It will succeed at evicting pod-b. But, when it tries to evict pod-d, it will be refused because that would leave only one pod available for the deployment.

The deployment creates a replacement for pod-b called pod-e. Because there are not enough resources in the cluster to schedule pod-e the drain will again block. The cluster may end up in this state:

node-1 drained node-2 node-3 no node
pod-b terminating pod-c available pod-e pending
pod-d available pod-y

At this point, the cluster administrator needs to add a node back to the cluster to proceed with the upgrade.

You can see how Kubernetes varies the rate at which disruptions can happen, according to:

  • how many replicas an application needs
  • how long it takes to gracefully shutdown an instance
  • how long it takes a new instance to start up
  • the type of controller
  • the cluster's resource capacity

Pod disruption conditions

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

A dedicated Pod DisruptionTarget condition is added to indicate that the Pod is about to be deleted due to a disruption. The reason field of the condition additionally indicates one of the following reasons for the Pod termination:

PreemptionByScheduler
Pod is due to be preempted by a scheduler in order to accommodate a new Pod with a higher priority. For more information, see Pod priority preemption.
DeletionByTaintManager
Pod is due to be deleted by Taint Manager (which is part of the node lifecycle controller within kube-controller-manager) due to a NoExecute taint that the Pod does not tolerate; see taint-based evictions.
EvictionByEvictionAPI
Pod has been marked for eviction using the Kubernetes API .
DeletionByPodGC
Pod, that is bound to a no longer existing Node, is due to be deleted by Pod garbage collection.
TerminationByKubelet
Pod has been terminated by the kubelet, because of either node pressure eviction, the graceful node shutdown, or preemption for system critical pods.

In all other disruption scenarios, like eviction due to exceeding Pod container limits, Pods don't receive the DisruptionTarget condition because the disruptions were probably caused by the Pod and would reoccur on retry.

Along with cleaning up the pods, the Pod garbage collector (PodGC) will also mark them as failed if they are in a non-terminal phase (see also Pod garbage collection).

When using a Job (or CronJob), you may want to use these Pod disruption conditions as part of your Job's Pod failure policy.

Separating Cluster Owner and Application Owner Roles

Often, it is useful to think of the Cluster Manager and Application Owner as separate roles with limited knowledge of each other. This separation of responsibilities may make sense in these scenarios:

  • when there are many application teams sharing a Kubernetes cluster, and there is natural specialization of roles
  • when third-party tools or services are used to automate cluster management

Pod Disruption Budgets support this separation of roles by providing an interface between the roles.

If you do not have such a separation of responsibilities in your organization, you may not need to use Pod Disruption Budgets.

How to perform Disruptive Actions on your Cluster

If you are a Cluster Administrator, and you need to perform a disruptive action on all the nodes in your cluster, such as a node or system software upgrade, here are some options:

  • Accept downtime during the upgrade.
  • Failover to another complete replica cluster.
    • No downtime, but may be costly both for the duplicated nodes and for human effort to orchestrate the switchover.
  • Write disruption tolerant applications and use PDBs.
    • No downtime.
    • Minimal resource duplication.
    • Allows more automation of cluster administration.
    • Writing disruption-tolerant applications is tricky, but the work to tolerate voluntary disruptions largely overlaps with work to support autoscaling and tolerating involuntary disruptions.

What's next

4.1.6 - Pod Quality of Service Classes

This page introduces Quality of Service (QoS) classes in Kubernetes, and explains how Kubernetes assigns a QoS class to each Pod as a consequence of the resource constraints that you specify for the containers in that Pod. Kubernetes relies on this classification to make decisions about which Pods to evict when there are not enough available resources on a Node.

Quality of Service classes

Kubernetes classifies the Pods that you run and allocates each Pod into a specific quality of service (QoS) class. Kubernetes uses that classification to influence how different pods are handled. Kubernetes does this classification based on the resource requests of the Containers in that Pod, along with how those requests relate to resource limits. This is known as Quality of Service (QoS) class. Kubernetes assigns every Pod a QoS class based on the resource requests and limits of its component Containers. QoS classes are used by Kubernetes to decide which Pods to evict from a Node experiencing Node Pressure. The possible QoS classes are Guaranteed, Burstable, and BestEffort. When a Node runs out of resources, Kubernetes will first evict BestEffort Pods running on that Node, followed by Burstable and finally Guaranteed Pods. When this eviction is due to resource pressure, only Pods exceeding resource requests are candidates for eviction.

Guaranteed

Pods that are Guaranteed have the strictest resource limits and are least likely to face eviction. They are guaranteed not to be killed until they exceed their limits or there are no lower-priority Pods that can be preempted from the Node. They may not acquire resources beyond their specified limits. These Pods can also make use of exclusive CPUs using the static CPU management policy.

Criteria

For a Pod to be given a QoS class of Guaranteed:

  • Every Container in the Pod must have a memory limit and a memory request.
  • For every Container in the Pod, the memory limit must equal the memory request.
  • Every Container in the Pod must have a CPU limit and a CPU request.
  • For every Container in the Pod, the CPU limit must equal the CPU request.

Burstable

Pods that are Burstable have some lower-bound resource guarantees based on the request, but do not require a specific limit. If a limit is not specified, it defaults to a limit equivalent to the capacity of the Node, which allows the Pods to flexibly increase their resources if resources are available. In the event of Pod eviction due to Node resource pressure, these Pods are evicted only after all BestEffort Pods are evicted. Because a Burstable Pod can include a Container that has no resource limits or requests, a Pod that is Burstable can try to use any amount of node resources.

Criteria

A Pod is given a QoS class of Burstable if:

  • The Pod does not meet the criteria for QoS class Guaranteed.
  • At least one Container in the Pod has a memory or CPU request or limit.

BestEffort

Pods in the BestEffort QoS class can use node resources that aren't specifically assigned to Pods in other QoS classes. For example, if you have a node with 16 CPU cores available to the kubelet, and you assign 4 CPU cores to a Guaranteed Pod, then a Pod in the BestEffort QoS class can try to use any amount of the remaining 12 CPU cores.

The kubelet prefers to evict BestEffort Pods if the node comes under resource pressure.

Criteria

A Pod has a QoS class of BestEffort if it doesn't meet the criteria for either Guaranteed or Burstable. In other words, a Pod is BestEffort only if none of the Containers in the Pod have a memory limit or a memory request, and none of the Containers in the Pod have a CPU limit or a CPU request. Containers in a Pod can request other resources (not CPU or memory) and still be classified as BestEffort.

Memory QoS with cgroup v2

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.22 [alpha] (enabled by default: false)

Memory QoS uses the memory controller of cgroup v2 to guarantee memory resources in Kubernetes. Memory requests and limits of containers in pod are used to set specific interfaces memory.min and memory.high provided by the memory controller. When memory.min is set to memory requests, memory resources are reserved and never reclaimed by the kernel; this is how Memory QoS ensures memory availability for Kubernetes pods. And if memory limits are set in the container, this means that the system needs to limit container memory usage; Memory QoS uses memory.high to throttle workload approaching its memory limit, ensuring that the system is not overwhelmed by instantaneous memory allocation.

Memory QoS relies on QoS class to determine which settings to apply; however, these are different mechanisms that both provide controls over quality of service.

Some behavior is independent of QoS class

Certain behavior is independent of the QoS class assigned by Kubernetes. For example:

  • Any Container exceeding a resource limit will be killed and restarted by the kubelet without affecting other Containers in that Pod.

  • If a Container exceeds its resource request and the node it runs on faces resource pressure, the Pod it is in becomes a candidate for eviction. If this occurs, all Containers in the Pod will be terminated. Kubernetes may create a replacement Pod, usually on a different node.

  • The resource request of a Pod is equal to the sum of the resource requests of its component Containers, and the resource limit of a Pod is equal to the sum of the resource limits of its component Containers.

  • The kube-scheduler does not consider QoS class when selecting which Pods to preempt. Preemption can occur when a cluster does not have enough resources to run all the Pods you defined.

What's next

4.1.7 - User Namespaces

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.30 [beta]

This page explains how user namespaces are used in Kubernetes pods. A user namespace isolates the user running inside the container from the one in the host.

A process running as root in a container can run as a different (non-root) user in the host; in other words, the process has full privileges for operations inside the user namespace, but is unprivileged for operations outside the namespace.

You can use this feature to reduce the damage a compromised container can do to the host or other pods in the same node. There are several security vulnerabilities rated either HIGH or CRITICAL that were not exploitable when user namespaces is active. It is expected user namespace will mitigate some future vulnerabilities too.

Before you begin

This is a Linux-only feature and support is needed in Linux for idmap mounts on the filesystems used. This means:

  • On the node, the filesystem you use for /var/lib/kubelet/pods/, or the custom directory you configure for this, needs idmap mount support.
  • All the filesystems used in the pod's volumes must support idmap mounts.

In practice this means you need at least Linux 6.3, as tmpfs started supporting idmap mounts in that version. This is usually needed as several Kubernetes features use tmpfs (the service account token that is mounted by default uses a tmpfs, Secrets use a tmpfs, etc.)

Some popular filesystems that support idmap mounts in Linux 6.3 are: btrfs, ext4, xfs, fat, tmpfs, overlayfs.

In addition, the container runtime and its underlying OCI runtime must support user namespaces. The following OCI runtimes offer support:

  • crun version 1.9 or greater (it's recommend version 1.13+).
  • runc version 1.2 or greater

To use user namespaces with Kubernetes, you also need to use a CRI container runtime to use this feature with Kubernetes pods:

  • containerd: version 2.0 (and later) supports user namespaces for containers.
  • CRI-O: version 1.25 (and later) supports user namespaces for containers.

You can see the status of user namespaces support in cri-dockerd tracked in an issue on GitHub.

Introduction

User namespaces is a Linux feature that allows to map users in the container to different users in the host. Furthermore, the capabilities granted to a pod in a user namespace are valid only in the namespace and void outside of it.

A pod can opt-in to use user namespaces by setting the pod.spec.hostUsers field to false.

The kubelet will pick host UIDs/GIDs a pod is mapped to, and will do so in a way to guarantee that no two pods on the same node use the same mapping.

The runAsUser, runAsGroup, fsGroup, etc. fields in the pod.spec always refer to the user inside the container.

The valid UIDs/GIDs when this feature is enabled is the range 0-65535. This applies to files and processes (runAsUser, runAsGroup, etc.).

Files using a UID/GID outside this range will be seen as belonging to the overflow ID, usually 65534 (configured in /proc/sys/kernel/overflowuid and /proc/sys/kernel/overflowgid). However, it is not possible to modify those files, even by running as the 65534 user/group.

Most applications that need to run as root but don't access other host namespaces or resources, should continue to run fine without any changes needed if user namespaces is activated.

Understanding user namespaces for pods

Several container runtimes with their default configuration (like Docker Engine, containerd, CRI-O) use Linux namespaces for isolation. Other technologies exist and can be used with those runtimes too (e.g. Kata Containers uses VMs instead of Linux namespaces). This page is applicable for container runtimes using Linux namespaces for isolation.

When creating a pod, by default, several new namespaces are used for isolation: a network namespace to isolate the network of the container, a PID namespace to isolate the view of processes, etc. If a user namespace is used, this will isolate the users in the container from the users in the node.

This means containers can run as root and be mapped to a non-root user on the host. Inside the container the process will think it is running as root (and therefore tools like apt, yum, etc. work fine), while in reality the process doesn't have privileges on the host. You can verify this, for example, if you check which user the container process is running by executing ps aux from the host. The user ps shows is not the same as the user you see if you execute inside the container the command id.

This abstraction limits what can happen, for example, if the container manages to escape to the host. Given that the container is running as a non-privileged user on the host, it is limited what it can do to the host.

Furthermore, as users on each pod will be mapped to different non-overlapping users in the host, it is limited what they can do to other pods too.

Capabilities granted to a pod are also limited to the pod user namespace and mostly invalid out of it, some are even completely void. Here are two examples:

  • CAP_SYS_MODULE does not have any effect if granted to a pod using user namespaces, the pod isn't able to load kernel modules.
  • CAP_SYS_ADMIN is limited to the pod's user namespace and invalid outside of it.

Without using a user namespace a container running as root, in the case of a container breakout, has root privileges on the node. And if some capability were granted to the container, the capabilities are valid on the host too. None of this is true when we use user namespaces.

If you want to know more details about what changes when user namespaces are in use, see man 7 user_namespaces.

Set up a node to support user namespaces

By default, the kubelet assigns pods UIDs/GIDs above the range 0-65535, based on the assumption that the host's files and processes use UIDs/GIDs within this range, which is standard for most Linux distributions. This approach prevents any overlap between the UIDs/GIDs of the host and those of the pods.

Avoiding the overlap is important to mitigate the impact of vulnerabilities such as CVE-2021-25741, where a pod can potentially read arbitrary files in the host. If the UIDs/GIDs of the pod and the host don't overlap, it is limited what a pod would be able to do: the pod UID/GID won't match the host's file owner/group.

The kubelet can use a custom range for user IDs and group IDs for pods. To configure a custom range, the node needs to have:

  • A user kubelet in the system (you cannot use any other username here)
  • The binary getsubids installed (part of shadow-utils) and in the PATH for the kubelet binary.
  • A configuration of subordinate UIDs/GIDs for the kubelet user (see man 5 subuid and man 5 subgid).

This setting only gathers the UID/GID range configuration and does not change the user executing the kubelet.

You must follow some constraints for the subordinate ID range that you assign to the kubelet user:

  • The subordinate user ID, that starts the UID range for Pods, must be a multiple of 65536 and must also be greater than or equal to 65536. In other words, you cannot use any ID from the range 0-65535 for Pods; the kubelet imposes this restriction to make it difficult to create an accidentally insecure configuration.

  • The subordinate ID count must be a multiple of 65536

  • The subordinate ID count must be at least 65536 x <maxPods> where <maxPods> is the maximum number of pods that can run on the node.

  • You must assign the same range for both user IDs and for group IDs, It doesn't matter if other users have user ID ranges that don't align with the group ID ranges.

  • None of the assigned ranges should overlap with any other assignment.

  • The subordinate configuration must be only one line. In other words, you can't have multiple ranges.

For example, you could define /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid to both have these entries for the kubelet user:

# The format is
#   name:firstID:count of IDs
# where
# - firstID is 65536 (the minimum value possible)
# - count of IDs is 110 (default limit for number of) * 65536
kubelet:65536:7208960

Integration with Pod security admission checks

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [alpha]

For Linux Pods that enable user namespaces, Kubernetes relaxes the application of Pod Security Standards in a controlled way. This behavior can be controlled by the feature gate UserNamespacesPodSecurityStandards, which allows an early opt-in for end users. Admins have to ensure that user namespaces are enabled by all nodes within the cluster if using the feature gate.

If you enable the associated feature gate and create a Pod that uses user namespaces, the following fields won't be constrained even in contexts that enforce the Baseline or Restricted pod security standard. This behavior does not present a security concern because root inside a Pod with user namespaces actually refers to the user inside the container, that is never mapped to a privileged user on the host. Here's the list of fields that are not checks for Pods in those circumstances:

  • spec.securityContext.runAsNonRoot
  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.runAsNonRoot
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.runAsNonRoot
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.runAsNonRoot
  • spec.securityContext.runAsUser
  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.runAsUser
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.runAsUser
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.runAsUser

Limitations

When using a user namespace for the pod, it is disallowed to use other host namespaces. In particular, if you set hostUsers: false then you are not allowed to set any of:

  • hostNetwork: true
  • hostIPC: true
  • hostPID: true

What's next

4.1.8 - Downward API

There are two ways to expose Pod and container fields to a running container: environment variables, and as files that are populated by a special volume type. Together, these two ways of exposing Pod and container fields are called the downward API.

It is sometimes useful for a container to have information about itself, without being overly coupled to Kubernetes. The downward API allows containers to consume information about themselves or the cluster without using the Kubernetes client or API server.

An example is an existing application that assumes a particular well-known environment variable holds a unique identifier. One possibility is to wrap the application, but that is tedious and error-prone, and it violates the goal of low coupling. A better option would be to use the Pod's name as an identifier, and inject the Pod's name into the well-known environment variable.

In Kubernetes, there are two ways to expose Pod and container fields to a running container:

Together, these two ways of exposing Pod and container fields are called the downward API.

Available fields

Only some Kubernetes API fields are available through the downward API. This section lists which fields you can make available.

You can pass information from available Pod-level fields using fieldRef. At the API level, the spec for a Pod always defines at least one Container. You can pass information from available Container-level fields using resourceFieldRef.

Information available via fieldRef

For some Pod-level fields, you can provide them to a container either as an environment variable or using a downwardAPI volume. The fields available via either mechanism are:

metadata.name
the pod's name
metadata.namespace
the pod's namespace
metadata.uid
the pod's unique ID
metadata.annotations['<KEY>']
the value of the pod's annotation named <KEY> (for example, metadata.annotations['myannotation'])
metadata.labels['<KEY>']
the text value of the pod's label named <KEY> (for example, metadata.labels['mylabel'])

The following information is available through environment variables but not as a downwardAPI volume fieldRef:

spec.serviceAccountName
the name of the pod's service account
spec.nodeName
the name of the node where the Pod is executing
status.hostIP
the primary IP address of the node to which the Pod is assigned
status.hostIPs
the IP addresses is a dual-stack version of status.hostIP, the first is always the same as status.hostIP.
status.podIP
the pod's primary IP address (usually, its IPv4 address)
status.podIPs
the IP addresses is a dual-stack version of status.podIP, the first is always the same as status.podIP

The following information is available through a downwardAPI volume fieldRef, but not as environment variables:

metadata.labels
all of the pod's labels, formatted as label-key="escaped-label-value" with one label per line
metadata.annotations
all of the pod's annotations, formatted as annotation-key="escaped-annotation-value" with one annotation per line

Information available via resourceFieldRef

These container-level fields allow you to provide information about requests and limits for resources such as CPU and memory.

resource: limits.cpu
A container's CPU limit
resource: requests.cpu
A container's CPU request
resource: limits.memory
A container's memory limit
resource: requests.memory
A container's memory request
resource: limits.hugepages-*
A container's hugepages limit
resource: requests.hugepages-*
A container's hugepages request
resource: limits.ephemeral-storage
A container's ephemeral-storage limit
resource: requests.ephemeral-storage
A container's ephemeral-storage request

Fallback information for resource limits

If CPU and memory limits are not specified for a container, and you use the downward API to try to expose that information, then the kubelet defaults to exposing the maximum allocatable value for CPU and memory based on the node allocatable calculation.

What's next

You can read about downwardAPI volumes.

You can try using the downward API to expose container- or Pod-level information:

4.2 - Workload Management

Kubernetes provides several built-in APIs for declarative management of your workloads and the components of those workloads.

Ultimately, your applications run as containers inside Pods; however, managing individual Pods would be a lot of effort. For example, if a Pod fails, you probably want to run a new Pod to replace it. Kubernetes can do that for you.

You use the Kubernetes API to create a workload object that represents a higher abstraction level than a Pod, and then the Kubernetes control plane automatically manages Pod objects on your behalf, based on the specification for the workload object you defined.

The built-in APIs for managing workloads are:

Deployment (and, indirectly, ReplicaSet), the most common way to run an application on your cluster. Deployment is a good fit for managing a stateless application workload on your cluster, where any Pod in the Deployment is interchangeable and can be replaced if needed. (Deployments are a replacement for the legacy ReplicationController API).

A StatefulSet lets you manage one or more Pods – all running the same application code – where the Pods rely on having a distinct identity. This is different from a Deployment where the Pods are expected to be interchangeable. The most common use for a StatefulSet is to be able to make a link between its Pods and their persistent storage. For example, you can run a StatefulSet that associates each Pod with a PersistentVolume. If one of the Pods in the StatefulSet fails, Kubernetes makes a replacement Pod that is connected to the same PersistentVolume.

A DaemonSet defines Pods that provide facilities that are local to a specific node; for example, a driver that lets containers on that node access a storage system. You use a DaemonSet when the driver, or other node-level service, has to run on the node where it's useful. Each Pod in a DaemonSet performs a role similar to a system daemon on a classic Unix / POSIX server. A DaemonSet might be fundamental to the operation of your cluster, such as a plugin to let that node access cluster networking, it might help you to manage the node, or it could provide less essential facilities that enhance the container platform you are running. You can run DaemonSets (and their pods) across every node in your cluster, or across just a subset (for example, only install the GPU accelerator driver on nodes that have a GPU installed).

You can use a Job and / or a CronJob to define tasks that run to completion and then stop. A Job represents a one-off task, whereas each CronJob repeats according to a schedule.

Other topics in this section:

4.2.1 - Deployments

A Deployment manages a set of Pods to run an application workload, usually one that doesn't maintain state.

A Deployment provides declarative updates for Pods and ReplicaSets.

You describe a desired state in a Deployment, and the Deployment Controller changes the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. You can define Deployments to create new ReplicaSets, or to remove existing Deployments and adopt all their resources with new Deployments.

Use Case

The following are typical use cases for Deployments:

Creating a Deployment

The following is an example of a Deployment. It creates a ReplicaSet to bring up three nginx Pods:

controllers/nginx-deployment.yaml 
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: nginx-deployment
  labels:
    app: nginx
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: nginx:1.14.2
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80

In this example:

  • A Deployment named nginx-deployment is created, indicated by the .metadata.name field. This name will become the basis for the ReplicaSets and Pods which are created later. See Writing a Deployment Spec for more details.

  • The Deployment creates a ReplicaSet that creates three replicated Pods, indicated by the .spec.replicas field.

  • The .spec.selector field defines how the created ReplicaSet finds which Pods to manage. In this case, you select a label that is defined in the Pod template (app: nginx). However, more sophisticated selection rules are possible, as long as the Pod template itself satisfies the rule.

  • The template field contains the following sub-fields:

    • The Pods are labeled app: nginxusing the .metadata.labels field.
    • The Pod template's specification, or .template.spec field, indicates that the Pods run one container, nginx, which runs the nginx Docker Hub image at version 1.14.2.
    • Create one container and name it nginx using the .spec.template.spec.containers[0].name field.

Before you begin, make sure your Kubernetes cluster is up and running. Follow the steps given below to create the above Deployment:

  1. Create the Deployment by running the following command:

    kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/controllers/nginx-deployment.yaml

  2. Run kubectl get deployments to check if the Deployment was created.

    If the Deployment is still being created, the output is similar to the following:

    NAME               READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
nginx-deployment   0/3     0            0           1s

    When you inspect the Deployments in your cluster, the following fields are displayed:

    • NAME lists the names of the Deployments in the namespace.
    • READY displays how many replicas of the application are available to your users. It follows the pattern ready/desired.
    • UP-TO-DATE displays the number of replicas that have been updated to achieve the desired state.
    • AVAILABLE displays how many replicas of the application are available to your users.
    • AGE displays the amount of time that the application has been running.

    Notice how the number of desired replicas is 3 according to .spec.replicas field.

  3. To see the Deployment rollout status, run kubectl rollout status deployment/nginx-deployment.

    The output is similar to:

    Waiting for rollout to finish: 2 out of 3 new replicas have been updated...
deployment "nginx-deployment" successfully rolled out

  4. Run the kubectl get deployments again a few seconds later. The output is similar to this:

    NAME               READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
nginx-deployment   3/3     3            3           18s

    Notice that the Deployment has created all three replicas, and all replicas are up-to-date (they contain the latest Pod template) and available.

  5. To see the ReplicaSet (rs) created by the Deployment, run kubectl get rs. The output is similar to this:

    NAME                          DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
nginx-deployment-75675f5897   3         3         3       18s

    ReplicaSet output shows the following fields:

    • NAME lists the names of the ReplicaSets in the namespace.
    • DESIRED displays the desired number of replicas of the application, which you define when you create the Deployment. This is the desired state.
    • CURRENT displays how many replicas are currently running.
    • READY displays how many replicas of the application are available to your users.
    • AGE displays the amount of time that the application has been running.

    Notice that the name of the ReplicaSet is always formatted as [DEPLOYMENT-NAME]-[HASH]. This name will become the basis for the Pods which are created.

    The HASH string is the same as the pod-template-hash label on the ReplicaSet.

  6. To see the labels automatically generated for each Pod, run kubectl get pods --show-labels. The output is similar to:

    NAME                                READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE       LABELS
nginx-deployment-75675f5897-7ci7o   1/1       Running   0          18s       app=nginx,pod-template-hash=75675f5897
nginx-deployment-75675f5897-kzszj   1/1       Running   0          18s       app=nginx,pod-template-hash=75675f5897
nginx-deployment-75675f5897-qqcnn   1/1       Running   0          18s       app=nginx,pod-template-hash=75675f5897

    The created ReplicaSet ensures that there are three nginx Pods.

Pod-template-hash label

The pod-template-hash label is added by the Deployment controller to every ReplicaSet that a Deployment creates or adopts.

This label ensures that child ReplicaSets of a Deployment do not overlap. It is generated by hashing the PodTemplate of the ReplicaSet and using the resulting hash as the label value that is added to the ReplicaSet selector, Pod template labels, and in any existing Pods that the ReplicaSet might have.

Updating a Deployment

Follow the steps given below to update your Deployment:

  1. Let's update the nginx Pods to use the nginx:1.16.1 image instead of the nginx:1.14.2 image.

    kubectl set image deployment.v1.apps/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.16.1

    or use the following command:

    kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.16.1

    where deployment/nginx-deployment indicates the Deployment, nginx indicates the Container the update will take place and nginx:1.16.1 indicates the new image and its tag.

    The output is similar to:

    deployment.apps/nginx-deployment image updated

    Alternatively, you can edit the Deployment and change .spec.template.spec.containers[0].image from nginx:1.14.2 to nginx:1.16.1:

    kubectl edit deployment/nginx-deployment

    The output is similar to:

    deployment.apps/nginx-deployment edited

  2. To see the rollout status, run:

    kubectl rollout status deployment/nginx-deployment

    The output is similar to this:

    Waiting for rollout to finish: 2 out of 3 new replicas have been updated...

    or

    deployment "nginx-deployment" successfully rolled out

Get more details on your updated Deployment:

  • After the rollout succeeds, you can view the Deployment by running kubectl get deployments. The output is similar to this:

    NAME               READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
nginx-deployment   3/3     3            3           36s

  • Run kubectl get rs to see that the Deployment updated the Pods by creating a new ReplicaSet and scaling it up to 3 replicas, as well as scaling down the old ReplicaSet to 0 replicas.

    kubectl get rs

    The output is similar to this:

    NAME                          DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
nginx-deployment-1564180365   3         3         3       6s
nginx-deployment-2035384211   0         0         0       36s

  • Running get pods should now show only the new Pods:

    kubectl get pods

    The output is similar to this:

    NAME                                READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
nginx-deployment-1564180365-khku8   1/1       Running   0          14s
nginx-deployment-1564180365-nacti   1/1       Running   0          14s
nginx-deployment-1564180365-z9gth   1/1       Running   0          14s

    Next time you want to update these Pods, you only need to update the Deployment's Pod template again.

    Deployment ensures that only a certain number of Pods are down while they are being updated. By default, it ensures that at least 75% of the desired number of Pods are up (25% max unavailable).

    Deployment also ensures that only a certain number of Pods are created above the desired number of Pods. By default, it ensures that at most 125% of the desired number of Pods are up (25% max surge).

    For example, if you look at the above Deployment closely, you will see that it first creates a new Pod, then deletes an old Pod, and creates another new one. It does not kill old Pods until a sufficient number of new Pods have come up, and does not create new Pods until a sufficient number of old Pods have been killed. It makes sure that at least 3 Pods are available and that at max 4 Pods in total are available. In case of a Deployment with 4 replicas, the number of Pods would be between 3 and 5.

  • Get details of your Deployment:

    kubectl describe deployments

    The output is similar to this:

    Name:                   nginx-deployment
Namespace:              default
CreationTimestamp:      Thu, 30 Nov 2017 10:56:25 +0000
Labels:                 app=nginx
Annotations:            deployment.kubernetes.io/revision=2
Selector:               app=nginx
Replicas:               3 desired | 3 updated | 3 total | 3 available | 0 unavailable
StrategyType:           RollingUpdate
MinReadySeconds:        0
RollingUpdateStrategy:  25% max unavailable, 25% max surge
Pod Template:
  Labels:  app=nginx
   Containers:
    nginx:
      Image:        nginx:1.16.1
      Port:         80/TCP
      Environment:  <none>
      Mounts:       <none>
    Volumes:        <none>
  Conditions:
    Type           Status  Reason
    ----           ------  ------
    Available      True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
    Progressing    True    NewReplicaSetAvailable
  OldReplicaSets:  <none>
  NewReplicaSet:   nginx-deployment-1564180365 (3/3 replicas created)
  Events:
    Type    Reason             Age   From                   Message
    ----    ------             ----  ----                   -------
    Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  2m    deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 3
    Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  24s   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-1564180365 to 1
    Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  22s   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 2
    Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  22s   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-1564180365 to 2
    Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  19s   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 1
    Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  19s   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-1564180365 to 3
    Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  14s   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 0

    Here you see that when you first created the Deployment, it created a ReplicaSet (nginx-deployment-2035384211) and scaled it up to 3 replicas directly. When you updated the Deployment, it created a new ReplicaSet (nginx-deployment-1564180365) and scaled it up to 1 and waited for it to come up. Then it scaled down the old ReplicaSet to 2 and scaled up the new ReplicaSet to 2 so that at least 3 Pods were available and at most 4 Pods were created at all times. It then continued scaling up and down the new and the old ReplicaSet, with the same rolling update strategy. Finally, you'll have 3 available replicas in the new ReplicaSet, and the old ReplicaSet is scaled down to 0.

Rollover (aka multiple updates in-flight)

Each time a new Deployment is observed by the Deployment controller, a ReplicaSet is created to bring up the desired Pods. If the Deployment is updated, the existing ReplicaSet that controls Pods whose labels match .spec.selector but whose template does not match .spec.template are scaled down. Eventually, the new ReplicaSet is scaled to .spec.replicas and all old ReplicaSets is scaled to 0.

If you update a Deployment while an existing rollout is in progress, the Deployment creates a new ReplicaSet as per the update and start scaling that up, and rolls over the ReplicaSet that it was scaling up previously -- it will add it to its list of old ReplicaSets and start scaling it down.

For example, suppose you create a Deployment to create 5 replicas of nginx:1.14.2, but then update the Deployment to create 5 replicas of nginx:1.16.1, when only 3 replicas of nginx:1.14.2 had been created. In that case, the Deployment immediately starts killing the 3 nginx:1.14.2 Pods that it had created, and starts creating nginx:1.16.1 Pods. It does not wait for the 5 replicas of nginx:1.14.2 to be created before changing course.

Label selector updates

It is generally discouraged to make label selector updates and it is suggested to plan your selectors up front. In any case, if you need to perform a label selector update, exercise great caution and make sure you have grasped all of the implications.

  • Selector additions require the Pod template labels in the Deployment spec to be updated with the new label too, otherwise a validation error is returned. This change is a non-overlapping one, meaning that the new selector does not select ReplicaSets and Pods created with the old selector, resulting in orphaning all old ReplicaSets and creating a new ReplicaSet.
  • Selector updates changes the existing value in a selector key -- result in the same behavior as additions.
  • Selector removals removes an existing key from the Deployment selector -- do not require any changes in the Pod template labels. Existing ReplicaSets are not orphaned, and a new ReplicaSet is not created, but note that the removed label still exists in any existing Pods and ReplicaSets.

Rolling Back a Deployment

Sometimes, you may want to rollback a Deployment; for example, when the Deployment is not stable, such as crash looping. By default, all of the Deployment's rollout history is kept in the system so that you can rollback anytime you want (you can change that by modifying revision history limit).

  • Suppose that you made a typo while updating the Deployment, by putting the image name as nginx:1.161 instead of nginx:1.16.1:

    kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.161

    The output is similar to this:

    deployment.apps/nginx-deployment image updated

  • The rollout gets stuck. You can verify it by checking the rollout status:

    kubectl rollout status deployment/nginx-deployment

    The output is similar to this:

    Waiting for rollout to finish: 1 out of 3 new replicas have been updated...

  • Press Ctrl-C to stop the above rollout status watch. For more information on stuck rollouts, read more here.

  • You see that the number of old replicas (adding the replica count from nginx-deployment-1564180365 and nginx-deployment-2035384211) is 3, and the number of new replicas (from nginx-deployment-3066724191) is 1.

    kubectl get rs

    The output is similar to this:

    NAME                          DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
nginx-deployment-1564180365   3         3         3       25s
nginx-deployment-2035384211   0         0         0       36s
nginx-deployment-3066724191   1         1         0       6s

  • Looking at the Pods created, you see that 1 Pod created by new ReplicaSet is stuck in an image pull loop.

    kubectl get pods

    The output is similar to this:

    NAME                                READY     STATUS             RESTARTS   AGE
nginx-deployment-1564180365-70iae   1/1       Running            0          25s
nginx-deployment-1564180365-jbqqo   1/1       Running            0          25s
nginx-deployment-1564180365-hysrc   1/1       Running            0          25s
nginx-deployment-3066724191-08mng   0/1       ImagePullBackOff   0          6s

  • Get the description of the Deployment:

    kubectl describe deployment

    The output is similar to this:

    Name:           nginx-deployment
Namespace:      default
CreationTimestamp:  Tue, 15 Mar 2016 14:48:04 -0700
Labels:         app=nginx
Selector:       app=nginx
Replicas:       3 desired | 1 updated | 4 total | 3 available | 1 unavailable
StrategyType:       RollingUpdate
MinReadySeconds:    0
RollingUpdateStrategy:  25% max unavailable, 25% max surge
Pod Template:
  Labels:  app=nginx
  Containers:
   nginx:
    Image:        nginx:1.161
    Port:         80/TCP
    Host Port:    0/TCP
    Environment:  <none>
    Mounts:       <none>
  Volumes:        <none>
Conditions:
  Type           Status  Reason
  ----           ------  ------
  Available      True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
  Progressing    True    ReplicaSetUpdated
OldReplicaSets:     nginx-deployment-1564180365 (3/3 replicas created)
NewReplicaSet:      nginx-deployment-3066724191 (1/1 replicas created)
Events:
  FirstSeen LastSeen    Count   From                    SubObjectPath   Type        Reason              Message
  --------- --------    -----   ----                    -------------   --------    ------              -------
  1m        1m          1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 3
  22s       22s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-1564180365 to 1
  22s       22s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 2
  22s       22s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-1564180365 to 2
  21s       21s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 1
  21s       21s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-1564180365 to 3
  13s       13s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 0
  13s       13s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-3066724191 to 1

    To fix this, you need to rollback to a previous revision of Deployment that is stable.

Checking Rollout History of a Deployment

Follow the steps given below to check the rollout history:

  1. First, check the revisions of this Deployment:

    kubectl rollout history deployment/nginx-deployment

    The output is similar to this:

    deployments "nginx-deployment"
REVISION    CHANGE-CAUSE
1           kubectl apply --filename=https://k8s.io/examples/controllers/nginx-deployment.yaml
2           kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.16.1
3           kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.161

    CHANGE-CAUSE is copied from the Deployment annotation kubernetes.io/change-cause to its revisions upon creation. You can specify theCHANGE-CAUSE message by:

    • Annotating the Deployment with kubectl annotate deployment/nginx-deployment kubernetes.io/change-cause="image updated to 1.16.1"
    • Manually editing the manifest of the resource.

  2. To see the details of each revision, run:

    kubectl rollout history deployment/nginx-deployment --revision=2

    The output is similar to this:

    deployments "nginx-deployment" revision 2
  Labels:       app=nginx
          pod-template-hash=1159050644
  Annotations:  kubernetes.io/change-cause=kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.16.1
  Containers:
   nginx:
    Image:      nginx:1.16.1
    Port:       80/TCP
     QoS Tier:
        cpu:      BestEffort
        memory:   BestEffort
    Environment Variables:      <none>
  No volumes.

Rolling Back to a Previous Revision

Follow the steps given below to rollback the Deployment from the current version to the previous version, which is version 2.

  1. Now you've decided to undo the current rollout and rollback to the previous revision:

    kubectl rollout undo deployment/nginx-deployment

    The output is similar to this:

    deployment.apps/nginx-deployment rolled back

    Alternatively, you can rollback to a specific revision by specifying it with --to-revision:

    kubectl rollout undo deployment/nginx-deployment --to-revision=2

    The output is similar to this:

    deployment.apps/nginx-deployment rolled back

    For more details about rollout related commands, read kubectl rollout.

    The Deployment is now rolled back to a previous stable revision. As you can see, a DeploymentRollback event for rolling back to revision 2 is generated from Deployment controller.

  2. Check if the rollback was successful and the Deployment is running as expected, run:

    kubectl get deployment nginx-deployment

    The output is similar to this:

    NAME               READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
nginx-deployment   3/3     3            3           30m

  3. Get the description of the Deployment:

    kubectl describe deployment nginx-deployment

    The output is similar to this:

    Name:                   nginx-deployment
Namespace:              default
CreationTimestamp:      Sun, 02 Sep 2018 18:17:55 -0500
Labels:                 app=nginx
Annotations:            deployment.kubernetes.io/revision=4
                        kubernetes.io/change-cause=kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.16.1
Selector:               app=nginx
Replicas:               3 desired | 3 updated | 3 total | 3 available | 0 unavailable
StrategyType:           RollingUpdate
MinReadySeconds:        0
RollingUpdateStrategy:  25% max unavailable, 25% max surge
Pod Template:
  Labels:  app=nginx
  Containers:
   nginx:
    Image:        nginx:1.16.1
    Port:         80/TCP
    Host Port:    0/TCP
    Environment:  <none>
    Mounts:       <none>
  Volumes:        <none>
Conditions:
  Type           Status  Reason
  ----           ------  ------
  Available      True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
  Progressing    True    NewReplicaSetAvailable
OldReplicaSets:  <none>
NewReplicaSet:   nginx-deployment-c4747d96c (3/3 replicas created)
Events:
  Type    Reason              Age   From                   Message
  ----    ------              ----  ----                   -------
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   12m   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-75675f5897 to 3
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-c4747d96c to 1
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-75675f5897 to 2
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-c4747d96c to 2
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-75675f5897 to 1
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-c4747d96c to 3
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-75675f5897 to 0
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-595696685f to 1
  Normal  DeploymentRollback  15s   deployment-controller  Rolled back deployment "nginx-deployment" to revision 2
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   15s   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-595696685f to 0

Scaling a Deployment

You can scale a Deployment by using the following command:

kubectl scale deployment/nginx-deployment --replicas=10

The output is similar to this:

deployment.apps/nginx-deployment scaled

Assuming horizontal Pod autoscaling is enabled in your cluster, you can set up an autoscaler for your Deployment and choose the minimum and maximum number of Pods you want to run based on the CPU utilization of your existing Pods.

kubectl autoscale deployment/nginx-deployment --min=10 --max=15 --cpu-percent=80

The output is similar to this:

deployment.apps/nginx-deployment scaled

Proportional scaling

RollingUpdate Deployments support running multiple versions of an application at the same time. When you or an autoscaler scales a RollingUpdate Deployment that is in the middle of a rollout (either in progress or paused), the Deployment controller balances the additional replicas in the existing active ReplicaSets (ReplicaSets with Pods) in order to mitigate risk. This is called proportional scaling.

For example, you are running a Deployment with 10 replicas, maxSurge=3, and maxUnavailable=2.

  • Ensure that the 10 replicas in your Deployment are running.

    kubectl get deploy

    The output is similar to this:

    NAME                 DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
nginx-deployment     10        10        10           10          50s

  • You update to a new image which happens to be unresolvable from inside the cluster.

    kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:sometag

    The output is similar to this:

    deployment.apps/nginx-deployment image updated

  • The image update starts a new rollout with ReplicaSet nginx-deployment-1989198191, but it's blocked due to the maxUnavailable requirement that you mentioned above. Check out the rollout status:

    kubectl get rs

    The output is similar to this:

    NAME                          DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     AGE
nginx-deployment-1989198191   5         5         0         9s
nginx-deployment-618515232    8         8         8         1m

  • Then a new scaling request for the Deployment comes along. The autoscaler increments the Deployment replicas to 15. The Deployment controller needs to decide where to add these new 5 replicas. If you weren't using proportional scaling, all 5 of them would be added in the new ReplicaSet. With proportional scaling, you spread the additional replicas across all ReplicaSets. Bigger proportions go to the ReplicaSets with the most replicas and lower proportions go to ReplicaSets with less replicas. Any leftovers are added to the ReplicaSet with the most replicas. ReplicaSets with zero replicas are not scaled up.

In our example above, 3 replicas are added to the old ReplicaSet and 2 replicas are added to the new ReplicaSet. The rollout process should eventually move all replicas to the new ReplicaSet, assuming the new replicas become healthy. To confirm this, run:

kubectl get deploy

The output is similar to this:

NAME                 DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
nginx-deployment     15        18        7            8           7m

The rollout status confirms how the replicas were added to each ReplicaSet.

kubectl get rs

The output is similar to this:

NAME                          DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     AGE
nginx-deployment-1989198191   7         7         0         7m
nginx-deployment-618515232    11        11        11        7m

Pausing and Resuming a rollout of a Deployment

When you update a Deployment, or plan to, you can pause rollouts for that Deployment before you trigger one or more updates. When you're ready to apply those changes, you resume rollouts for the Deployment. This approach allows you to apply multiple fixes in between pausing and resuming without triggering unnecessary rollouts.

  • For example, with a Deployment that was created:

    Get the Deployment details:

    kubectl get deploy

    The output is similar to this:

    NAME      DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
nginx     3         3         3            3           1m

    Get the rollout status:

    kubectl get rs

    The output is similar to this:

    NAME               DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     AGE
nginx-2142116321   3         3         3         1m

  • Pause by running the following command:

    kubectl rollout pause deployment/nginx-deployment

    The output is similar to this:

    deployment.apps/nginx-deployment paused

  • Then update the image of the Deployment:

    kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.16.1

    The output is similar to this:

    deployment.apps/nginx-deployment image updated

  • Notice that no new rollout started:

    kubectl rollout history deployment/nginx-deployment

    The output is similar to this:

    deployments "nginx"
REVISION  CHANGE-CAUSE
1   <none>

  • Get the rollout status to verify that the existing ReplicaSet has not changed:

    kubectl get rs

    The output is similar to this:

    NAME               DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     AGE
nginx-2142116321   3         3         3         2m

  • You can make as many updates as you wish, for example, update the resources that will be used:

    kubectl set resources deployment/nginx-deployment -c=nginx --limits=cpu=200m,memory=512Mi

    The output is similar to this:

    deployment.apps/nginx-deployment resource requirements updated

    The initial state of the Deployment prior to pausing its rollout will continue its function, but new updates to the Deployment will not have any effect as long as the Deployment rollout is paused.

  • Eventually, resume the Deployment rollout and observe a new ReplicaSet coming up with all the new updates:

    kubectl rollout resume deployment/nginx-deployment

    The output is similar to this:

    deployment.apps/nginx-deployment resumed

  • Watch the status of the rollout until it's done.

    kubectl get rs --watch

    The output is similar to this:

    NAME               DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     AGE
nginx-2142116321   2         2         2         2m
nginx-3926361531   2         2         0         6s
nginx-3926361531   2         2         1         18s
nginx-2142116321   1         2         2         2m
nginx-2142116321   1         2         2         2m
nginx-3926361531   3         2         1         18s
nginx-3926361531   3         2         1         18s
nginx-2142116321   1         1         1         2m
nginx-3926361531   3         3         1         18s
nginx-3926361531   3         3         2         19s
nginx-2142116321   0         1         1         2m
nginx-2142116321   0         1         1         2m
nginx-2142116321   0         0         0         2m
nginx-3926361531   3         3         3         20s

  • Get the status of the latest rollout:

    kubectl get rs

    The output is similar to this:

    NAME               DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     AGE
nginx-2142116321   0         0         0         2m
nginx-3926361531   3         3         3         28s

Deployment status

A Deployment enters various states during its lifecycle. It can be progressing while rolling out a new ReplicaSet, it can be complete, or it can fail to progress.

Progressing Deployment

Kubernetes marks a Deployment as progressing when one of the following tasks is performed:

  • The Deployment creates a new ReplicaSet.
  • The Deployment is scaling up its newest ReplicaSet.
  • The Deployment is scaling down its older ReplicaSet(s).
  • New Pods become ready or available (ready for at least MinReadySeconds).

When the rollout becomes “progressing”, the Deployment controller adds a condition with the following attributes to the Deployment's .status.conditions:

  • type: Progressing
  • status: "True"
  • reason: NewReplicaSetCreated | reason: FoundNewReplicaSet | reason: ReplicaSetUpdated

You can monitor the progress for a Deployment by using kubectl rollout status.

Complete Deployment

Kubernetes marks a Deployment as complete when it has the following characteristics:

  • All of the replicas associated with the Deployment have been updated to the latest version you've specified, meaning any updates you've requested have been completed.
  • All of the replicas associated with the Deployment are available.
  • No old replicas for the Deployment are running.

When the rollout becomes “complete”, the Deployment controller sets a condition with the following attributes to the Deployment's .status.conditions:

  • type: Progressing
  • status: "True"
  • reason: NewReplicaSetAvailable

This Progressing condition will retain a status value of "True" until a new rollout is initiated. The condition holds even when availability of replicas changes (which does instead affect the Available condition).

You can check if a Deployment has completed by using kubectl rollout status. If the rollout completed successfully, kubectl rollout status returns a zero exit code.

kubectl rollout status deployment/nginx-deployment

The output is similar to this:

Waiting for rollout to finish: 2 of 3 updated replicas are available...
deployment "nginx-deployment" successfully rolled out

and the exit status from kubectl rollout is 0 (success):

echo $?

0

Failed Deployment

Your Deployment may get stuck trying to deploy its newest ReplicaSet without ever completing. This can occur due to some of the following factors:

  • Insufficient quota
  • Readiness probe failures
  • Image pull errors
  • Insufficient permissions
  • Limit ranges
  • Application runtime misconfiguration

One way you can detect this condition is to specify a deadline parameter in your Deployment spec: (.spec.progressDeadlineSeconds). .spec.progressDeadlineSeconds denotes the number of seconds the Deployment controller waits before indicating (in the Deployment status) that the Deployment progress has stalled.

The following kubectl command sets the spec with progressDeadlineSeconds to make the controller report lack of progress of a rollout for a Deployment after 10 minutes:

kubectl patch deployment/nginx-deployment -p '{"spec":{"progressDeadlineSeconds":600}}'

The output is similar to this:

deployment.apps/nginx-deployment patched

Once the deadline has been exceeded, the Deployment controller adds a DeploymentCondition with the following attributes to the Deployment's .status.conditions:

  • type: Progressing
  • status: "False"
  • reason: ProgressDeadlineExceeded

This condition can also fail early and is then set to status value of "False" due to reasons as ReplicaSetCreateError. Also, the deadline is not taken into account anymore once the Deployment rollout completes.

See the Kubernetes API conventions for more information on status conditions.

You may experience transient errors with your Deployments, either due to a low timeout that you have set or due to any other kind of error that can be treated as transient. For example, let's suppose you have insufficient quota. If you describe the Deployment you will notice the following section:

kubectl describe deployment nginx-deployment

The output is similar to this:

<...>
Conditions:
  Type            Status  Reason
  ----            ------  ------
  Available       True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
  Progressing     True    ReplicaSetUpdated
  ReplicaFailure  True    FailedCreate
<...>

If you run kubectl get deployment nginx-deployment -o yaml, the Deployment status is similar to this:

status:
  availableReplicas: 2
  conditions:
  - lastTransitionTime: 2016-10-04T12:25:39Z
    lastUpdateTime: 2016-10-04T12:25:39Z
    message: Replica set "nginx-deployment-4262182780" is progressing.
    reason: ReplicaSetUpdated
    status: "True"
    type: Progressing
  - lastTransitionTime: 2016-10-04T12:25:42Z
    lastUpdateTime: 2016-10-04T12:25:42Z
    message: Deployment has minimum availability.
    reason: MinimumReplicasAvailable
    status: "True"
    type: Available
  - lastTransitionTime: 2016-10-04T12:25:39Z
    lastUpdateTime: 2016-10-04T12:25:39Z
    message: 'Error creating: pods "nginx-deployment-4262182780-" is forbidden: exceeded quota:
      object-counts, requested: pods=1, used: pods=3, limited: pods=2'
    reason: FailedCreate
    status: "True"
    type: ReplicaFailure
  observedGeneration: 3
  replicas: 2
  unavailableReplicas: 2

Eventually, once the Deployment progress deadline is exceeded, Kubernetes updates the status and the reason for the Progressing condition:

Conditions:
  Type            Status  Reason
  ----            ------  ------
  Available       True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
  Progressing     False   ProgressDeadlineExceeded
  ReplicaFailure  True    FailedCreate

You can address an issue of insufficient quota by scaling down your Deployment, by scaling down other controllers you may be running, or by increasing quota in your namespace. If you satisfy the quota conditions and the Deployment controller then completes the Deployment rollout, you'll see the Deployment's status update with a successful condition (status: "True" and reason: NewReplicaSetAvailable).

Conditions:
  Type          Status  Reason
  ----          ------  ------
  Available     True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
  Progressing   True    NewReplicaSetAvailable

type: Available with status: "True" means that your Deployment has minimum availability. Minimum availability is dictated by the parameters specified in the deployment strategy. type: Progressing with status: "True" means that your Deployment is either in the middle of a rollout and it is progressing or that it has successfully completed its progress and the minimum required new replicas are available (see the Reason of the condition for the particulars - in our case reason: NewReplicaSetAvailable means that the Deployment is complete).

You can check if a Deployment has failed to progress by using kubectl rollout status. kubectl rollout status returns a non-zero exit code if the Deployment has exceeded the progression deadline.

kubectl rollout status deployment/nginx-deployment

The output is similar to this:

Waiting for rollout to finish: 2 out of 3 new replicas have been updated...
error: deployment "nginx" exceeded its progress deadline

and the exit status from kubectl rollout is 1 (indicating an error):

echo $?

1

Operating on a failed deployment

All actions that apply to a complete Deployment also apply to a failed Deployment. You can scale it up/down, roll back to a previous revision, or even pause it if you need to apply multiple tweaks in the Deployment Pod template.

Clean up Policy

You can set .spec.revisionHistoryLimit field in a Deployment to specify how many old ReplicaSets for this Deployment you want to retain. The rest will be garbage-collected in the background. By default, it is 10.

Canary Deployment

If you want to roll out releases to a subset of users or servers using the Deployment, you can create multiple Deployments, one for each release, following the canary pattern described in managing resources.

Writing a Deployment Spec

As with all other Kubernetes configs, a Deployment needs .apiVersion, .kind, and .metadata fields. For general information about working with config files, see deploying applications, configuring containers, and using kubectl to manage resources documents.

When the control plane creates new Pods for a Deployment, the .metadata.name of the Deployment is part of the basis for naming those Pods. The name of a Deployment must be a valid DNS subdomain value, but this can produce unexpected results for the Pod hostnames. For best compatibility, the name should follow the more restrictive rules for a DNS label.

A Deployment also needs a .spec section.

Pod Template

The .spec.template and .spec.selector are the only required fields of the .spec.

The .spec.template is a Pod template. It has exactly the same schema as a Pod, except it is nested and does not have an apiVersion or kind.

In addition to required fields for a Pod, a Pod template in a Deployment must specify appropriate labels and an appropriate restart policy. For labels, make sure not to overlap with other controllers. See selector.

Only a .spec.template.spec.restartPolicy equal to Always is allowed, which is the default if not specified.

Replicas

.spec.replicas is an optional field that specifies the number of desired Pods. It defaults to 1.

Should you manually scale a Deployment, example via kubectl scale deployment deployment --replicas=X, and then you update that Deployment based on a manifest (for example: by running kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml), then applying that manifest overwrites the manual scaling that you previously did.

If a HorizontalPodAutoscaler (or any similar API for horizontal scaling) is managing scaling for a Deployment, don't set .spec.replicas.

Instead, allow the Kubernetes control plane to manage the .spec.replicas field automatically.

Selector

.spec.selector is a required field that specifies a label selector for the Pods targeted by this Deployment.

.spec.selector must match .spec.template.metadata.labels, or it will be rejected by the API.

In API version apps/v1, .spec.selector and .metadata.labels do not default to .spec.template.metadata.labels if not set. So they must be set explicitly. Also note that .spec.selector is immutable after creation of the Deployment in apps/v1.

A Deployment may terminate Pods whose labels match the selector if their template is different from .spec.template or if the total number of such Pods exceeds .spec.replicas. It brings up new Pods with .spec.template if the number of Pods is less than the desired number.

If you have multiple controllers that have overlapping selectors, the controllers will fight with each other and won't behave correctly.

Strategy

.spec.strategy specifies the strategy used to replace old Pods by new ones. .spec.strategy.type can be "Recreate" or "RollingUpdate". "RollingUpdate" is the default value.

Recreate Deployment

All existing Pods are killed before new ones are created when .spec.strategy.type==Recreate.

Rolling Update Deployment

The Deployment updates Pods in a rolling update fashion when .spec.strategy.type==RollingUpdate. You can specify maxUnavailable and maxSurge to control the rolling update process.

Max Unavailable

.spec.strategy.rollingUpdate.maxUnavailable is an optional field that specifies the maximum number of Pods that can be unavailable during the update process. The value can be an absolute number (for example, 5) or a percentage of desired Pods (for example, 10%). The absolute number is calculated from percentage by rounding down. The value cannot be 0 if .spec.strategy.rollingUpdate.maxSurge is 0. The default value is 25%.

For example, when this value is set to 30%, the old ReplicaSet can be scaled down to 70% of desired Pods immediately when the rolling update starts. Once new Pods are ready, old ReplicaSet can be scaled down further, followed by scaling up the new ReplicaSet, ensuring that the total number of Pods available at all times during the update is at least 70% of the desired Pods.

Max Surge

.spec.strategy.rollingUpdate.maxSurge is an optional field that specifies the maximum number of Pods that can be created over the desired number of Pods. The value can be an absolute number (for example, 5) or a percentage of desired Pods (for example, 10%). The value cannot be 0 if MaxUnavailable is 0. The absolute number is calculated from the percentage by rounding up. The default value is 25%.

For example, when this value is set to 30%, the new ReplicaSet can be scaled up immediately when the rolling update starts, such that the total number of old and new Pods does not exceed 130% of desired Pods. Once old Pods have been killed, the new ReplicaSet can be scaled up further, ensuring that the total number of Pods running at any time during the update is at most 130% of desired Pods.

Here are some Rolling Update Deployment examples that use the maxUnavailable and maxSurge:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
 name: nginx-deployment
 labels:
   app: nginx
spec:
 replicas: 3
 selector:
   matchLabels:
     app: nginx
 template:
   metadata:
     labels:
       app: nginx
   spec:
     containers:
     - name: nginx
       image: nginx:1.14.2
       ports:
       - containerPort: 80
 strategy:
   type: RollingUpdate
   rollingUpdate:
     maxUnavailable: 1


apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
 name: nginx-deployment
 labels:
   app: nginx
spec:
 replicas: 3
 selector:
   matchLabels:
     app: nginx
 template:
   metadata:
     labels:
       app: nginx
   spec:
     containers:
     - name: nginx
       image: nginx:1.14.2
       ports:
       - containerPort: 80
 strategy:
   type: RollingUpdate
   rollingUpdate:
     maxSurge: 1


apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
 name: nginx-deployment
 labels:
   app: nginx
spec:
 replicas: 3
 selector:
   matchLabels:
     app: nginx
 template:
   metadata:
     labels:
       app: nginx
   spec:
     containers:
     - name: nginx
       image: nginx:1.14.2
       ports:
       - containerPort: 80
 strategy:
   type: RollingUpdate
   rollingUpdate:
     maxSurge: 1
     maxUnavailable: 1

Progress Deadline Seconds

.spec.progressDeadlineSeconds is an optional field that specifies the number of seconds you want to wait for your Deployment to progress before the system reports back that the Deployment has failed progressing - surfaced as a condition with type: Progressing, status: "False". and reason: ProgressDeadlineExceeded in the status of the resource. The Deployment controller will keep retrying the Deployment. This defaults to 600. In the future, once automatic rollback will be implemented, the Deployment controller will roll back a Deployment as soon as it observes such a condition.

If specified, this field needs to be greater than .spec.minReadySeconds.

Min Ready Seconds

.spec.minReadySeconds is an optional field that specifies the minimum number of seconds for which a newly created Pod should be ready without any of its containers crashing, for it to be considered available. This defaults to 0 (the Pod will be considered available as soon as it is ready). To learn more about when a Pod is considered ready, see Container Probes.

Revision History Limit

A Deployment's revision history is stored in the ReplicaSets it controls.

.spec.revisionHistoryLimit is an optional field that specifies the number of old ReplicaSets to retain to allow rollback. These old ReplicaSets consume resources in etcd and crowd the output of kubectl get rs. The configuration of each Deployment revision is stored in its ReplicaSets; therefore, once an old ReplicaSet is deleted, you lose the ability to rollback to that revision of Deployment. By default, 10 old ReplicaSets will be kept, however its ideal value depends on the frequency and stability of new Deployments.

More specifically, setting this field to zero means that all old ReplicaSets with 0 replicas will be cleaned up. In this case, a new Deployment rollout cannot be undone, since its revision history is cleaned up.

Paused

.spec.paused is an optional boolean field for pausing and resuming a Deployment. The only difference between a paused Deployment and one that is not paused, is that any changes into the PodTemplateSpec of the paused Deployment will not trigger new rollouts as long as it is paused. A Deployment is not paused by default when it is created.

What's next

4.2.2 - ReplicaSet

A ReplicaSet's purpose is to maintain a stable set of replica Pods running at any given time. Usually, you define a Deployment and let that Deployment manage ReplicaSets automatically.

A ReplicaSet's purpose is to maintain a stable set of replica Pods running at any given time. As such, it is often used to guarantee the availability of a specified number of identical Pods.

How a ReplicaSet works

A ReplicaSet is defined with fields, including a selector that specifies how to identify Pods it can acquire, a number of replicas indicating how many Pods it should be maintaining, and a pod template specifying the data of new Pods it should create to meet the number of replicas criteria. A ReplicaSet then fulfills its purpose by creating and deleting Pods as needed to reach the desired number. When a ReplicaSet needs to create new Pods, it uses its Pod template.

A ReplicaSet is linked to its Pods via the Pods' metadata.ownerReferences field, which specifies what resource the current object is owned by. All Pods acquired by a ReplicaSet have their owning ReplicaSet's identifying information within their ownerReferences field. It's through this link that the ReplicaSet knows of the state of the Pods it is maintaining and plans accordingly.

A ReplicaSet identifies new Pods to acquire by using its selector. If there is a Pod that has no OwnerReference or the OwnerReference is not a Controller and it matches a ReplicaSet's selector, it will be immediately acquired by said ReplicaSet.

When to use a ReplicaSet

A ReplicaSet ensures that a specified number of pod replicas are running at any given time. However, a Deployment is a higher-level concept that manages ReplicaSets and provides declarative updates to Pods along with a lot of other useful features. Therefore, we recommend using Deployments instead of directly using ReplicaSets, unless you require custom update orchestration or don't require updates at all.

This actually means that you may never need to manipulate ReplicaSet objects: use a Deployment instead, and define your application in the spec section.

Example

controllers/frontend.yaml 
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: ReplicaSet
metadata:
  name: frontend
  labels:
    app: guestbook
    tier: frontend
spec:
  # modify replicas according to your case
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      tier: frontend
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        tier: frontend
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: php-redis
        image: us-docker.pkg.dev/google-samples/containers/gke/gb-frontend:v5

Saving this manifest into frontend.yaml and submitting it to a Kubernetes cluster will create the defined ReplicaSet and the Pods that it manages.

kubectl apply -f https://kubernetes.io/examples/controllers/frontend.yaml

You can then get the current ReplicaSets deployed:

kubectl get rs

And see the frontend one you created:

NAME       DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
frontend   3         3         3       6s

You can also check on the state of the ReplicaSet:

kubectl describe rs/frontend

And you will see output similar to:

Name:         frontend
Namespace:    default
Selector:     tier=frontend
Labels:       app=guestbook
              tier=frontend
Annotations:  <none>
Replicas:     3 current / 3 desired
Pods Status:  3 Running / 0 Waiting / 0 Succeeded / 0 Failed
Pod Template:
  Labels:  tier=frontend
  Containers:
   php-redis:
    Image:        us-docker.pkg.dev/google-samples/containers/gke/gb-frontend:v5
    Port:         <none>
    Host Port:    <none>
    Environment:  <none>
    Mounts:       <none>
  Volumes:        <none>
Events:
  Type    Reason            Age   From                   Message
  ----    ------            ----  ----                   -------
  Normal  SuccessfulCreate  13s   replicaset-controller  Created pod: frontend-gbgfx
  Normal  SuccessfulCreate  13s   replicaset-controller  Created pod: frontend-rwz57
  Normal  SuccessfulCreate  13s   replicaset-controller  Created pod: frontend-wkl7w

And lastly you can check for the Pods brought up:

kubectl get pods

You should see Pod information similar to:

NAME             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
frontend-gbgfx   1/1     Running   0          10m
frontend-rwz57   1/1     Running   0          10m
frontend-wkl7w   1/1     Running   0          10m

You can also verify that the owner reference of these pods is set to the frontend ReplicaSet. To do this, get the yaml of one of the Pods running:

kubectl get pods frontend-gbgfx -o yaml

The output will look similar to this, with the frontend ReplicaSet's info set in the metadata's ownerReferences field:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: "2024-02-28T22:30:44Z"
  generateName: frontend-
  labels:
    tier: frontend
  name: frontend-gbgfx
  namespace: default
  ownerReferences:
  - apiVersion: apps/v1
    blockOwnerDeletion: true
    controller: true
    kind: ReplicaSet
    name: frontend
    uid: e129deca-f864-481b-bb16-b27abfd92292
...

Non-Template Pod acquisitions

While you can create bare Pods with no problems, it is strongly recommended to make sure that the bare Pods do not have labels which match the selector of one of your ReplicaSets. The reason for this is because a ReplicaSet is not limited to owning Pods specified by its template-- it can acquire other Pods in the manner specified in the previous sections.

Take the previous frontend ReplicaSet example, and the Pods specified in the following manifest:

pods/pod-rs.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pod1
  labels:
    tier: frontend
spec:
  containers:
  - name: hello1
    image: gcr.io/google-samples/hello-app:2.0

---

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pod2
  labels:
    tier: frontend
spec:
  containers:
  - name: hello2
    image: gcr.io/google-samples/hello-app:1.0

As those Pods do not have a Controller (or any object) as their owner reference and match the selector of the frontend ReplicaSet, they will immediately be acquired by it.

Suppose you create the Pods after the frontend ReplicaSet has been deployed and has set up its initial Pod replicas to fulfill its replica count requirement:

kubectl apply -f https://kubernetes.io/examples/pods/pod-rs.yaml

The new Pods will be acquired by the ReplicaSet, and then immediately terminated as the ReplicaSet would be over its desired count.

Fetching the Pods:

kubectl get pods

The output shows that the new Pods are either already terminated, or in the process of being terminated:

NAME             READY   STATUS        RESTARTS   AGE
frontend-b2zdv   1/1     Running       0          10m
frontend-vcmts   1/1     Running       0          10m
frontend-wtsmm   1/1     Running       0          10m
pod1             0/1     Terminating   0          1s
pod2             0/1     Terminating   0          1s

If you create the Pods first:

kubectl apply -f https://kubernetes.io/examples/pods/pod-rs.yaml

And then create the ReplicaSet however:

kubectl apply -f https://kubernetes.io/examples/controllers/frontend.yaml

You shall see that the ReplicaSet has acquired the Pods and has only created new ones according to its spec until the number of its new Pods and the original matches its desired count. As fetching the Pods:

kubectl get pods

Will reveal in its output:

NAME             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
frontend-hmmj2   1/1     Running   0          9s
pod1             1/1     Running   0          36s
pod2             1/1     Running   0          36s

In this manner, a ReplicaSet can own a non-homogeneous set of Pods

Writing a ReplicaSet manifest

As with all other Kubernetes API objects, a ReplicaSet needs the apiVersion, kind, and metadata fields. For ReplicaSets, the kind is always a ReplicaSet.

When the control plane creates new Pods for a ReplicaSet, the .metadata.name of the ReplicaSet is part of the basis for naming those Pods. The name of a ReplicaSet must be a valid DNS subdomain value, but this can produce unexpected results for the Pod hostnames. For best compatibility, the name should follow the more restrictive rules for a DNS label.

A ReplicaSet also needs a .spec section.

Pod Template

The .spec.template is a pod template which is also required to have labels in place. In our frontend.yaml example we had one label: tier: frontend. Be careful not to overlap with the selectors of other controllers, lest they try to adopt this Pod.

For the template's restart policy field, .spec.template.spec.restartPolicy, the only allowed value is Always, which is the default.

Pod Selector

The .spec.selector field is a label selector. As discussed earlier these are the labels used to identify potential Pods to acquire. In our frontend.yaml example, the selector was:

matchLabels:
  tier: frontend

In the ReplicaSet, .spec.template.metadata.labels must match spec.selector, or it will be rejected by the API.

Replicas

You can specify how many Pods should run concurrently by setting .spec.replicas. The ReplicaSet will create/delete its Pods to match this number.

If you do not specify .spec.replicas, then it defaults to 1.

Working with ReplicaSets

Deleting a ReplicaSet and its Pods

To delete a ReplicaSet and all of its Pods, use kubectl delete. The Garbage collector automatically deletes all of the dependent Pods by default.

When using the REST API or the client-go library, you must set propagationPolicy to Background or Foreground in the -d option. For example:

kubectl proxy --port=8080
curl -X DELETE  'localhost:8080/apis/apps/v1/namespaces/default/replicasets/frontend' \
  -d '{"kind":"DeleteOptions","apiVersion":"v1","propagationPolicy":"Foreground"}' \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json"

Deleting just a ReplicaSet

You can delete a ReplicaSet without affecting any of its Pods using kubectl delete with the --cascade=orphan option. When using the REST API or the client-go library, you must set propagationPolicy to Orphan. For example:

kubectl proxy --port=8080
curl -X DELETE  'localhost:8080/apis/apps/v1/namespaces/default/replicasets/frontend' \
  -d '{"kind":"DeleteOptions","apiVersion":"v1","propagationPolicy":"Orphan"}' \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json"

Once the original is deleted, you can create a new ReplicaSet to replace it. As long as the old and new .spec.selector are the same, then the new one will adopt the old Pods. However, it will not make any effort to make existing Pods match a new, different pod template. To update Pods to a new spec in a controlled way, use a Deployment, as ReplicaSets do not support a rolling update directly.

Isolating Pods from a ReplicaSet

You can remove Pods from a ReplicaSet by changing their labels. This technique may be used to remove Pods from service for debugging, data recovery, etc. Pods that are removed in this way will be replaced automatically ( assuming that the number of replicas is not also changed).

Scaling a ReplicaSet

A ReplicaSet can be easily scaled up or down by simply updating the .spec.replicas field. The ReplicaSet controller ensures that a desired number of Pods with a matching label selector are available and operational.

When scaling down, the ReplicaSet controller chooses which pods to delete by sorting the available pods to prioritize scaling down pods based on the following general algorithm:

  1. Pending (and unschedulable) pods are scaled down first
  2. If controller.kubernetes.io/pod-deletion-cost annotation is set, then the pod with the lower value will come first.
  3. Pods on nodes with more replicas come before pods on nodes with fewer replicas.
  4. If the pods' creation times differ, the pod that was created more recently comes before the older pod (the creation times are bucketed on an integer log scale).

If all of the above match, then selection is random.

Pod deletion cost

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.22 [beta]

Using the controller.kubernetes.io/pod-deletion-cost annotation, users can set a preference regarding which pods to remove first when downscaling a ReplicaSet.

The annotation should be set on the pod, the range is [-2147483648, 2147483647]. It represents the cost of deleting a pod compared to other pods belonging to the same ReplicaSet. Pods with lower deletion cost are preferred to be deleted before pods with higher deletion cost.

The implicit value for this annotation for pods that don't set it is 0; negative values are permitted. Invalid values will be rejected by the API server.

This feature is beta and enabled by default. You can disable it using the feature gate PodDeletionCost in both kube-apiserver and kube-controller-manager.

Example Use Case

The different pods of an application could have different utilization levels. On scale down, the application may prefer to remove the pods with lower utilization. To avoid frequently updating the pods, the application should update controller.kubernetes.io/pod-deletion-cost once before issuing a scale down (setting the annotation to a value proportional to pod utilization level). This works if the application itself controls the down scaling; for example, the driver pod of a Spark deployment.

ReplicaSet as a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler Target

A ReplicaSet can also be a target for Horizontal Pod Autoscalers (HPA). That is, a ReplicaSet can be auto-scaled by an HPA. Here is an example HPA targeting the ReplicaSet we created in the previous example.

controllers/hpa-rs.yaml 
apiVersion: autoscaling/v1
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
metadata:
  name: frontend-scaler
spec:
  scaleTargetRef:
    kind: ReplicaSet
    name: frontend
  minReplicas: 3
  maxReplicas: 10
  targetCPUUtilizationPercentage: 50

Saving this manifest into hpa-rs.yaml and submitting it to a Kubernetes cluster should create the defined HPA that autoscales the target ReplicaSet depending on the CPU usage of the replicated Pods.

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/controllers/hpa-rs.yaml

Alternatively, you can use the kubectl autoscale command to accomplish the same (and it's easier!)

kubectl autoscale rs frontend --max=10 --min=3 --cpu-percent=50

Alternatives to ReplicaSet

Deployment is an object which can own ReplicaSets and update them and their Pods via declarative, server-side rolling updates. While ReplicaSets can be used independently, today they're mainly used by Deployments as a mechanism to orchestrate Pod creation, deletion and updates. When you use Deployments you don't have to worry about managing the ReplicaSets that they create. Deployments own and manage their ReplicaSets. As such, it is recommended to use Deployments when you want ReplicaSets.

Bare Pods

Unlike the case where a user directly created Pods, a ReplicaSet replaces Pods that are deleted or terminated for any reason, such as in the case of node failure or disruptive node maintenance, such as a kernel upgrade. For this reason, we recommend that you use a ReplicaSet even if your application requires only a single Pod. Think of it similarly to a process supervisor, only it supervises multiple Pods across multiple nodes instead of individual processes on a single node. A ReplicaSet delegates local container restarts to some agent on the node such as Kubelet.

Job

Use a Job instead of a ReplicaSet for Pods that are expected to terminate on their own (that is, batch jobs).

DaemonSet

Use a DaemonSet instead of a ReplicaSet for Pods that provide a machine-level function, such as machine monitoring or machine logging. These Pods have a lifetime that is tied to a machine lifetime: the Pod needs to be running on the machine before other Pods start, and are safe to terminate when the machine is otherwise ready to be rebooted/shutdown.

ReplicationController

ReplicaSets are the successors to ReplicationControllers. The two serve the same purpose, and behave similarly, except that a ReplicationController does not support set-based selector requirements as described in the labels user guide. As such, ReplicaSets are preferred over ReplicationControllers

What's next

4.2.3 - StatefulSets

A StatefulSet runs a group of Pods, and maintains a sticky identity for each of those Pods. This is useful for managing applications that need persistent storage or a stable, unique network identity.

StatefulSet is the workload API object used to manage stateful applications.

Manages the deployment and scaling of a set of Pods, and provides guarantees about the ordering and uniqueness of these Pods.

Like a Deployment, a StatefulSet manages Pods that are based on an identical container spec. Unlike a Deployment, a StatefulSet maintains a sticky identity for each of its Pods. These pods are created from the same spec, but are not interchangeable: each has a persistent identifier that it maintains across any rescheduling.

If you want to use storage volumes to provide persistence for your workload, you can use a StatefulSet as part of the solution. Although individual Pods in a StatefulSet are susceptible to failure, the persistent Pod identifiers make it easier to match existing volumes to the new Pods that replace any that have failed.

Using StatefulSets

StatefulSets are valuable for applications that require one or more of the following.

  • Stable, unique network identifiers.
  • Stable, persistent storage.
  • Ordered, graceful deployment and scaling.
  • Ordered, automated rolling updates.

In the above, stable is synonymous with persistence across Pod (re)scheduling. If an application doesn't require any stable identifiers or ordered deployment, deletion, or scaling, you should deploy your application using a workload object that provides a set of stateless replicas. Deployment or ReplicaSet may be better suited to your stateless needs.

Limitations

  • The storage for a given Pod must either be provisioned by a PersistentVolume Provisioner (examples here) based on the requested storage class, or pre-provisioned by an admin.
  • Deleting and/or scaling a StatefulSet down will not delete the volumes associated with the StatefulSet. This is done to ensure data safety, which is generally more valuable than an automatic purge of all related StatefulSet resources.
  • StatefulSets currently require a Headless Service to be responsible for the network identity of the Pods. You are responsible for creating this Service.
  • StatefulSets do not provide any guarantees on the termination of pods when a StatefulSet is deleted. To achieve ordered and graceful termination of the pods in the StatefulSet, it is possible to scale the StatefulSet down to 0 prior to deletion.
  • When using Rolling Updates with the default Pod Management Policy (OrderedReady), it's possible to get into a broken state that requires manual intervention to repair.

Components

The example below demonstrates the components of a StatefulSet.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: nginx
  labels:
    app: nginx
spec:
  ports:
  - port: 80
    name: web
  clusterIP: None
  selector:
    app: nginx
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  name: web
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx # has to match .spec.template.metadata.labels
  serviceName: "nginx"
  replicas: 3 # by default is 1
  minReadySeconds: 10 # by default is 0
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx # has to match .spec.selector.matchLabels
    spec:
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 10
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: registry.k8s.io/nginx-slim:0.24
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
          name: web
        volumeMounts:
        - name: www
          mountPath: /usr/share/nginx/html
  volumeClaimTemplates:
  - metadata:
      name: www
    spec:
      accessModes: [ "ReadWriteOnce" ]
      storageClassName: "my-storage-class"
      resources:
        requests:
          storage: 1Gi

In the above example:

  • A Headless Service, named nginx, is used to control the network domain.
  • The StatefulSet, named web, has a Spec that indicates that 3 replicas of the nginx container will be launched in unique Pods.
  • The volumeClaimTemplates will provide stable storage using PersistentVolumes provisioned by a PersistentVolume Provisioner.

The name of a StatefulSet object must be a valid DNS label.

Pod Selector

You must set the .spec.selector field of a StatefulSet to match the labels of its .spec.template.metadata.labels. Failing to specify a matching Pod Selector will result in a validation error during StatefulSet creation.

Volume Claim Templates

You can set the .spec.volumeClaimTemplates field to create a PersistentVolumeClaim. This will provide stable storage to the StatefulSet if either

  • The StorageClass specified for the volume claim is set up to use dynamic provisioning, or
  • The cluster already contains a PersistentVolume with the correct StorageClass and sufficient available storage space.

Minimum ready seconds

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable]

.spec.minReadySeconds is an optional field that specifies the minimum number of seconds for which a newly created Pod should be running and ready without any of its containers crashing, for it to be considered available. This is used to check progression of a rollout when using a Rolling Update strategy. This field defaults to 0 (the Pod will be considered available as soon as it is ready). To learn more about when a Pod is considered ready, see Container Probes.

Pod Identity

StatefulSet Pods have a unique identity that consists of an ordinal, a stable network identity, and stable storage. The identity sticks to the Pod, regardless of which node it's (re)scheduled on.

Ordinal Index

For a StatefulSet with N replicas, each Pod in the StatefulSet will be assigned an integer ordinal, that is unique over the Set. By default, pods will be assigned ordinals from 0 up through N-1. The StatefulSet controller will also add a pod label with this index: apps.kubernetes.io/pod-index.

Start ordinal

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

.spec.ordinals is an optional field that allows you to configure the integer ordinals assigned to each Pod. It defaults to nil. Within the field, you can configure the following options:

  • .spec.ordinals.start: If the .spec.ordinals.start field is set, Pods will be assigned ordinals from .spec.ordinals.start up through .spec.ordinals.start + .spec.replicas - 1.

Stable Network ID

Each Pod in a StatefulSet derives its hostname from the name of the StatefulSet and the ordinal of the Pod. The pattern for the constructed hostname is $(statefulset name)-$(ordinal). The example above will create three Pods named web-0,web-1,web-2. A StatefulSet can use a Headless Service to control the domain of its Pods. The domain managed by this Service takes the form: $(service name).$(namespace).svc.cluster.local, where "cluster.local" is the cluster domain. As each Pod is created, it gets a matching DNS subdomain, taking the form: $(podname).$(governing service domain), where the governing service is defined by the serviceName field on the StatefulSet.

Depending on how DNS is configured in your cluster, you may not be able to look up the DNS name for a newly-run Pod immediately. This behavior can occur when other clients in the cluster have already sent queries for the hostname of the Pod before it was created. Negative caching (normal in DNS) means that the results of previous failed lookups are remembered and reused, even after the Pod is running, for at least a few seconds.

If you need to discover Pods promptly after they are created, you have a few options:

  • Query the Kubernetes API directly (for example, using a watch) rather than relying on DNS lookups.
  • Decrease the time of caching in your Kubernetes DNS provider (typically this means editing the config map for CoreDNS, which currently caches for 30 seconds).

As mentioned in the limitations section, you are responsible for creating the Headless Service responsible for the network identity of the pods.

Here are some examples of choices for Cluster Domain, Service name, StatefulSet name, and how that affects the DNS names for the StatefulSet's Pods.

Cluster Domain Service (ns/name) StatefulSet (ns/name) StatefulSet Domain Pod DNS Pod Hostname
cluster.local default/nginx default/web nginx.default.svc.cluster.local web-{0..N-1}.nginx.default.svc.cluster.local web-{0..N-1}
cluster.local foo/nginx foo/web nginx.foo.svc.cluster.local web-{0..N-1}.nginx.foo.svc.cluster.local web-{0..N-1}
kube.local foo/nginx foo/web nginx.foo.svc.kube.local web-{0..N-1}.nginx.foo.svc.kube.local web-{0..N-1}

Stable Storage

For each VolumeClaimTemplate entry defined in a StatefulSet, each Pod receives one PersistentVolumeClaim. In the nginx example above, each Pod receives a single PersistentVolume with a StorageClass of my-storage-class and 1 GiB of provisioned storage. If no StorageClass is specified, then the default StorageClass will be used. When a Pod is (re)scheduled onto a node, its volumeMounts mount the PersistentVolumes associated with its PersistentVolume Claims. Note that, the PersistentVolumes associated with the Pods' PersistentVolume Claims are not deleted when the Pods, or StatefulSet are deleted. This must be done manually.

Pod Name Label

When the StatefulSet controller creates a Pod, it adds a label, statefulset.kubernetes.io/pod-name, that is set to the name of the Pod. This label allows you to attach a Service to a specific Pod in the StatefulSet.

Pod index label

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.28 [beta]

When the StatefulSet controller creates a Pod, the new Pod is labelled with apps.kubernetes.io/pod-index. The value of this label is the ordinal index of the Pod. This label allows you to route traffic to a particular pod index, filter logs/metrics using the pod index label, and more. Note the feature gate PodIndexLabel must be enabled for this feature, and it is enabled by default.

Deployment and Scaling Guarantees

  • For a StatefulSet with N replicas, when Pods are being deployed, they are created sequentially, in order from {0..N-1}.
  • When Pods are being deleted, they are terminated in reverse order, from {N-1..0}.
  • Before a scaling operation is applied to a Pod, all of its predecessors must be Running and Ready.
  • Before a Pod is terminated, all of its successors must be completely shutdown.

The StatefulSet should not specify a pod.Spec.TerminationGracePeriodSeconds of 0. This practice is unsafe and strongly discouraged. For further explanation, please refer to force deleting StatefulSet Pods.

When the nginx example above is created, three Pods will be deployed in the order web-0, web-1, web-2. web-1 will not be deployed before web-0 is Running and Ready, and web-2 will not be deployed until web-1 is Running and Ready. If web-0 should fail, after web-1 is Running and Ready, but before web-2 is launched, web-2 will not be launched until web-0 is successfully relaunched and becomes Running and Ready.

If a user were to scale the deployed example by patching the StatefulSet such that replicas=1, web-2 would be terminated first. web-1 would not be terminated until web-2 is fully shutdown and deleted. If web-0 were to fail after web-2 has been terminated and is completely shutdown, but prior to web-1's termination, web-1 would not be terminated until web-0 is Running and Ready.

Pod Management Policies

StatefulSet allows you to relax its ordering guarantees while preserving its uniqueness and identity guarantees via its .spec.podManagementPolicy field.

OrderedReady Pod Management

OrderedReady pod management is the default for StatefulSets. It implements the behavior described above.

Parallel Pod Management

Parallel pod management tells the StatefulSet controller to launch or terminate all Pods in parallel, and to not wait for Pods to become Running and Ready or completely terminated prior to launching or terminating another Pod. This option only affects the behavior for scaling operations. Updates are not affected.

Update strategies

A StatefulSet's .spec.updateStrategy field allows you to configure and disable automated rolling updates for containers, labels, resource request/limits, and annotations for the Pods in a StatefulSet. There are two possible values:

OnDelete
When a StatefulSet's .spec.updateStrategy.type is set to OnDelete, the StatefulSet controller will not automatically update the Pods in a StatefulSet. Users must manually delete Pods to cause the controller to create new Pods that reflect modifications made to a StatefulSet's .spec.template.
RollingUpdate
The RollingUpdate update strategy implements automated, rolling updates for the Pods in a StatefulSet. This is the default update strategy.

Rolling Updates

When a StatefulSet's .spec.updateStrategy.type is set to RollingUpdate, the StatefulSet controller will delete and recreate each Pod in the StatefulSet. It will proceed in the same order as Pod termination (from the largest ordinal to the smallest), updating each Pod one at a time.

The Kubernetes control plane waits until an updated Pod is Running and Ready prior to updating its predecessor. If you have set .spec.minReadySeconds (see Minimum Ready Seconds), the control plane additionally waits that amount of time after the Pod turns ready, before moving on.

Partitioned rolling updates

The RollingUpdate update strategy can be partitioned, by specifying a .spec.updateStrategy.rollingUpdate.partition. If a partition is specified, all Pods with an ordinal that is greater than or equal to the partition will be updated when the StatefulSet's .spec.template is updated. All Pods with an ordinal that is less than the partition will not be updated, and, even if they are deleted, they will be recreated at the previous version. If a StatefulSet's .spec.updateStrategy.rollingUpdate.partition is greater than its .spec.replicas, updates to its .spec.template will not be propagated to its Pods. In most cases you will not need to use a partition, but they are useful if you want to stage an update, roll out a canary, or perform a phased roll out.

Maximum unavailable Pods

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [alpha]

You can control the maximum number of Pods that can be unavailable during an update by specifying the .spec.updateStrategy.rollingUpdate.maxUnavailable field. The value can be an absolute number (for example, 5) or a percentage of desired Pods (for example, 10%). Absolute number is calculated from the percentage value by rounding it up. This field cannot be 0. The default setting is 1.

This field applies to all Pods in the range 0 to replicas - 1. If there is any unavailable Pod in the range 0 to replicas - 1, it will be counted towards maxUnavailable.

Forced rollback

When using Rolling Updates with the default Pod Management Policy (OrderedReady), it's possible to get into a broken state that requires manual intervention to repair.

If you update the Pod template to a configuration that never becomes Running and Ready (for example, due to a bad binary or application-level configuration error), StatefulSet will stop the rollout and wait.

In this state, it's not enough to revert the Pod template to a good configuration. Due to a known issue, StatefulSet will continue to wait for the broken Pod to become Ready (which never happens) before it will attempt to revert it back to the working configuration.

After reverting the template, you must also delete any Pods that StatefulSet had already attempted to run with the bad configuration. StatefulSet will then begin to recreate the Pods using the reverted template.

PersistentVolumeClaim retention

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.32 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

The optional .spec.persistentVolumeClaimRetentionPolicy field controls if and how PVCs are deleted during the lifecycle of a StatefulSet. You must enable the StatefulSetAutoDeletePVC feature gate on the API server and the controller manager to use this field. Once enabled, there are two policies you can configure for each StatefulSet:

whenDeleted
configures the volume retention behavior that applies when the StatefulSet is deleted
whenScaled
configures the volume retention behavior that applies when the replica count of the StatefulSet is reduced; for example, when scaling down the set.

For each policy that you can configure, you can set the value to either Delete or Retain.

Delete
The PVCs created from the StatefulSet volumeClaimTemplate are deleted for each Pod affected by the policy. With the whenDeleted policy all PVCs from the volumeClaimTemplate are deleted after their Pods have been deleted. With the whenScaled policy, only PVCs corresponding to Pod replicas being scaled down are deleted, after their Pods have been deleted.
Retain (default)
PVCs from the volumeClaimTemplate are not affected when their Pod is deleted. This is the behavior before this new feature.

Bear in mind that these policies only apply when Pods are being removed due to the StatefulSet being deleted or scaled down. For example, if a Pod associated with a StatefulSet fails due to node failure, and the control plane creates a replacement Pod, the StatefulSet retains the existing PVC. The existing volume is unaffected, and the cluster will attach it to the node where the new Pod is about to launch.

The default for policies is Retain, matching the StatefulSet behavior before this new feature.

Here is an example policy.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
...
spec:
  persistentVolumeClaimRetentionPolicy:
    whenDeleted: Retain
    whenScaled: Delete
...

The StatefulSet controller adds owner references to its PVCs, which are then deleted by the garbage collector after the Pod is terminated. This enables the Pod to cleanly unmount all volumes before the PVCs are deleted (and before the backing PV and volume are deleted, depending on the retain policy). When you set the whenDeleted policy to Delete, an owner reference to the StatefulSet instance is placed on all PVCs associated with that StatefulSet.

The whenScaled policy must delete PVCs only when a Pod is scaled down, and not when a Pod is deleted for another reason. When reconciling, the StatefulSet controller compares its desired replica count to the actual Pods present on the cluster. Any StatefulSet Pod whose id greater than the replica count is condemned and marked for deletion. If the whenScaled policy is Delete, the condemned Pods are first set as owners to the associated StatefulSet template PVCs, before the Pod is deleted. This causes the PVCs to be garbage collected after only the condemned Pods have terminated.

This means that if the controller crashes and restarts, no Pod will be deleted before its owner reference has been updated appropriate to the policy. If a condemned Pod is force-deleted while the controller is down, the owner reference may or may not have been set up, depending on when the controller crashed. It may take several reconcile loops to update the owner references, so some condemned Pods may have set up owner references and others may not. For this reason we recommend waiting for the controller to come back up, which will verify owner references before terminating Pods. If that is not possible, the operator should verify the owner references on PVCs to ensure the expected objects are deleted when Pods are force-deleted.

Replicas

.spec.replicas is an optional field that specifies the number of desired Pods. It defaults to 1.

Should you manually scale a deployment, example via kubectl scale statefulset statefulset --replicas=X, and then you update that StatefulSet based on a manifest (for example: by running kubectl apply -f statefulset.yaml), then applying that manifest overwrites the manual scaling that you previously did.

If a HorizontalPodAutoscaler (or any similar API for horizontal scaling) is managing scaling for a Statefulset, don't set .spec.replicas. Instead, allow the Kubernetes control plane to manage the .spec.replicas field automatically.

What's next

4.2.4 - DaemonSet

A DaemonSet defines Pods that provide node-local facilities. These might be fundamental to the operation of your cluster, such as a networking helper tool, or be part of an add-on.

A DaemonSet ensures that all (or some) Nodes run a copy of a Pod. As nodes are added to the cluster, Pods are added to them. As nodes are removed from the cluster, those Pods are garbage collected. Deleting a DaemonSet will clean up the Pods it created.

Some typical uses of a DaemonSet are:

  • running a cluster storage daemon on every node
  • running a logs collection daemon on every node
  • running a node monitoring daemon on every node

In a simple case, one DaemonSet, covering all nodes, would be used for each type of daemon. A more complex setup might use multiple DaemonSets for a single type of daemon, but with different flags and/or different memory and cpu requests for different hardware types.

Writing a DaemonSet Spec

Create a DaemonSet

You can describe a DaemonSet in a YAML file. For example, the daemonset.yaml file below describes a DaemonSet that runs the fluentd-elasticsearch Docker image:

controllers/daemonset.yaml 
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: DaemonSet
metadata:
  name: fluentd-elasticsearch
  namespace: kube-system
  labels:
    k8s-app: fluentd-logging
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      name: fluentd-elasticsearch
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        name: fluentd-elasticsearch
    spec:
      tolerations:
      # these tolerations are to have the daemonset runnable on control plane nodes
      # remove them if your control plane nodes should not run pods
      - key: node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane
        operator: Exists
        effect: NoSchedule
      - key: node-role.kubernetes.io/master
        operator: Exists
        effect: NoSchedule
      containers:
      - name: fluentd-elasticsearch
        image: quay.io/fluentd_elasticsearch/fluentd:v2.5.2
        resources:
          limits:
            memory: 200Mi
          requests:
            cpu: 100m
            memory: 200Mi
        volumeMounts:
        - name: varlog
          mountPath: /var/log
      # it may be desirable to set a high priority class to ensure that a DaemonSet Pod
      # preempts running Pods
      # priorityClassName: important
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30
      volumes:
      - name: varlog
        hostPath:
          path: /var/log

Create a DaemonSet based on the YAML file:

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/controllers/daemonset.yaml

Required Fields

As with all other Kubernetes config, a DaemonSet needs apiVersion, kind, and metadata fields. For general information about working with config files, see running stateless applications and object management using kubectl.

The name of a DaemonSet object must be a valid DNS subdomain name.

A DaemonSet also needs a .spec section.

Pod Template

The .spec.template is one of the required fields in .spec.

The .spec.template is a pod template. It has exactly the same schema as a Pod, except it is nested and does not have an apiVersion or kind.

In addition to required fields for a Pod, a Pod template in a DaemonSet has to specify appropriate labels (see pod selector).

A Pod Template in a DaemonSet must have a RestartPolicy equal to Always, or be unspecified, which defaults to Always.

Pod Selector

The .spec.selector field is a pod selector. It works the same as the .spec.selector of a Job.

You must specify a pod selector that matches the labels of the .spec.template. Also, once a DaemonSet is created, its .spec.selector can not be mutated. Mutating the pod selector can lead to the unintentional orphaning of Pods, and it was found to be confusing to users.

The .spec.selector is an object consisting of two fields:

  • matchLabels - works the same as the .spec.selector of a ReplicationController.
  • matchExpressions - allows to build more sophisticated selectors by specifying key, list of values and an operator that relates the key and values.

When the two are specified the result is ANDed.

The .spec.selector must match the .spec.template.metadata.labels. Config with these two not matching will be rejected by the API.

Running Pods on select Nodes

If you specify a .spec.template.spec.nodeSelector, then the DaemonSet controller will create Pods on nodes which match that node selector. Likewise if you specify a .spec.template.spec.affinity, then DaemonSet controller will create Pods on nodes which match that node affinity. If you do not specify either, then the DaemonSet controller will create Pods on all nodes.

How Daemon Pods are scheduled

A DaemonSet can be used to ensure that all eligible nodes run a copy of a Pod. The DaemonSet controller creates a Pod for each eligible node and adds the spec.affinity.nodeAffinity field of the Pod to match the target host. After the Pod is created, the default scheduler typically takes over and then binds the Pod to the target host by setting the .spec.nodeName field. If the new Pod cannot fit on the node, the default scheduler may preempt (evict) some of the existing Pods based on the priority of the new Pod.

The user can specify a different scheduler for the Pods of the DaemonSet, by setting the .spec.template.spec.schedulerName field of the DaemonSet.

The original node affinity specified at the .spec.template.spec.affinity.nodeAffinity field (if specified) is taken into consideration by the DaemonSet controller when evaluating the eligible nodes, but is replaced on the created Pod with the node affinity that matches the name of the eligible node.

nodeAffinity:
  requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
    nodeSelectorTerms:
    - matchFields:
      - key: metadata.name
        operator: In
        values:
        - target-host-name

Taints and tolerations

The DaemonSet controller automatically adds a set of tolerations to DaemonSet Pods:

Tolerations for DaemonSet pods
Toleration key Effect Details
node.kubernetes.io/not-ready NoExecute DaemonSet Pods can be scheduled onto nodes that are not healthy or ready to accept Pods. Any DaemonSet Pods running on such nodes will not be evicted.
node.kubernetes.io/unreachable NoExecute DaemonSet Pods can be scheduled onto nodes that are unreachable from the node controller. Any DaemonSet Pods running on such nodes will not be evicted.
node.kubernetes.io/disk-pressure NoSchedule DaemonSet Pods can be scheduled onto nodes with disk pressure issues.
node.kubernetes.io/memory-pressure NoSchedule DaemonSet Pods can be scheduled onto nodes with memory pressure issues.
node.kubernetes.io/pid-pressure NoSchedule DaemonSet Pods can be scheduled onto nodes with process pressure issues.
node.kubernetes.io/unschedulable NoSchedule DaemonSet Pods can be scheduled onto nodes that are unschedulable.
node.kubernetes.io/network-unavailable NoSchedule Only added for DaemonSet Pods that request host networking, i.e., Pods having spec.hostNetwork: true. Such DaemonSet Pods can be scheduled onto nodes with unavailable network.

You can add your own tolerations to the Pods of a DaemonSet as well, by defining these in the Pod template of the DaemonSet.

Because the DaemonSet controller sets the node.kubernetes.io/unschedulable:NoSchedule toleration automatically, Kubernetes can run DaemonSet Pods on nodes that are marked as unschedulable.

If you use a DaemonSet to provide an important node-level function, such as cluster networking, it is helpful that Kubernetes places DaemonSet Pods on nodes before they are ready. For example, without that special toleration, you could end up in a deadlock situation where the node is not marked as ready because the network plugin is not running there, and at the same time the network plugin is not running on that node because the node is not yet ready.

Communicating with Daemon Pods

Some possible patterns for communicating with Pods in a DaemonSet are:

  • Push: Pods in the DaemonSet are configured to send updates to another service, such as a stats database. They do not have clients.
  • NodeIP and Known Port: Pods in the DaemonSet can use a hostPort, so that the pods are reachable via the node IPs. Clients know the list of node IPs somehow, and know the port by convention.
  • DNS: Create a headless service with the same pod selector, and then discover DaemonSets using the endpoints resource or retrieve multiple A records from DNS.
  • Service: Create a service with the same Pod selector, and use the service to reach a daemon on a random node. (No way to reach specific node.)

Updating a DaemonSet

If node labels are changed, the DaemonSet will promptly add Pods to newly matching nodes and delete Pods from newly not-matching nodes.

You can modify the Pods that a DaemonSet creates. However, Pods do not allow all fields to be updated. Also, the DaemonSet controller will use the original template the next time a node (even with the same name) is created.

You can delete a DaemonSet. If you specify --cascade=orphan with kubectl, then the Pods will be left on the nodes. If you subsequently create a new DaemonSet with the same selector, the new DaemonSet adopts the existing Pods. If any Pods need replacing the DaemonSet replaces them according to its updateStrategy.

You can perform a rolling update on a DaemonSet.

Alternatives to DaemonSet

Init scripts

It is certainly possible to run daemon processes by directly starting them on a node (e.g. using init, upstartd, or systemd). This is perfectly fine. However, there are several advantages to running such processes via a DaemonSet:

  • Ability to monitor and manage logs for daemons in the same way as applications.
  • Same config language and tools (e.g. Pod templates, kubectl) for daemons and applications.
  • Running daemons in containers with resource limits increases isolation between daemons from app containers. However, this can also be accomplished by running the daemons in a container but not in a Pod.

Bare Pods

It is possible to create Pods directly which specify a particular node to run on. However, a DaemonSet replaces Pods that are deleted or terminated for any reason, such as in the case of node failure or disruptive node maintenance, such as a kernel upgrade. For this reason, you should use a DaemonSet rather than creating individual Pods.

Static Pods

It is possible to create Pods by writing a file to a certain directory watched by Kubelet. These are called static pods. Unlike DaemonSet, static Pods cannot be managed with kubectl or other Kubernetes API clients. Static Pods do not depend on the apiserver, making them useful in cluster bootstrapping cases. Also, static Pods may be deprecated in the future.

Deployments

DaemonSets are similar to Deployments in that they both create Pods, and those Pods have processes which are not expected to terminate (e.g. web servers, storage servers).

Use a Deployment for stateless services, like frontends, where scaling up and down the number of replicas and rolling out updates are more important than controlling exactly which host the Pod runs on. Use a DaemonSet when it is important that a copy of a Pod always run on all or certain hosts, if the DaemonSet provides node-level functionality that allows other Pods to run correctly on that particular node.

For example, network plugins often include a component that runs as a DaemonSet. The DaemonSet component makes sure that the node where it's running has working cluster networking.

What's next

4.2.5 - Jobs

Jobs represent one-off tasks that run to completion and then stop.

A Job creates one or more Pods and will continue to retry execution of the Pods until a specified number of them successfully terminate. As pods successfully complete, the Job tracks the successful completions. When a specified number of successful completions is reached, the task (ie, Job) is complete. Deleting a Job will clean up the Pods it created. Suspending a Job will delete its active Pods until the Job is resumed again.

A simple case is to create one Job object in order to reliably run one Pod to completion. The Job object will start a new Pod if the first Pod fails or is deleted (for example due to a node hardware failure or a node reboot).

You can also use a Job to run multiple Pods in parallel.

If you want to run a Job (either a single task, or several in parallel) on a schedule, see CronJob.

Running an example Job

Here is an example Job config. It computes π to 2000 places and prints it out. It takes around 10s to complete.

controllers/job.yaml 
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: pi
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: pi
        image: perl:5.34.0
        command: ["perl",  "-Mbignum=bpi", "-wle", "print bpi(2000)"]
      restartPolicy: Never
  backoffLimit: 4

You can run the example with this command:

kubectl apply -f https://kubernetes.io/examples/controllers/job.yaml

The output is similar to this:

job.batch/pi created

Check on the status of the Job with kubectl:


Name:           pi
Namespace:      default
Selector:       batch.kubernetes.io/controller-uid=c9948307-e56d-4b5d-8302-ae2d7b7da67c
Labels:         batch.kubernetes.io/controller-uid=c9948307-e56d-4b5d-8302-ae2d7b7da67c
                batch.kubernetes.io/job-name=pi
                ...
Annotations:    batch.kubernetes.io/job-tracking: ""
Parallelism:    1
Completions:    1
Start Time:     Mon, 02 Dec 2019 15:20:11 +0200
Completed At:   Mon, 02 Dec 2019 15:21:16 +0200
Duration:       65s
Pods Statuses:  0 Running / 1 Succeeded / 0 Failed
Pod Template:
  Labels:  batch.kubernetes.io/controller-uid=c9948307-e56d-4b5d-8302-ae2d7b7da67c
           batch.kubernetes.io/job-name=pi
  Containers:
   pi:
    Image:      perl:5.34.0
    Port:       <none>
    Host Port:  <none>
    Command:
      perl
      -Mbignum=bpi
      -wle
      print bpi(2000)
    Environment:  <none>
    Mounts:       <none>
  Volumes:        <none>
Events:
  Type    Reason            Age   From            Message
  ----    ------            ----  ----            -------
  Normal  SuccessfulCreate  21s   job-controller  Created pod: pi-xf9p4
  Normal  Completed         18s   job-controller  Job completed



apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  annotations: batch.kubernetes.io/job-tracking: ""
             ...  
  creationTimestamp: "2022-11-10T17:53:53Z"
  generation: 1
  labels:
    batch.kubernetes.io/controller-uid: 863452e6-270d-420e-9b94-53a54146c223
    batch.kubernetes.io/job-name: pi
  name: pi
  namespace: default
  resourceVersion: "4751"
  uid: 204fb678-040b-497f-9266-35ffa8716d14
spec:
  backoffLimit: 4
  completionMode: NonIndexed
  completions: 1
  parallelism: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      batch.kubernetes.io/controller-uid: 863452e6-270d-420e-9b94-53a54146c223
  suspend: false
  template:
    metadata:
      creationTimestamp: null
      labels:
        batch.kubernetes.io/controller-uid: 863452e6-270d-420e-9b94-53a54146c223
        batch.kubernetes.io/job-name: pi
    spec:
      containers:
      - command:
        - perl
        - -Mbignum=bpi
        - -wle
        - print bpi(2000)
        image: perl:5.34.0
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        name: pi
        resources: {}
        terminationMessagePath: /dev/termination-log
        terminationMessagePolicy: File
      dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst
      restartPolicy: Never
      schedulerName: default-scheduler
      securityContext: {}
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30
status:
  active: 1
  ready: 0
  startTime: "2022-11-10T17:53:57Z"
  uncountedTerminatedPods: {}

To view completed Pods of a Job, use kubectl get pods.

To list all the Pods that belong to a Job in a machine readable form, you can use a command like this:

pods=$(kubectl get pods --selector=batch.kubernetes.io/job-name=pi --output=jsonpath='{.items[*].metadata.name}')
echo $pods

The output is similar to this:

pi-5rwd7

Here, the selector is the same as the selector for the Job. The --output=jsonpath option specifies an expression with the name from each Pod in the returned list.

View the standard output of one of the pods:

kubectl logs $pods

Another way to view the logs of a Job:

kubectl logs jobs/pi

The output is similar to this:

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491412737245870066063155881748815209209628292540917153643678925903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094330572703657595919530921861173819326117931051185480744623799627495673518857527248912279381830119491298336733624406566430860213949463952247371907021798609437027705392171762931767523846748184676694051320005681271452635608277857713427577896091736371787214684409012249534301465495853710507922796892589235420199561121290219608640344181598136297747713099605187072113499999983729780499510597317328160963185950244594553469083026425223082533446850352619311881710100031378387528865875332083814206171776691473035982534904287554687311595628638823537875937519577818577805321712268066130019278766111959092164201989380952572010654858632788659361533818279682303019520353018529689957736225994138912497217752834791315155748572424541506959508295331168617278558890750983817546374649393192550604009277016711390098488240128583616035637076601047101819429555961989467678374494482553797747268471040475346462080466842590694912933136770289891521047521620569660240580381501935112533824300355876402474964732639141992726042699227967823547816360093417216412199245863150302861829745557067498385054945885869269956909272107975093029553211653449872027559602364806654991198818347977535663698074265425278625518184175746728909777727938000816470600161452491921732172147723501414419735685481613611573525521334757418494684385233239073941433345477624168625189835694855620992192221842725502542568876717904946016534668049886272327917860857843838279679766814541009538837863609506800642251252051173929848960841284886269456042419652850222106611863067442786220391949450471237137869609563643719172874677646575739624138908658326459958133904780275901

Writing a Job spec

As with all other Kubernetes config, a Job needs apiVersion, kind, and metadata fields.

When the control plane creates new Pods for a Job, the .metadata.name of the Job is part of the basis for naming those Pods. The name of a Job must be a valid DNS subdomain value, but this can produce unexpected results for the Pod hostnames. For best compatibility, the name should follow the more restrictive rules for a DNS label. Even when the name is a DNS subdomain, the name must be no longer than 63 characters.

A Job also needs a .spec section.

Job Labels

Job labels will have batch.kubernetes.io/ prefix for job-name and controller-uid.

Pod Template

The .spec.template is the only required field of the .spec.

The .spec.template is a pod template. It has exactly the same schema as a Pod, except it is nested and does not have an apiVersion or kind.

In addition to required fields for a Pod, a pod template in a Job must specify appropriate labels (see pod selector) and an appropriate restart policy.

Only a RestartPolicy equal to Never or OnFailure is allowed.

Pod selector

The .spec.selector field is optional. In almost all cases you should not specify it. See section specifying your own pod selector.

Parallel execution for Jobs

There are three main types of task suitable to run as a Job:

  1. Non-parallel Jobs
    • normally, only one Pod is started, unless the Pod fails.
    • the Job is complete as soon as its Pod terminates successfully.
  2. Parallel Jobs with a fixed completion count:
    • specify a non-zero positive value for .spec.completions.
    • the Job represents the overall task, and is complete when there are .spec.completions successful Pods.
    • when using .spec.completionMode="Indexed", each Pod gets a different index in the range 0 to .spec.completions-1.
  3. Parallel Jobs with a work queue:
    • do not specify .spec.completions, default to .spec.parallelism.
    • the Pods must coordinate amongst themselves or an external service to determine what each should work on. For example, a Pod might fetch a batch of up to N items from the work queue.
    • each Pod is independently capable of determining whether or not all its peers are done, and thus that the entire Job is done.
    • when any Pod from the Job terminates with success, no new Pods are created.
    • once at least one Pod has terminated with success and all Pods are terminated, then the Job is completed with success.
    • once any Pod has exited with success, no other Pod should still be doing any work for this task or writing any output. They should all be in the process of exiting.

For a non-parallel Job, you can leave both .spec.completions and .spec.parallelism unset. When both are unset, both are defaulted to 1.

For a fixed completion count Job, you should set .spec.completions to the number of completions needed. You can set .spec.parallelism, or leave it unset and it will default to 1.

For a work queue Job, you must leave .spec.completions unset, and set .spec.parallelism to a non-negative integer.

For more information about how to make use of the different types of job, see the job patterns section.

Controlling parallelism

The requested parallelism (.spec.parallelism) can be set to any non-negative value. If it is unspecified, it defaults to 1. If it is specified as 0, then the Job is effectively paused until it is increased.

Actual parallelism (number of pods running at any instant) may be more or less than requested parallelism, for a variety of reasons:

  • For fixed completion count Jobs, the actual number of pods running in parallel will not exceed the number of remaining completions. Higher values of .spec.parallelism are effectively ignored.
  • For work queue Jobs, no new Pods are started after any Pod has succeeded -- remaining Pods are allowed to complete, however.
  • If the Job Controller has not had time to react.
  • If the Job controller failed to create Pods for any reason (lack of ResourceQuota, lack of permission, etc.), then there may be fewer pods than requested.
  • The Job controller may throttle new Pod creation due to excessive previous pod failures in the same Job.
  • When a Pod is gracefully shut down, it takes time to stop.

Completion mode

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

Jobs with fixed completion count - that is, jobs that have non null .spec.completions - can have a completion mode that is specified in .spec.completionMode:

  • NonIndexed (default): the Job is considered complete when there have been .spec.completions successfully completed Pods. In other words, each Pod completion is homologous to each other. Note that Jobs that have null .spec.completions are implicitly NonIndexed.

  • Indexed: the Pods of a Job get an associated completion index from 0 to .spec.completions-1. The index is available through four mechanisms:

    • The Pod annotation batch.kubernetes.io/job-completion-index.
    • The Pod label batch.kubernetes.io/job-completion-index (for v1.28 and later). Note the feature gate PodIndexLabel must be enabled to use this label, and it is enabled by default.
    • As part of the Pod hostname, following the pattern $(job-name)-$(index). When you use an Indexed Job in combination with a Service, Pods within the Job can use the deterministic hostnames to address each other via DNS. For more information about how to configure this, see Job with Pod-to-Pod Communication.
    • From the containerized task, in the environment variable JOB_COMPLETION_INDEX.

    The Job is considered complete when there is one successfully completed Pod for each index. For more information about how to use this mode, see Indexed Job for Parallel Processing with Static Work Assignment.

Handling Pod and container failures

A container in a Pod may fail for a number of reasons, such as because the process in it exited with a non-zero exit code, or the container was killed for exceeding a memory limit, etc. If this happens, and the .spec.template.spec.restartPolicy = "OnFailure", then the Pod stays on the node, but the container is re-run. Therefore, your program needs to handle the case when it is restarted locally, or else specify .spec.template.spec.restartPolicy = "Never". See pod lifecycle for more information on restartPolicy.

An entire Pod can also fail, for a number of reasons, such as when the pod is kicked off the node (node is upgraded, rebooted, deleted, etc.), or if a container of the Pod fails and the .spec.template.spec.restartPolicy = "Never". When a Pod fails, then the Job controller starts a new Pod. This means that your application needs to handle the case when it is restarted in a new pod. In particular, it needs to handle temporary files, locks, incomplete output and the like caused by previous runs.

By default, each pod failure is counted towards the .spec.backoffLimit limit, see pod backoff failure policy. However, you can customize handling of pod failures by setting the Job's pod failure policy.

Additionally, you can choose to count the pod failures independently for each index of an Indexed Job by setting the .spec.backoffLimitPerIndex field (for more information, see backoff limit per index).

Note that even if you specify .spec.parallelism = 1 and .spec.completions = 1 and .spec.template.spec.restartPolicy = "Never", the same program may sometimes be started twice.

If you do specify .spec.parallelism and .spec.completions both greater than 1, then there may be multiple pods running at once. Therefore, your pods must also be tolerant of concurrency.

If you specify the .spec.podFailurePolicy field, the Job controller does not consider a terminating Pod (a pod that has a .metadata.deletionTimestamp field set) as a failure until that Pod is terminal (its .status.phase is Failed or Succeeded). However, the Job controller creates a replacement Pod as soon as the termination becomes apparent. Once the pod terminates, the Job controller evaluates .backoffLimit and .podFailurePolicy for the relevant Job, taking this now-terminated Pod into consideration.

If either of these requirements is not satisfied, the Job controller counts a terminating Pod as an immediate failure, even if that Pod later terminates with phase: "Succeeded".

Pod backoff failure policy

There are situations where you want to fail a Job after some amount of retries due to a logical error in configuration etc. To do so, set .spec.backoffLimit to specify the number of retries before considering a Job as failed. The back-off limit is set by default to 6. Failed Pods associated with the Job are recreated by the Job controller with an exponential back-off delay (10s, 20s, 40s ...) capped at six minutes.

The number of retries is calculated in two ways:

  • The number of Pods with .status.phase = "Failed".
  • When using restartPolicy = "OnFailure", the number of retries in all the containers of Pods with .status.phase equal to Pending or Running.

If either of the calculations reaches the .spec.backoffLimit, the Job is considered failed.

Backoff limit per index

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [beta]

When you run an indexed Job, you can choose to handle retries for pod failures independently for each index. To do so, set the .spec.backoffLimitPerIndex to specify the maximal number of pod failures per index.

When the per-index backoff limit is exceeded for an index, Kubernetes considers the index as failed and adds it to the .status.failedIndexes field. The succeeded indexes, those with a successfully executed pods, are recorded in the .status.completedIndexes field, regardless of whether you set the backoffLimitPerIndex field.

Note that a failing index does not interrupt execution of other indexes. Once all indexes finish for a Job where you specified a backoff limit per index, if at least one of those indexes did fail, the Job controller marks the overall Job as failed, by setting the Failed condition in the status. The Job gets marked as failed even if some, potentially nearly all, of the indexes were processed successfully.

You can additionally limit the maximal number of indexes marked failed by setting the .spec.maxFailedIndexes field. When the number of failed indexes exceeds the maxFailedIndexes field, the Job controller triggers termination of all remaining running Pods for that Job. Once all pods are terminated, the entire Job is marked failed by the Job controller, by setting the Failed condition in the Job status.

Here is an example manifest for a Job that defines a backoffLimitPerIndex:

/controllers/job-backoff-limit-per-index-example.yaml 
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: job-backoff-limit-per-index-example
spec:
  completions: 10
  parallelism: 3
  completionMode: Indexed  # required for the feature
  backoffLimitPerIndex: 1  # maximal number of failures per index
  maxFailedIndexes: 5      # maximal number of failed indexes before terminating the Job execution
  template:
    spec:
      restartPolicy: Never # required for the feature
      containers:
      - name: example
        image: python
        command:           # The jobs fails as there is at least one failed index
                           # (all even indexes fail in here), yet all indexes
                           # are executed as maxFailedIndexes is not exceeded.
        - python3
        - -c
        - |
          import os, sys
          print("Hello world")
          if int(os.environ.get("JOB_COMPLETION_INDEX")) % 2 == 0:
            sys.exit(1)

In the example above, the Job controller allows for one restart for each of the indexes. When the total number of failed indexes exceeds 5, then the entire Job is terminated.

Once the job is finished, the Job status looks as follows:

kubectl get -o yaml job job-backoff-limit-per-index-example

  status:
    completedIndexes: 1,3,5,7,9
    failedIndexes: 0,2,4,6,8
    succeeded: 5          # 1 succeeded pod for each of 5 succeeded indexes
    failed: 10            # 2 failed pods (1 retry) for each of 5 failed indexes
    conditions:
    - message: Job has failed indexes
      reason: FailedIndexes
      status: "True"
      type: FailureTarget
    - message: Job has failed indexes
      reason: FailedIndexes
      status: "True"
      type: Failed

The Job controller adds the FailureTarget Job condition to trigger Job termination and cleanup. When all of the Job Pods are terminated, the Job controller adds the Failed condition with the same values for reason and message as the FailureTarget Job condition. For details, see Termination of Job Pods.

Additionally, you may want to use the per-index backoff along with a pod failure policy. When using per-index backoff, there is a new FailIndex action available which allows you to avoid unnecessary retries within an index.

Pod failure policy

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

A Pod failure policy, defined with the .spec.podFailurePolicy field, enables your cluster to handle Pod failures based on the container exit codes and the Pod conditions.

In some situations, you may want to have a better control when handling Pod failures than the control provided by the Pod backoff failure policy, which is based on the Job's .spec.backoffLimit. These are some examples of use cases:

  • To optimize costs of running workloads by avoiding unnecessary Pod restarts, you can terminate a Job as soon as one of its Pods fails with an exit code indicating a software bug.
  • To guarantee that your Job finishes even if there are disruptions, you can ignore Pod failures caused by disruptions (such as preemption, API-initiated eviction or taint-based eviction) so that they don't count towards the .spec.backoffLimit limit of retries.

You can configure a Pod failure policy, in the .spec.podFailurePolicy field, to meet the above use cases. This policy can handle Pod failures based on the container exit codes and the Pod conditions.

Here is a manifest for a Job that defines a podFailurePolicy:

/controllers/job-pod-failure-policy-example.yaml 
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: job-pod-failure-policy-example
spec:
  completions: 12
  parallelism: 3
  template:
    spec:
      restartPolicy: Never
      containers:
      - name: main
        image: docker.io/library/bash:5
        command: ["bash"]        # example command simulating a bug which triggers the FailJob action
        args:
        - -c
        - echo "Hello world!" && sleep 5 && exit 42
  backoffLimit: 6
  podFailurePolicy:
    rules:
    - action: FailJob
      onExitCodes:
        containerName: main      # optional
        operator: In             # one of: In, NotIn
        values: [42]
    - action: Ignore             # one of: Ignore, FailJob, Count
      onPodConditions:
      - type: DisruptionTarget   # indicates Pod disruption

In the example above, the first rule of the Pod failure policy specifies that the Job should be marked failed if the main container fails with the 42 exit code. The following are the rules for the main container specifically:

  • an exit code of 0 means that the container succeeded
  • an exit code of 42 means that the entire Job failed
  • any other exit code represents that the container failed, and hence the entire Pod. The Pod will be re-created if the total number of restarts is below backoffLimit. If the backoffLimit is reached the entire Job failed.

The second rule of the Pod failure policy, specifying the Ignore action for failed Pods with condition DisruptionTarget excludes Pod disruptions from being counted towards the .spec.backoffLimit limit of retries.

These are some requirements and semantics of the API:

  • if you want to use a .spec.podFailurePolicy field for a Job, you must also define that Job's pod template with .spec.restartPolicy set to Never.
  • the Pod failure policy rules you specify under spec.podFailurePolicy.rules are evaluated in order. Once a rule matches a Pod failure, the remaining rules are ignored. When no rule matches the Pod failure, the default handling applies.
  • you may want to restrict a rule to a specific container by specifying its name inspec.podFailurePolicy.rules[*].onExitCodes.containerName. When not specified the rule applies to all containers. When specified, it should match one the container or initContainer names in the Pod template.
  • you may specify the action taken when a Pod failure policy is matched by spec.podFailurePolicy.rules[*].action. Possible values are:
    • FailJob: use to indicate that the Pod's job should be marked as Failed and all running Pods should be terminated.
    • Ignore: use to indicate that the counter towards the .spec.backoffLimit should not be incremented and a replacement Pod should be created.
    • Count: use to indicate that the Pod should be handled in the default way. The counter towards the .spec.backoffLimit should be incremented.
    • FailIndex: use this action along with backoff limit per index to avoid unnecessary retries within the index of a failed pod.

When you use the podFailurePolicy, and the Job fails due to the pod matching the rule with the FailJob action, then the Job controller triggers the Job termination process by adding the FailureTarget condition. For more details, see Job termination and cleanup.

Success policy

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [beta] (enabled by default: true)

When creating an Indexed Job, you can define when a Job can be declared as succeeded using a .spec.successPolicy, based on the pods that succeeded.

By default, a Job succeeds when the number of succeeded Pods equals .spec.completions. These are some situations where you might want additional control for declaring a Job succeeded:

  • When running simulations with different parameters, you might not need all the simulations to succeed for the overall Job to be successful.
  • When following a leader-worker pattern, only the success of the leader determines the success or failure of a Job. Examples of this are frameworks like MPI and PyTorch etc.

You can configure a success policy, in the .spec.successPolicy field, to meet the above use cases. This policy can handle Job success based on the succeeded pods. After the Job meets the success policy, the job controller terminates the lingering Pods. A success policy is defined by rules. Each rule can take one of the following forms:

  • When you specify the succeededIndexes only, once all indexes specified in the succeededIndexes succeed, the job controller marks the Job as succeeded. The succeededIndexes must be a list of intervals between 0 and .spec.completions-1.
  • When you specify the succeededCount only, once the number of succeeded indexes reaches the succeededCount, the job controller marks the Job as succeeded.
  • When you specify both succeededIndexes and succeededCount, once the number of succeeded indexes from the subset of indexes specified in the succeededIndexes reaches the succeededCount, the job controller marks the Job as succeeded.

Note that when you specify multiple rules in the .spec.successPolicy.rules, the job controller evaluates the rules in order. Once the Job meets a rule, the job controller ignores remaining rules.

Here is a manifest for a Job with successPolicy:

/controllers/job-success-policy.yaml 
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: job-success
spec:
  parallelism: 10
  completions: 10
  completionMode: Indexed # Required for the success policy
  successPolicy:
    rules:
      - succeededIndexes: 0,2-3
        succeededCount: 1
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: main
        image: python
        command:          # Provided that at least one of the Pods with 0, 2, and 3 indexes has succeeded,
                          # the overall Job is a success.
          - python3
          - -c
          - |
            import os, sys
            if os.environ.get("JOB_COMPLETION_INDEX") == "2":
              sys.exit(0)
            else:
              sys.exit(1)            
      restartPolicy: Never

In the example above, both succeededIndexes and succeededCount have been specified. Therefore, the job controller will mark the Job as succeeded and terminate the lingering Pods when either of the specified indexes, 0, 2, or 3, succeed. The Job that meets the success policy gets the SuccessCriteriaMet condition with a SuccessPolicy reason. After the removal of the lingering Pods is issued, the Job gets the Complete condition.

Note that the succeededIndexes is represented as intervals separated by a hyphen. The number are listed in represented by the first and last element of the series, separated by a hyphen.

Job termination and cleanup

When a Job completes, no more Pods are created, but the Pods are usually not deleted either. Keeping them around allows you to still view the logs of completed pods to check for errors, warnings, or other diagnostic output. The job object also remains after it is completed so that you can view its status. It is up to the user to delete old jobs after noting their status. Delete the job with kubectl (e.g. kubectl delete jobs/pi or kubectl delete -f ./job.yaml). When you delete the job using kubectl, all the pods it created are deleted too.

By default, a Job will run uninterrupted unless a Pod fails (restartPolicy=Never) or a Container exits in error (restartPolicy=OnFailure), at which point the Job defers to the .spec.backoffLimit described above. Once .spec.backoffLimit has been reached the Job will be marked as failed and any running Pods will be terminated.

Another way to terminate a Job is by setting an active deadline. Do this by setting the .spec.activeDeadlineSeconds field of the Job to a number of seconds. The activeDeadlineSeconds applies to the duration of the job, no matter how many Pods are created. Once a Job reaches activeDeadlineSeconds, all of its running Pods are terminated and the Job status will become type: Failed with reason: DeadlineExceeded.

Note that a Job's .spec.activeDeadlineSeconds takes precedence over its .spec.backoffLimit. Therefore, a Job that is retrying one or more failed Pods will not deploy additional Pods once it reaches the time limit specified by activeDeadlineSeconds, even if the backoffLimit is not yet reached.

Example:

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: pi-with-timeout
spec:
  backoffLimit: 5
  activeDeadlineSeconds: 100
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: pi
        image: perl:5.34.0
        command: ["perl", "-Mbignum=bpi", "-wle", "print bpi(2000)"]
      restartPolicy: Never

Note that both the Job spec and the Pod template spec within the Job have an activeDeadlineSeconds field. Ensure that you set this field at the proper level.

Keep in mind that the restartPolicy applies to the Pod, and not to the Job itself: there is no automatic Job restart once the Job status is type: Failed. That is, the Job termination mechanisms activated with .spec.activeDeadlineSeconds and .spec.backoffLimit result in a permanent Job failure that requires manual intervention to resolve.

Terminal Job conditions

A Job has two possible terminal states, each of which has a corresponding Job condition:

  • Succeeded: Job condition Complete
  • Failed: Job condition Failed

Jobs fail for the following reasons:

  • The number of Pod failures exceeded the specified .spec.backoffLimit in the Job specification. For details, see Pod backoff failure policy.
  • The Job runtime exceeded the specified .spec.activeDeadlineSeconds
  • An indexed Job that used .spec.backoffLimitPerIndex has failed indexes. For details, see Backoff limit per index.
  • The number of failed indexes in the Job exceeded the specified spec.maxFailedIndexes. For details, see Backoff limit per index
  • A failed Pod matches a rule in .spec.podFailurePolicy that has the FailJob action. For details about how Pod failure policy rules might affect failure evaluation, see Pod failure policy.

Jobs succeed for the following reasons:

  • The number of succeeded Pods reached the specified .spec.completions
  • The criteria specified in .spec.successPolicy are met. For details, see Success policy.

In Kubernetes v1.31 and later the Job controller delays the addition of the terminal conditions,Failed or Complete, until all of the Job Pods are terminated.

In Kubernetes v1.30 and earlier, the Job controller added the Complete or the Failed Job terminal conditions as soon as the Job termination process was triggered and all Pod finalizers were removed. However, some Pods would still be running or terminating at the moment that the terminal condition was added.

In Kubernetes v1.31 and later, the controller only adds the Job terminal conditions after all of the Pods are terminated. You can control this behavior by using the JobManagedBy and the JobPodReplacementPolicy (both enabled by default) feature gates.

Termination of Job pods

The Job controller adds the FailureTarget condition or the SuccessCriteriaMet condition to the Job to trigger Pod termination after a Job meets either the success or failure criteria.

Factors like terminationGracePeriodSeconds might increase the amount of time from the moment that the Job controller adds the FailureTarget condition or the SuccessCriteriaMet condition to the moment that all of the Job Pods terminate and the Job controller adds a terminal condition (Failed or Complete).

You can use the FailureTarget or the SuccessCriteriaMet condition to evaluate whether the Job has failed or succeeded without having to wait for the controller to add a terminal condition.

For example, you might want to decide when to create a replacement Job that replaces a failed Job. If you replace the failed Job when the FailureTarget condition appears, your replacement Job runs sooner, but could result in Pods from the failed and the replacement Job running at the same time, using extra compute resources.

Alternatively, if your cluster has limited resource capacity, you could choose to wait until the Failed condition appears on the Job, which would delay your replacement Job but would ensure that you conserve resources by waiting until all of the failed Pods are removed.

Clean up finished jobs automatically

Finished Jobs are usually no longer needed in the system. Keeping them around in the system will put pressure on the API server. If the Jobs are managed directly by a higher level controller, such as CronJobs, the Jobs can be cleaned up by CronJobs based on the specified capacity-based cleanup policy.

TTL mechanism for finished Jobs

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.23 [stable]

Another way to clean up finished Jobs (either Complete or Failed) automatically is to use a TTL mechanism provided by a TTL controller for finished resources, by specifying the .spec.ttlSecondsAfterFinished field of the Job.

When the TTL controller cleans up the Job, it will delete the Job cascadingly, i.e. delete its dependent objects, such as Pods, together with the Job. Note that when the Job is deleted, its lifecycle guarantees, such as finalizers, will be honored.

For example:

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: pi-with-ttl
spec:
  ttlSecondsAfterFinished: 100
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: pi
        image: perl:5.34.0
        command: ["perl", "-Mbignum=bpi", "-wle", "print bpi(2000)"]
      restartPolicy: Never

The Job pi-with-ttl will be eligible to be automatically deleted, 100 seconds after it finishes.

If the field is set to 0, the Job will be eligible to be automatically deleted immediately after it finishes. If the field is unset, this Job won't be cleaned up by the TTL controller after it finishes.

Job patterns

The Job object can be used to process a set of independent but related work items. These might be emails to be sent, frames to be rendered, files to be transcoded, ranges of keys in a NoSQL database to scan, and so on.

In a complex system, there may be multiple different sets of work items. Here we are just considering one set of work items that the user wants to manage together — a batch job.

There are several different patterns for parallel computation, each with strengths and weaknesses. The tradeoffs are:

  • One Job object for each work item, versus a single Job object for all work items. One Job per work item creates some overhead for the user and for the system to manage large numbers of Job objects. A single Job for all work items is better for large numbers of items.
  • Number of Pods created equals number of work items, versus each Pod can process multiple work items. When the number of Pods equals the number of work items, the Pods typically requires less modification to existing code and containers. Having each Pod process multiple work items is better for large numbers of items.
  • Several approaches use a work queue. This requires running a queue service, and modifications to the existing program or container to make it use the work queue. Other approaches are easier to adapt to an existing containerised application.
  • When the Job is associated with a headless Service, you can enable the Pods within a Job to communicate with each other to collaborate in a computation.

The tradeoffs are summarized here, with columns 2 to 4 corresponding to the above tradeoffs. The pattern names are also links to examples and more detailed description.

Pattern Single Job object Fewer pods than work items? Use app unmodified?
Queue with Pod Per Work Item ✓ sometimes
Queue with Variable Pod Count ✓ ✓
Indexed Job with Static Work Assignment ✓ ✓
Job with Pod-to-Pod Communication ✓ sometimes sometimes
Job Template Expansion ✓

When you specify completions with .spec.completions, each Pod created by the Job controller has an identical spec. This means that all pods for a task will have the same command line and the same image, the same volumes, and (almost) the same environment variables. These patterns are different ways to arrange for pods to work on different things.

This table shows the required settings for .spec.parallelism and .spec.completions for each of the patterns. Here, W is the number of work items.

Pattern .spec.completions .spec.parallelism
Queue with Pod Per Work Item W any
Queue with Variable Pod Count null any
Indexed Job with Static Work Assignment W any
Job with Pod-to-Pod Communication W W
Job Template Expansion 1 should be 1

Advanced usage

Suspending a Job

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

When a Job is created, the Job controller will immediately begin creating Pods to satisfy the Job's requirements and will continue to do so until the Job is complete. However, you may want to temporarily suspend a Job's execution and resume it later, or start Jobs in suspended state and have a custom controller decide later when to start them.

To suspend a Job, you can update the .spec.suspend field of the Job to true; later, when you want to resume it again, update it to false. Creating a Job with .spec.suspend set to true will create it in the suspended state.

When a Job is resumed from suspension, its .status.startTime field will be reset to the current time. This means that the .spec.activeDeadlineSeconds timer will be stopped and reset when a Job is suspended and resumed.

When you suspend a Job, any running Pods that don't have a status of Completed will be terminated with a SIGTERM signal. The Pod's graceful termination period will be honored and your Pod must handle this signal in this period. This may involve saving progress for later or undoing changes. Pods terminated this way will not count towards the Job's completions count.

An example Job definition in the suspended state can be like so:

kubectl get job myjob -o yaml

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: myjob
spec:
  suspend: true
  parallelism: 1
  completions: 5
  template:
    spec:
      ...

You can also toggle Job suspension by patching the Job using the command line.

Suspend an active Job:

kubectl patch job/myjob --type=strategic --patch '{"spec":{"suspend":true}}'

Resume a suspended Job:

kubectl patch job/myjob --type=strategic --patch '{"spec":{"suspend":false}}'

The Job's status can be used to determine if a Job is suspended or has been suspended in the past:

kubectl get jobs/myjob -o yaml

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
# .metadata and .spec omitted
status:
  conditions:
  - lastProbeTime: "2021-02-05T13:14:33Z"
    lastTransitionTime: "2021-02-05T13:14:33Z"
    status: "True"
    type: Suspended
  startTime: "2021-02-05T13:13:48Z"

The Job condition of type "Suspended" with status "True" means the Job is suspended; the lastTransitionTime field can be used to determine how long the Job has been suspended for. If the status of that condition is "False", then the Job was previously suspended and is now running. If such a condition does not exist in the Job's status, the Job has never been stopped.

Events are also created when the Job is suspended and resumed:

kubectl describe jobs/myjob

Name:           myjob
...
Events:
  Type    Reason            Age   From            Message
  ----    ------            ----  ----            -------
  Normal  SuccessfulCreate  12m   job-controller  Created pod: myjob-hlrpl
  Normal  SuccessfulDelete  11m   job-controller  Deleted pod: myjob-hlrpl
  Normal  Suspended         11m   job-controller  Job suspended
  Normal  SuccessfulCreate  3s    job-controller  Created pod: myjob-jvb44
  Normal  Resumed           3s    job-controller  Job resumed

The last four events, particularly the "Suspended" and "Resumed" events, are directly a result of toggling the .spec.suspend field. In the time between these two events, we see that no Pods were created, but Pod creation restarted as soon as the Job was resumed.

Mutable Scheduling Directives

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [stable]

In most cases, a parallel job will want the pods to run with constraints, like all in the same zone, or all either on GPU model x or y but not a mix of both.

The suspend field is the first step towards achieving those semantics. Suspend allows a custom queue controller to decide when a job should start; However, once a job is unsuspended, a custom queue controller has no influence on where the pods of a job will actually land.

This feature allows updating a Job's scheduling directives before it starts, which gives custom queue controllers the ability to influence pod placement while at the same time offloading actual pod-to-node assignment to kube-scheduler. This is allowed only for suspended Jobs that have never been unsuspended before.

The fields in a Job's pod template that can be updated are node affinity, node selector, tolerations, labels, annotations and scheduling gates.

Specifying your own Pod selector

Normally, when you create a Job object, you do not specify .spec.selector. The system defaulting logic adds this field when the Job is created. It picks a selector value that will not overlap with any other jobs.

However, in some cases, you might need to override this automatically set selector. To do this, you can specify the .spec.selector of the Job.

Be very careful when doing this. If you specify a label selector which is not unique to the pods of that Job, and which matches unrelated Pods, then pods of the unrelated job may be deleted, or this Job may count other Pods as completing it, or one or both Jobs may refuse to create Pods or run to completion. If a non-unique selector is chosen, then other controllers (e.g. ReplicationController) and their Pods may behave in unpredictable ways too. Kubernetes will not stop you from making a mistake when specifying .spec.selector.

Here is an example of a case when you might want to use this feature.

Say Job old is already running. You want existing Pods to keep running, but you want the rest of the Pods it creates to use a different pod template and for the Job to have a new name. You cannot update the Job because these fields are not updatable. Therefore, you delete Job old but leave its pods running, using kubectl delete jobs/old --cascade=orphan. Before deleting it, you make a note of what selector it uses:

kubectl get job old -o yaml

The output is similar to this:

kind: Job
metadata:
  name: old
  ...
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      batch.kubernetes.io/controller-uid: a8f3d00d-c6d2-11e5-9f87-42010af00002
  ...

Then you create a new Job with name new and you explicitly specify the same selector. Since the existing Pods have label batch.kubernetes.io/controller-uid=a8f3d00d-c6d2-11e5-9f87-42010af00002, they are controlled by Job new as well.

You need to specify manualSelector: true in the new Job since you are not using the selector that the system normally generates for you automatically.

kind: Job
metadata:
  name: new
  ...
spec:
  manualSelector: true
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      batch.kubernetes.io/controller-uid: a8f3d00d-c6d2-11e5-9f87-42010af00002
  ...

The new Job itself will have a different uid from a8f3d00d-c6d2-11e5-9f87-42010af00002. Setting manualSelector: true tells the system that you know what you are doing and to allow this mismatch.

Job tracking with finalizers

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [stable]

The control plane keeps track of the Pods that belong to any Job and notices if any such Pod is removed from the API server. To do that, the Job controller creates Pods with the finalizer batch.kubernetes.io/job-tracking. The controller removes the finalizer only after the Pod has been accounted for in the Job status, allowing the Pod to be removed by other controllers or users.

Elastic Indexed Jobs

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

You can scale Indexed Jobs up or down by mutating both .spec.parallelism and .spec.completions together such that .spec.parallelism == .spec.completions. When scaling down, Kubernetes removes the Pods with higher indexes.

Use cases for elastic Indexed Jobs include batch workloads which require scaling an indexed Job, such as MPI, Horovod, Ray, and PyTorch training jobs.

Delayed creation of replacement pods

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [beta]

By default, the Job controller recreates Pods as soon they either fail or are terminating (have a deletion timestamp). This means that, at a given time, when some of the Pods are terminating, the number of running Pods for a Job can be greater than parallelism or greater than one Pod per index (if you are using an Indexed Job).

You may choose to create replacement Pods only when the terminating Pod is fully terminal (has status.phase: Failed). To do this, set the .spec.podReplacementPolicy: Failed. The default replacement policy depends on whether the Job has a podFailurePolicy set. With no Pod failure policy defined for a Job, omitting the podReplacementPolicy field selects the TerminatingOrFailed replacement policy: the control plane creates replacement Pods immediately upon Pod deletion (as soon as the control plane sees that a Pod for this Job has deletionTimestamp set). For Jobs with a Pod failure policy set, the default podReplacementPolicy is Failed, and no other value is permitted. See Pod failure policy to learn more about Pod failure policies for Jobs.

kind: Job
metadata:
  name: new
  ...
spec:
  podReplacementPolicy: Failed
  ...

Provided your cluster has the feature gate enabled, you can inspect the .status.terminating field of a Job. The value of the field is the number of Pods owned by the Job that are currently terminating.

kubectl get jobs/myjob -o yaml

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
# .metadata and .spec omitted
status:
  terminating: 3 # three Pods are terminating and have not yet reached the Failed phase

Delegation of managing a Job object to external controller

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.32 [beta] (enabled by default: false)

This feature allows you to disable the built-in Job controller, for a specific Job, and delegate reconciliation of the Job to an external controller.

You indicate the controller that reconciles the Job by setting a custom value for the spec.managedBy field - any value other than kubernetes.io/job-controller. The value of the field is immutable.

Alternatives

Bare Pods

When the node that a Pod is running on reboots or fails, the pod is terminated and will not be restarted. However, a Job will create new Pods to replace terminated ones. For this reason, we recommend that you use a Job rather than a bare Pod, even if your application requires only a single Pod.

Replication Controller

Jobs are complementary to Replication Controllers. A Replication Controller manages Pods which are not expected to terminate (e.g. web servers), and a Job manages Pods that are expected to terminate (e.g. batch tasks).

As discussed in Pod Lifecycle, Job is only appropriate for pods with RestartPolicy equal to OnFailure or Never. (Note: If RestartPolicy is not set, the default value is Always.)

Single Job starts controller Pod

Another pattern is for a single Job to create a Pod which then creates other Pods, acting as a sort of custom controller for those Pods. This allows the most flexibility, but may be somewhat complicated to get started with and offers less integration with Kubernetes.

One example of this pattern would be a Job which starts a Pod which runs a script that in turn starts a Spark master controller (see spark example), runs a spark driver, and then cleans up.

An advantage of this approach is that the overall process gets the completion guarantee of a Job object, but maintains complete control over what Pods are created and how work is assigned to them.

What's next

4.2.6 - Automatic Cleanup for Finished Jobs

A time-to-live mechanism to clean up old Jobs that have finished execution.
FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.23 [stable]

When your Job has finished, it's useful to keep that Job in the API (and not immediately delete the Job) so that you can tell whether the Job succeeded or failed.

Kubernetes' TTL-after-finished controller provides a TTL (time to live) mechanism to limit the lifetime of Job objects that have finished execution.

Cleanup for finished Jobs

The TTL-after-finished controller is only supported for Jobs. You can use this mechanism to clean up finished Jobs (either Complete or Failed) automatically by specifying the .spec.ttlSecondsAfterFinished field of a Job, as in this example.

The TTL-after-finished controller assumes that a Job is eligible to be cleaned up TTL seconds after the Job has finished. The timer starts once the status condition of the Job changes to show that the Job is either Complete or Failed; once the TTL has expired, that Job becomes eligible for cascading removal. When the TTL-after-finished controller cleans up a job, it will delete it cascadingly, that is to say it will delete its dependent objects together with it.

Kubernetes honors object lifecycle guarantees on the Job, such as waiting for finalizers.

You can set the TTL seconds at any time. Here are some examples for setting the .spec.ttlSecondsAfterFinished field of a Job:

  • Specify this field in the Job manifest, so that a Job can be cleaned up automatically some time after it finishes.
  • Manually set this field of existing, already finished Jobs, so that they become eligible for cleanup.
  • Use a mutating admission webhook to set this field dynamically at Job creation time. Cluster administrators can use this to enforce a TTL policy for finished jobs.
  • Use a mutating admission webhook to set this field dynamically after the Job has finished, and choose different TTL values based on job status, labels. For this case, the webhook needs to detect changes to the .status of the Job and only set a TTL when the Job is being marked as completed.
  • Write your own controller to manage the cleanup TTL for Jobs that match a particular selector.

Caveats

Updating TTL for finished Jobs

You can modify the TTL period, e.g. .spec.ttlSecondsAfterFinished field of Jobs, after the job is created or has finished. If you extend the TTL period after the existing ttlSecondsAfterFinished period has expired, Kubernetes doesn't guarantee to retain that Job, even if an update to extend the TTL returns a successful API response.

Time skew

Because the TTL-after-finished controller uses timestamps stored in the Kubernetes jobs to determine whether the TTL has expired or not, this feature is sensitive to time skew in your cluster, which may cause the control plane to clean up Job objects at the wrong time.

Clocks aren't always correct, but the difference should be very small. Please be aware of this risk when setting a non-zero TTL.

What's next

4.2.7 - CronJob

A CronJob starts one-time Jobs on a repeating schedule.
FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.21 [stable]

A CronJob creates Jobs on a repeating schedule.

CronJob is meant for performing regular scheduled actions such as backups, report generation, and so on. One CronJob object is like one line of a crontab (cron table) file on a Unix system. It runs a Job periodically on a given schedule, written in Cron format.

CronJobs have limitations and idiosyncrasies. For example, in certain circumstances, a single CronJob can create multiple concurrent Jobs. See the limitations below.

When the control plane creates new Jobs and (indirectly) Pods for a CronJob, the .metadata.name of the CronJob is part of the basis for naming those Pods. The name of a CronJob must be a valid DNS subdomain value, but this can produce unexpected results for the Pod hostnames. For best compatibility, the name should follow the more restrictive rules for a DNS label. Even when the name is a DNS subdomain, the name must be no longer than 52 characters. This is because the CronJob controller will automatically append 11 characters to the name you provide and there is a constraint that the length of a Job name is no more than 63 characters.

Example

This example CronJob manifest prints the current time and a hello message every minute:

application/job/cronjob.yaml 
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: hello
spec:
  schedule: "* * * * *"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: hello
            image: busybox:1.28
            imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
            command:
            - /bin/sh
            - -c
            - date; echo Hello from the Kubernetes cluster
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

(Running Automated Tasks with a CronJob takes you through this example in more detail).

Writing a CronJob spec

Schedule syntax

The .spec.schedule field is required. The value of that field follows the Cron syntax:

# ┌───────────── minute (0 - 59)
# │ ┌───────────── hour (0 - 23)
# │ │ ┌───────────── day of the month (1 - 31)
# │ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 - 12)
# │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of the week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday)
# │ │ │ │ │                                   OR sun, mon, tue, wed, thu, fri, sat
# │ │ │ │ │ 
# │ │ │ │ │
# * * * * *

For example, 0 3 * * 1 means this task is scheduled to run weekly on a Monday at 3 AM.

The format also includes extended "Vixie cron" step values. As explained in the FreeBSD manual:

Step values can be used in conjunction with ranges. Following a range with /<number> specifies skips of the number's value through the range. For example, 0-23/2 can be used in the hours field to specify command execution every other hour (the alternative in the V7 standard is 0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22). Steps are also permitted after an asterisk, so if you want to say "every two hours", just use */2.

Other than the standard syntax, some macros like @monthly can also be used:

Entry Description Equivalent to
@yearly (or @annually) Run once a year at midnight of 1 January 0 0 1 1 *
@monthly Run once a month at midnight of the first day of the month 0 0 1 * *
@weekly Run once a week at midnight on Sunday morning 0 0 * * 0
@daily (or @midnight) Run once a day at midnight 0 0 * * *
@hourly Run once an hour at the beginning of the hour 0 * * * *

To generate CronJob schedule expressions, you can also use web tools like crontab.guru.

Job template

The .spec.jobTemplate defines a template for the Jobs that the CronJob creates, and it is required. It has exactly the same schema as a Job, except that it is nested and does not have an apiVersion or kind. You can specify common metadata for the templated Jobs, such as labels or annotations. For information about writing a Job .spec, see Writing a Job Spec.

Deadline for delayed Job start

The .spec.startingDeadlineSeconds field is optional. This field defines a deadline (in whole seconds) for starting the Job, if that Job misses its scheduled time for any reason.

After missing the deadline, the CronJob skips that instance of the Job (future occurrences are still scheduled). For example, if you have a backup Job that runs twice a day, you might allow it to start up to 8 hours late, but no later, because a backup taken any later wouldn't be useful: you would instead prefer to wait for the next scheduled run.

For Jobs that miss their configured deadline, Kubernetes treats them as failed Jobs. If you don't specify startingDeadlineSeconds for a CronJob, the Job occurrences have no deadline.

If the .spec.startingDeadlineSeconds field is set (not null), the CronJob controller measures the time between when a Job is expected to be created and now. If the difference is higher than that limit, it will skip this execution.

For example, if it is set to 200, it allows a Job to be created for up to 200 seconds after the actual schedule.

Concurrency policy

The .spec.concurrencyPolicy field is also optional. It specifies how to treat concurrent executions of a Job that is created by this CronJob. The spec may specify only one of the following concurrency policies:

  • Allow (default): The CronJob allows concurrently running Jobs
  • Forbid: The CronJob does not allow concurrent runs; if it is time for a new Job run and the previous Job run hasn't finished yet, the CronJob skips the new Job run. Also note that when the previous Job run finishes, .spec.startingDeadlineSeconds is still taken into account and may result in a new Job run.
  • Replace: If it is time for a new Job run and the previous Job run hasn't finished yet, the CronJob replaces the currently running Job run with a new Job run

Note that concurrency policy only applies to the Jobs created by the same CronJob. If there are multiple CronJobs, their respective Jobs are always allowed to run concurrently.

Schedule suspension

You can suspend execution of Jobs for a CronJob, by setting the optional .spec.suspend field to true. The field defaults to false.

This setting does not affect Jobs that the CronJob has already started.

If you do set that field to true, all subsequent executions are suspended (they remain scheduled, but the CronJob controller does not start the Jobs to run the tasks) until you unsuspend the CronJob.

Jobs history limits

The .spec.successfulJobsHistoryLimit and .spec.failedJobsHistoryLimit fields specify how many completed and failed Jobs should be kept. Both fields are optional.

  • .spec.successfulJobsHistoryLimit: This field specifies the number of successful finished jobs to keep. The default value is 3. Setting this field to 0 will not keep any successful jobs.

  • .spec.failedJobsHistoryLimit: This field specifies the number of failed finished jobs to keep. The default value is 1. Setting this field to 0 will not keep any failed jobs.

For another way to clean up Jobs automatically, see Clean up finished Jobs automatically.

Time zones

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [stable]

For CronJobs with no time zone specified, the kube-controller-manager interprets schedules relative to its local time zone.

You can specify a time zone for a CronJob by setting .spec.timeZone to the name of a valid time zone. For example, setting .spec.timeZone: "Etc/UTC" instructs Kubernetes to interpret the schedule relative to Coordinated Universal Time.

A time zone database from the Go standard library is included in the binaries and used as a fallback in case an external database is not available on the system.

CronJob limitations

Unsupported TimeZone specification

Specifying a timezone using CRON_TZ or TZ variables inside .spec.schedule is not officially supported (and never has been).

Starting with Kubernetes 1.29 if you try to set a schedule that includes TZ or CRON_TZ timezone specification, Kubernetes will fail to create the resource with a validation error. Updates to CronJobs already using TZ or CRON_TZ will continue to report a warning to the client.

Modifying a CronJob

By design, a CronJob contains a template for new Jobs. If you modify an existing CronJob, the changes you make will apply to new Jobs that start to run after your modification is complete. Jobs (and their Pods) that have already started continue to run without changes. That is, the CronJob does not update existing Jobs, even if those remain running.

Job creation

A CronJob creates a Job object approximately once per execution time of its schedule. The scheduling is approximate because there are certain circumstances where two Jobs might be created, or no Job might be created. Kubernetes tries to avoid those situations, but does not completely prevent them. Therefore, the Jobs that you define should be idempotent.

If startingDeadlineSeconds is set to a large value or left unset (the default) and if concurrencyPolicy is set to Allow, the Jobs will always run at least once.

For every CronJob, the CronJob Controller checks how many schedules it missed in the duration from its last scheduled time until now. If there are more than 100 missed schedules, then it does not start the Job and logs the error.

Cannot determine if job needs to be started. Too many missed start time (> 100). Set or decrease .spec.startingDeadlineSeconds or check clock skew.

It is important to note that if the startingDeadlineSeconds field is set (not nil), the controller counts how many missed Jobs occurred from the value of startingDeadlineSeconds until now rather than from the last scheduled time until now. For example, if startingDeadlineSeconds is 200, the controller counts how many missed Jobs occurred in the last 200 seconds.

A CronJob is counted as missed if it has failed to be created at its scheduled time. For example, if concurrencyPolicy is set to Forbid and a CronJob was attempted to be scheduled when there was a previous schedule still running, then it would count as missed.

For example, suppose a CronJob is set to schedule a new Job every one minute beginning at 08:30:00, and its startingDeadlineSeconds field is not set. If the CronJob controller happens to be down from 08:29:00 to 10:21:00, the Job will not start as the number of missed Jobs which missed their schedule is greater than 100.

To illustrate this concept further, suppose a CronJob is set to schedule a new Job every one minute beginning at 08:30:00, and its startingDeadlineSeconds is set to 200 seconds. If the CronJob controller happens to be down for the same period as the previous example (08:29:00 to 10:21:00,) the Job will still start at 10:22:00. This happens as the controller now checks how many missed schedules happened in the last 200 seconds (i.e., 3 missed schedules), rather than from the last scheduled time until now.

The CronJob is only responsible for creating Jobs that match its schedule, and the Job in turn is responsible for the management of the Pods it represents.

What's next

  • Learn about Pods and Jobs, two concepts that CronJobs rely upon.
  • Read about the detailed format of CronJob .spec.schedule fields.
  • For instructions on creating and working with CronJobs, and for an example of a CronJob manifest, see Running automated tasks with CronJobs.
  • CronJob is part of the Kubernetes REST API. Read the CronJob API reference for more details.

4.2.8 - ReplicationController

Legacy API for managing workloads that can scale horizontally. Superseded by the Deployment and ReplicaSet APIs.

A ReplicationController ensures that a specified number of pod replicas are running at any one time. In other words, a ReplicationController makes sure that a pod or a homogeneous set of pods is always up and available.

How a ReplicationController works

If there are too many pods, the ReplicationController terminates the extra pods. If there are too few, the ReplicationController starts more pods. Unlike manually created pods, the pods maintained by a ReplicationController are automatically replaced if they fail, are deleted, or are terminated. For example, your pods are re-created on a node after disruptive maintenance such as a kernel upgrade. For this reason, you should use a ReplicationController even if your application requires only a single pod. A ReplicationController is similar to a process supervisor, but instead of supervising individual processes on a single node, the ReplicationController supervises multiple pods across multiple nodes.

ReplicationController is often abbreviated to "rc" in discussion, and as a shortcut in kubectl commands.

A simple case is to create one ReplicationController object to reliably run one instance of a Pod indefinitely. A more complex use case is to run several identical replicas of a replicated service, such as web servers.

Running an example ReplicationController

This example ReplicationController config runs three copies of the nginx web server.

controllers/replication.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: ReplicationController
metadata:
  name: nginx
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    app: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      name: nginx
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: nginx
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80

Run the example job by downloading the example file and then running this command:

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/controllers/replication.yaml

The output is similar to this:

replicationcontroller/nginx created

Check on the status of the ReplicationController using this command:

kubectl describe replicationcontrollers/nginx

The output is similar to this:

Name:        nginx
Namespace:   default
Selector:    app=nginx
Labels:      app=nginx
Annotations:    <none>
Replicas:    3 current / 3 desired
Pods Status: 0 Running / 3 Waiting / 0 Succeeded / 0 Failed
Pod Template:
  Labels:       app=nginx
  Containers:
   nginx:
    Image:              nginx
    Port:               80/TCP
    Environment:        <none>
    Mounts:             <none>
  Volumes:              <none>
Events:
  FirstSeen       LastSeen     Count    From                        SubobjectPath    Type      Reason              Message
  ---------       --------     -----    ----                        -------------    ----      ------              -------
  20s             20s          1        {replication-controller }                    Normal    SuccessfulCreate    Created pod: nginx-qrm3m
  20s             20s          1        {replication-controller }                    Normal    SuccessfulCreate    Created pod: nginx-3ntk0
  20s             20s          1        {replication-controller }                    Normal    SuccessfulCreate    Created pod: nginx-4ok8v

Here, three pods are created, but none is running yet, perhaps because the image is being pulled. A little later, the same command may show:

Pods Status:    3 Running / 0 Waiting / 0 Succeeded / 0 Failed

To list all the pods that belong to the ReplicationController in a machine readable form, you can use a command like this:

pods=$(kubectl get pods --selector=app=nginx --output=jsonpath={.items..metadata.name})
echo $pods

The output is similar to this:

nginx-3ntk0 nginx-4ok8v nginx-qrm3m

Here, the selector is the same as the selector for the ReplicationController (seen in the kubectl describe output), and in a different form in replication.yaml. The --output=jsonpath option specifies an expression with the name from each pod in the returned list.

Writing a ReplicationController Manifest

As with all other Kubernetes config, a ReplicationController needs apiVersion, kind, and metadata fields.

When the control plane creates new Pods for a ReplicationController, the .metadata.name of the ReplicationController is part of the basis for naming those Pods. The name of a ReplicationController must be a valid DNS subdomain value, but this can produce unexpected results for the Pod hostnames. For best compatibility, the name should follow the more restrictive rules for a DNS label.

For general information about working with configuration files, see object management.

A ReplicationController also needs a .spec section.

Pod Template

The .spec.template is the only required field of the .spec.

The .spec.template is a pod template. It has exactly the same schema as a Pod, except it is nested and does not have an apiVersion or kind.

In addition to required fields for a Pod, a pod template in a ReplicationController must specify appropriate labels and an appropriate restart policy. For labels, make sure not to overlap with other controllers. See pod selector.

Only a .spec.template.spec.restartPolicy equal to Always is allowed, which is the default if not specified.

For local container restarts, ReplicationControllers delegate to an agent on the node, for example the Kubelet.

Labels on the ReplicationController

The ReplicationController can itself have labels (.metadata.labels). Typically, you would set these the same as the .spec.template.metadata.labels; if .metadata.labels is not specified then it defaults to .spec.template.metadata.labels. However, they are allowed to be different, and the .metadata.labels do not affect the behavior of the ReplicationController.

Pod Selector

The .spec.selector field is a label selector. A ReplicationController manages all the pods with labels that match the selector. It does not distinguish between pods that it created or deleted and pods that another person or process created or deleted. This allows the ReplicationController to be replaced without affecting the running pods.

If specified, the .spec.template.metadata.labels must be equal to the .spec.selector, or it will be rejected by the API. If .spec.selector is unspecified, it will be defaulted to .spec.template.metadata.labels.

Also you should not normally create any pods whose labels match this selector, either directly, with another ReplicationController, or with another controller such as Job. If you do so, the ReplicationController thinks that it created the other pods. Kubernetes does not stop you from doing this.

If you do end up with multiple controllers that have overlapping selectors, you will have to manage the deletion yourself (see below).

Multiple Replicas

You can specify how many pods should run concurrently by setting .spec.replicas to the number of pods you would like to have running concurrently. The number running at any time may be higher or lower, such as if the replicas were just increased or decreased, or if a pod is gracefully shutdown, and a replacement starts early.

If you do not specify .spec.replicas, then it defaults to 1.

Working with ReplicationControllers

Deleting a ReplicationController and its Pods

To delete a ReplicationController and all its pods, use kubectl delete. Kubectl will scale the ReplicationController to zero and wait for it to delete each pod before deleting the ReplicationController itself. If this kubectl command is interrupted, it can be restarted.

When using the REST API or client library, you need to do the steps explicitly (scale replicas to 0, wait for pod deletions, then delete the ReplicationController).

Deleting only a ReplicationController

You can delete a ReplicationController without affecting any of its pods.

Using kubectl, specify the --cascade=orphan option to kubectl delete.

When using the REST API or client library, you can delete the ReplicationController object.

Once the original is deleted, you can create a new ReplicationController to replace it. As long as the old and new .spec.selector are the same, then the new one will adopt the old pods. However, it will not make any effort to make existing pods match a new, different pod template. To update pods to a new spec in a controlled way, use a rolling update.

Isolating pods from a ReplicationController

Pods may be removed from a ReplicationController's target set by changing their labels. This technique may be used to remove pods from service for debugging and data recovery. Pods that are removed in this way will be replaced automatically (assuming that the number of replicas is not also changed).

Common usage patterns

Rescheduling

As mentioned above, whether you have 1 pod you want to keep running, or 1000, a ReplicationController will ensure that the specified number of pods exists, even in the event of node failure or pod termination (for example, due to an action by another control agent).

Scaling

The ReplicationController enables scaling the number of replicas up or down, either manually or by an auto-scaling control agent, by updating the replicas field.

Rolling updates

The ReplicationController is designed to facilitate rolling updates to a service by replacing pods one-by-one.

As explained in #1353, the recommended approach is to create a new ReplicationController with 1 replica, scale the new (+1) and old (-1) controllers one by one, and then delete the old controller after it reaches 0 replicas. This predictably updates the set of pods regardless of unexpected failures.

Ideally, the rolling update controller would take application readiness into account, and would ensure that a sufficient number of pods were productively serving at any given time.

The two ReplicationControllers would need to create pods with at least one differentiating label, such as the image tag of the primary container of the pod, since it is typically image updates that motivate rolling updates.

Multiple release tracks

In addition to running multiple releases of an application while a rolling update is in progress, it's common to run multiple releases for an extended period of time, or even continuously, using multiple release tracks. The tracks would be differentiated by labels.

For instance, a service might target all pods with tier in (frontend), environment in (prod). Now say you have 10 replicated pods that make up this tier. But you want to be able to 'canary' a new version of this component. You could set up a ReplicationController with replicas set to 9 for the bulk of the replicas, with labels tier=frontend, environment=prod, track=stable, and another ReplicationController with replicas set to 1 for the canary, with labels tier=frontend, environment=prod, track=canary. Now the service is covering both the canary and non-canary pods. But you can mess with the ReplicationControllers separately to test things out, monitor the results, etc.

Using ReplicationControllers with Services

Multiple ReplicationControllers can sit behind a single service, so that, for example, some traffic goes to the old version, and some goes to the new version.

A ReplicationController will never terminate on its own, but it isn't expected to be as long-lived as services. Services may be composed of pods controlled by multiple ReplicationControllers, and it is expected that many ReplicationControllers may be created and destroyed over the lifetime of a service (for instance, to perform an update of pods that run the service). Both services themselves and their clients should remain oblivious to the ReplicationControllers that maintain the pods of the services.

Writing programs for Replication

Pods created by a ReplicationController are intended to be fungible and semantically identical, though their configurations may become heterogeneous over time. This is an obvious fit for replicated stateless servers, but ReplicationControllers can also be used to maintain availability of master-elected, sharded, and worker-pool applications. Such applications should use dynamic work assignment mechanisms, such as the RabbitMQ work queues, as opposed to static/one-time customization of the configuration of each pod, which is considered an anti-pattern. Any pod customization performed, such as vertical auto-sizing of resources (for example, cpu or memory), should be performed by another online controller process, not unlike the ReplicationController itself.

Responsibilities of the ReplicationController

The ReplicationController ensures that the desired number of pods matches its label selector and are operational. Currently, only terminated pods are excluded from its count. In the future, readiness and other information available from the system may be taken into account, we may add more controls over the replacement policy, and we plan to emit events that could be used by external clients to implement arbitrarily sophisticated replacement and/or scale-down policies.

The ReplicationController is forever constrained to this narrow responsibility. It itself will not perform readiness nor liveness probes. Rather than performing auto-scaling, it is intended to be controlled by an external auto-scaler (as discussed in #492), which would change its replicas field. We will not add scheduling policies (for example, spreading) to the ReplicationController. Nor should it verify that the pods controlled match the currently specified template, as that would obstruct auto-sizing and other automated processes. Similarly, completion deadlines, ordering dependencies, configuration expansion, and other features belong elsewhere. We even plan to factor out the mechanism for bulk pod creation (#170).

The ReplicationController is intended to be a composable building-block primitive. We expect higher-level APIs and/or tools to be built on top of it and other complementary primitives for user convenience in the future. The "macro" operations currently supported by kubectl (run, scale) are proof-of-concept examples of this. For instance, we could imagine something like Asgard managing ReplicationControllers, auto-scalers, services, scheduling policies, canaries, etc.

API Object

Replication controller is a top-level resource in the Kubernetes REST API. More details about the API object can be found at: ReplicationController API object.

Alternatives to ReplicationController

ReplicaSet

ReplicaSet is the next-generation ReplicationController that supports the new set-based label selector. It's mainly used by Deployment as a mechanism to orchestrate pod creation, deletion and updates. Note that we recommend using Deployments instead of directly using Replica Sets, unless you require custom update orchestration or don't require updates at all.

Deployment is a higher-level API object that updates its underlying Replica Sets and their Pods. Deployments are recommended if you want the rolling update functionality, because they are declarative, server-side, and have additional features.

Bare Pods

Unlike in the case where a user directly created pods, a ReplicationController replaces pods that are deleted or terminated for any reason, such as in the case of node failure or disruptive node maintenance, such as a kernel upgrade. For this reason, we recommend that you use a ReplicationController even if your application requires only a single pod. Think of it similarly to a process supervisor, only it supervises multiple pods across multiple nodes instead of individual processes on a single node. A ReplicationController delegates local container restarts to some agent on the node, such as the kubelet.

Job

Use a Job instead of a ReplicationController for pods that are expected to terminate on their own (that is, batch jobs).

DaemonSet

Use a DaemonSet instead of a ReplicationController for pods that provide a machine-level function, such as machine monitoring or machine logging. These pods have a lifetime that is tied to a machine lifetime: the pod needs to be running on the machine before other pods start, and are safe to terminate when the machine is otherwise ready to be rebooted/shutdown.

What's next

  • Learn about Pods.
  • Learn about Deployment, the replacement for ReplicationController.
  • ReplicationController is part of the Kubernetes REST API. Read the ReplicationController object definition to understand the API for replication controllers.

4.3 - Autoscaling Workloads

With autoscaling, you can automatically update your workloads in one way or another. This allows your cluster to react to changes in resource demand more elastically and efficiently.

In Kubernetes, you can scale a workload depending on the current demand of resources. This allows your cluster to react to changes in resource demand more elastically and efficiently.

When you scale a workload, you can either increase or decrease the number of replicas managed by the workload, or adjust the resources available to the replicas in-place.

The first approach is referred to as horizontal scaling, while the second is referred to as vertical scaling.

There are manual and automatic ways to scale your workloads, depending on your use case.

Scaling workloads manually

Kubernetes supports manual scaling of workloads. Horizontal scaling can be done using the kubectl CLI. For vertical scaling, you need to patch the resource definition of your workload.

See below for examples of both strategies.

Scaling workloads automatically

Kubernetes also supports automatic scaling of workloads, which is the focus of this page.

The concept of Autoscaling in Kubernetes refers to the ability to automatically update an object that manages a set of Pods (for example a Deployment).

Scaling workloads horizontally

In Kubernetes, you can automatically scale a workload horizontally using a HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA).

It is implemented as a Kubernetes API resource and a controller and periodically adjusts the number of replicas in a workload to match observed resource utilization such as CPU or memory usage.

There is a walkthrough tutorial of configuring a HorizontalPodAutoscaler for a Deployment.

Scaling workloads vertically

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable]

You can automatically scale a workload vertically using a VerticalPodAutoscaler (VPA). Unlike the HPA, the VPA doesn't come with Kubernetes by default, but is a separate project that can be found on GitHub.

Once installed, it allows you to create CustomResourceDefinitions (CRDs) for your workloads which define how and when to scale the resources of the managed replicas.

At the moment, the VPA can operate in four different modes:

Different modes of the VPA
Mode Description
Auto Currently, Recreate might change to in-place updates in the future
Recreate The VPA assigns resource requests on pod creation as well as updates them on existing pods by evicting them when the requested resources differ significantly from the new recommendation
Initial The VPA only assigns resource requests on pod creation and never changes them later.
Off The VPA does not automatically change the resource requirements of the pods. The recommendations are calculated and can be inspected in the VPA object.

Requirements for in-place resizing

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [alpha]

Resizing a workload in-place without restarting the Pods or its Containers requires Kubernetes version 1.27 or later. Additionally, the InPlaceVerticalScaling feature gate needs to be enabled.

InPlacePodVerticalScaling: Enables in-place Pod vertical scaling.

Autoscaling based on cluster size

For workloads that need to be scaled based on the size of the cluster (for example cluster-dns or other system components), you can use the Cluster Proportional Autoscaler. Just like the VPA, it is not part of the Kubernetes core, but hosted as its own project on GitHub.

The Cluster Proportional Autoscaler watches the number of schedulable nodes and cores and scales the number of replicas of the target workload accordingly.

If the number of replicas should stay the same, you can scale your workloads vertically according to the cluster size using the Cluster Proportional Vertical Autoscaler. The project is currently in beta and can be found on GitHub.

While the Cluster Proportional Autoscaler scales the number of replicas of a workload, the Cluster Proportional Vertical Autoscaler adjusts the resource requests for a workload (for example a Deployment or DaemonSet) based on the number of nodes and/or cores in the cluster.

Event driven Autoscaling

It is also possible to scale workloads based on events, for example using the Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaler (KEDA).

KEDA is a CNCF graduated enabling you to scale your workloads based on the number of events to be processed, for example the amount of messages in a queue. There exists a wide range of adapters for different event sources to choose from.

Autoscaling based on schedules

Another strategy for scaling your workloads is to schedule the scaling operations, for example in order to reduce resource consumption during off-peak hours.

Similar to event driven autoscaling, such behavior can be achieved using KEDA in conjunction with its Cron scaler. The Cron scaler allows you to define schedules (and time zones) for scaling your workloads in or out.

Scaling cluster infrastructure

If scaling workloads isn't enough to meet your needs, you can also scale your cluster infrastructure itself.

Scaling the cluster infrastructure normally means adding or removing nodes. Read cluster autoscaling for more information.

What's next

4.4 - Managing Workloads

You've deployed your application and exposed it via a Service. Now what? Kubernetes provides a number of tools to help you manage your application deployment, including scaling and updating.

Organizing resource configurations

Many applications require multiple resources to be created, such as a Deployment along with a Service. Management of multiple resources can be simplified by grouping them together in the same file (separated by --- in YAML). For example:

application/nginx-app.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-nginx-svc
  labels:
    app: nginx
spec:
  type: LoadBalancer
  ports:
  - port: 80
  selector:
    app: nginx
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: my-nginx
  labels:
    app: nginx
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: nginx:1.14.2
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80

Multiple resources can be created the same way as a single resource:

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/application/nginx-app.yaml

service/my-nginx-svc created
deployment.apps/my-nginx created

The resources will be created in the order they appear in the manifest. Therefore, it's best to specify the Service first, since that will ensure the scheduler can spread the pods associated with the Service as they are created by the controller(s), such as Deployment.

kubectl apply also accepts multiple -f arguments:

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/application/nginx/nginx-svc.yaml \
  -f https://k8s.io/examples/application/nginx/nginx-deployment.yaml

It is a recommended practice to put resources related to the same microservice or application tier into the same file, and to group all of the files associated with your application in the same directory. If the tiers of your application bind to each other using DNS, you can deploy all of the components of your stack together.

A URL can also be specified as a configuration source, which is handy for deploying directly from manifests in your source control system:

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/application/nginx/nginx-deployment.yaml

deployment.apps/my-nginx created

If you need to define more manifests, such as adding a ConfigMap, you can do that too.

External tools

This section lists only the most common tools used for managing workloads on Kubernetes. To see a larger list, view Application definition and image build in the CNCF Landscape.

Helm

Helm is a tool for managing packages of pre-configured Kubernetes resources. These packages are known as Helm charts.

Kustomize

Kustomize traverses a Kubernetes manifest to add, remove or update configuration options. It is available both as a standalone binary and as a native feature of kubectl.

Bulk operations in kubectl

Resource creation isn't the only operation that kubectl can perform in bulk. It can also extract resource names from configuration files in order to perform other operations, in particular to delete the same resources you created:

kubectl delete -f https://k8s.io/examples/application/nginx-app.yaml

deployment.apps "my-nginx" deleted
service "my-nginx-svc" deleted

In the case of two resources, you can specify both resources on the command line using the resource/name syntax:

kubectl delete deployments/my-nginx services/my-nginx-svc

For larger numbers of resources, you'll find it easier to specify the selector (label query) specified using -l or --selector, to filter resources by their labels:

kubectl delete deployment,services -l app=nginx

deployment.apps "my-nginx" deleted
service "my-nginx-svc" deleted

Chaining and filtering

Because kubectl outputs resource names in the same syntax it accepts, you can chain operations using $() or xargs:

kubectl get $(kubectl create -f docs/concepts/cluster-administration/nginx/ -o name | grep service/ )
kubectl create -f docs/concepts/cluster-administration/nginx/ -o name | grep service/ | xargs -i kubectl get '{}'

The output might be similar to:

NAME           TYPE           CLUSTER-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)      AGE
my-nginx-svc   LoadBalancer   10.0.0.208   <pending>     80/TCP       0s

With the above commands, first you create resources under examples/application/nginx/ and print the resources created with -o name output format (print each resource as resource/name). Then you grep only the Service, and then print it with kubectl get.

Recursive operations on local files

If you happen to organize your resources across several subdirectories within a particular directory, you can recursively perform the operations on the subdirectories also, by specifying --recursive or -R alongside the --filename/-f argument.

For instance, assume there is a directory project/k8s/development that holds all of the manifests needed for the development environment, organized by resource type:

project/k8s/development
├── configmap
│   └── my-configmap.yaml
├── deployment
│   └── my-deployment.yaml
└── pvc
    └── my-pvc.yaml

By default, performing a bulk operation on project/k8s/development will stop at the first level of the directory, not processing any subdirectories. If you had tried to create the resources in this directory using the following command, we would have encountered an error:

kubectl apply -f project/k8s/development

error: you must provide one or more resources by argument or filename (.json|.yaml|.yml|stdin)

Instead, specify the --recursive or -R command line argument along with the --filename/-f argument:

kubectl apply -f project/k8s/development --recursive

configmap/my-config created
deployment.apps/my-deployment created
persistentvolumeclaim/my-pvc created

The --recursive argument works with any operation that accepts the --filename/-f argument such as: kubectl create, kubectl get, kubectl delete, kubectl describe, or even kubectl rollout.

The --recursive argument also works when multiple -f arguments are provided:

kubectl apply -f project/k8s/namespaces -f project/k8s/development --recursive

namespace/development created
namespace/staging created
configmap/my-config created
deployment.apps/my-deployment created
persistentvolumeclaim/my-pvc created

If you're interested in learning more about kubectl, go ahead and read Command line tool (kubectl).

Updating your application without an outage

At some point, you'll eventually need to update your deployed application, typically by specifying a new image or image tag. kubectl supports several update operations, each of which is applicable to different scenarios.

You can run multiple copies of your app, and use a rollout to gradually shift the traffic to new healthy Pods. Eventually, all the running Pods would have the new software.

This section of the page guides you through how to create and update applications with Deployments.

Let's say you were running version 1.14.2 of nginx:

kubectl create deployment my-nginx --image=nginx:1.14.2

deployment.apps/my-nginx created

Ensure that there is 1 replica:

kubectl scale --replicas 1 deployments/my-nginx --subresource='scale' --type='merge' -p '{"spec":{"replicas": 1}}'

deployment.apps/my-nginx scaled

and allow Kubernetes to add more temporary replicas during a rollout, by setting a surge maximum of 100%:

kubectl patch --type='merge' -p '{"spec":{"strategy":{"rollingUpdate":{"maxSurge": "100%" }}}}'

deployment.apps/my-nginx patched

To update to version 1.16.1, change .spec.template.spec.containers[0].image from nginx:1.14.2 to nginx:1.16.1 using kubectl edit:

kubectl edit deployment/my-nginx
# Change the manifest to use the newer container image, then save your changes

That's it! The Deployment will declaratively update the deployed nginx application progressively behind the scene. It ensures that only a certain number of old replicas may be down while they are being updated, and only a certain number of new replicas may be created above the desired number of pods. To learn more details about how this happens, visit Deployment.

You can use rollouts with DaemonSets, Deployments, or StatefulSets.

Managing rollouts

You can use kubectl rollout to manage a progressive update of an existing application.

For example:

kubectl apply -f my-deployment.yaml

# wait for rollout to finish
kubectl rollout status deployment/my-deployment --timeout 10m # 10 minute timeout

or

kubectl apply -f backing-stateful-component.yaml

# don't wait for rollout to finish, just check the status
kubectl rollout status statefulsets/backing-stateful-component --watch=false

You can also pause, resume or cancel a rollout. Visit kubectl rollout to learn more.

Canary deployments

Another scenario where multiple labels are needed is to distinguish deployments of different releases or configurations of the same component. It is common practice to deploy a canary of a new application release (specified via image tag in the pod template) side by side with the previous release so that the new release can receive live production traffic before fully rolling it out.

For instance, you can use a track label to differentiate different releases.

The primary, stable release would have a track label with value as stable:

name: frontend
replicas: 3
...
labels:
   app: guestbook
   tier: frontend
   track: stable
...
image: gb-frontend:v3

and then you can create a new release of the guestbook frontend that carries the track label with different value (i.e. canary), so that two sets of pods would not overlap:

name: frontend-canary
replicas: 1
...
labels:
   app: guestbook
   tier: frontend
   track: canary
...
image: gb-frontend:v4

The frontend service would span both sets of replicas by selecting the common subset of their labels (i.e. omitting the track label), so that the traffic will be redirected to both applications:

selector:
   app: guestbook
   tier: frontend

You can tweak the number of replicas of the stable and canary releases to determine the ratio of each release that will receive live production traffic (in this case, 3:1). Once you're confident, you can update the stable track to the new application release and remove the canary one.

Updating annotations

Sometimes you would want to attach annotations to resources. Annotations are arbitrary non-identifying metadata for retrieval by API clients such as tools or libraries. This can be done with kubectl annotate. For example:

kubectl annotate pods my-nginx-v4-9gw19 description='my frontend running nginx'
kubectl get pods my-nginx-v4-9gw19 -o yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: pod
metadata:
  annotations:
    description: my frontend running nginx
...

For more information, see annotations and kubectl annotate.

Scaling your application

When load on your application grows or shrinks, use kubectl to scale your application. For instance, to decrease the number of nginx replicas from 3 to 1, do:

kubectl scale deployment/my-nginx --replicas=1

deployment.apps/my-nginx scaled

Now you only have one pod managed by the deployment.

kubectl get pods -l app=nginx

NAME                        READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
my-nginx-2035384211-j5fhi   1/1       Running   0          30m

To have the system automatically choose the number of nginx replicas as needed, ranging from 1 to 3, do:

# This requires an existing source of container and Pod metrics
kubectl autoscale deployment/my-nginx --min=1 --max=3

horizontalpodautoscaler.autoscaling/my-nginx autoscaled

Now your nginx replicas will be scaled up and down as needed, automatically.

For more information, please see kubectl scale, kubectl autoscale and horizontal pod autoscaler document.

In-place updates of resources

Sometimes it's necessary to make narrow, non-disruptive updates to resources you've created.

kubectl apply

It is suggested to maintain a set of configuration files in source control (see configuration as code), so that they can be maintained and versioned along with the code for the resources they configure. Then, you can use kubectl apply to push your configuration changes to the cluster.

This command will compare the version of the configuration that you're pushing with the previous version and apply the changes you've made, without overwriting any automated changes to properties you haven't specified.

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/application/nginx/nginx-deployment.yaml

deployment.apps/my-nginx configured

To learn more about the underlying mechanism, read server-side apply.

kubectl edit

Alternatively, you may also update resources with kubectl edit:

kubectl edit deployment/my-nginx

This is equivalent to first get the resource, edit it in text editor, and then apply the resource with the updated version:

kubectl get deployment my-nginx -o yaml > /tmp/nginx.yaml
vi /tmp/nginx.yaml
# do some edit, and then save the file

kubectl apply -f /tmp/nginx.yaml
deployment.apps/my-nginx configured

rm /tmp/nginx.yaml

This allows you to do more significant changes more easily. Note that you can specify the editor with your EDITOR or KUBE_EDITOR environment variables.

For more information, please see kubectl edit.

kubectl patch

You can use kubectl patch to update API objects in place. This subcommand supports JSON patch, JSON merge patch, and strategic merge patch.

See Update API Objects in Place Using kubectl patch for more details.

Disruptive updates

In some cases, you may need to update resource fields that cannot be updated once initialized, or you may want to make a recursive change immediately, such as to fix broken pods created by a Deployment. To change such fields, use replace --force, which deletes and re-creates the resource. In this case, you can modify your original configuration file:

kubectl replace -f https://k8s.io/examples/application/nginx/nginx-deployment.yaml --force

deployment.apps/my-nginx deleted
deployment.apps/my-nginx replaced

What's next

5 - Services, Load Balancing, and Networking

Concepts and resources behind networking in Kubernetes.

The Kubernetes network model

The Kubernetes network model is built out of several pieces:

  • Each pod in a cluster gets its own unique cluster-wide IP address.

    • A pod has its own private network namespace which is shared by all of the containers within the pod. Processes running in different containers in the same pod can communicate with each other over localhost.

  • The pod network (also called a cluster network) handles communication between pods. It ensures that (barring intentional network segmentation):

    • All pods can communicate with all other pods, whether they are on the same node or on different nodes. Pods can communicate with each other directly, without the use of proxies or address translation (NAT).

      On Windows, this rule does not apply to host-network pods.

    • Agents on a node (such as system daemons, or kubelet) can communicate with all pods on that node.

  • The Service API lets you provide a stable (long lived) IP address or hostname for a service implemented by one or more backend pods, where the individual pods making up the service can change over time.

    • Kubernetes automatically manages EndpointSlice objects to provide information about the pods currently backing a Service.

    • A service proxy implementation monitors the set of Service and EndpointSlice objects, and programs the data plane to route service traffic to its backends, by using operating system or cloud provider APIs to intercept or rewrite packets.

  • The Gateway API (or its predecessor, Ingress) allows you to make Services accessible to clients that are outside the cluster.

  • NetworkPolicy is a built-in Kubernetes API that allows you to control traffic between pods, or between pods and the outside world.

In older container systems, there was no automatic connectivity between containers on different hosts, and so it was often necessary to explicitly create links between containers, or to map container ports to host ports to make them reachable by containers on other hosts. This is not needed in Kubernetes; Kubernetes's model is that pods can be treated much like VMs or physical hosts from the perspectives of port allocation, naming, service discovery, load balancing, application configuration, and migration.

Only a few parts of this model are implemented by Kubernetes itself. For the other parts, Kubernetes defines the APIs, but the corresponding functionality is provided by external components, some of which are optional:

  • Pod network namespace setup is handled by system-level software implementing the Container Runtime Interface.

  • The pod network itself is managed by a pod network implementation. On Linux, most container runtimes use the Container Networking Interface (CNI) to interact with the pod network implementation, so these implementations are often called CNI plugins.

  • Kubernetes provides a default implementation of service proxying, called kube-proxy, but some pod network implementations instead use their own service proxy that is more tightly integrated with the rest of the implementation.

  • NetworkPolicy is generally also implemented by the pod network implementation. (Some simpler pod network implementations don't implement NetworkPolicy, or an administrator may choose to configure the pod network without NetworkPolicy support. In these cases, the API will still be present, but it will have no effect.)

  • There are many implementations of the Gateway API, some of which are specific to particular cloud environments, some more focused on "bare metal" environments, and others more generic.

What's next

The Connecting Applications with Services tutorial lets you learn about Services and Kubernetes networking with a hands-on example.

Cluster Networking explains how to set up networking for your cluster, and also provides an overview of the technologies involved.

5.1 - Service

Expose an application running in your cluster behind a single outward-facing endpoint, even when the workload is split across multiple backends.

In Kubernetes, a Service is a method for exposing a network application that is running as one or more Pods in your cluster.

A key aim of Services in Kubernetes is that you don't need to modify your existing application to use an unfamiliar service discovery mechanism. You can run code in Pods, whether this is a code designed for a cloud-native world, or an older app you've containerized. You use a Service to make that set of Pods available on the network so that clients can interact with it.

If you use a Deployment to run your app, that Deployment can create and destroy Pods dynamically. From one moment to the next, you don't know how many of those Pods are working and healthy; you might not even know what those healthy Pods are named. Kubernetes Pods are created and destroyed to match the desired state of your cluster. Pods are ephemeral resources (you should not expect that an individual Pod is reliable and durable).

Each Pod gets its own IP address (Kubernetes expects network plugins to ensure this). For a given Deployment in your cluster, the set of Pods running in one moment in time could be different from the set of Pods running that application a moment later.

This leads to a problem: if some set of Pods (call them "backends") provides functionality to other Pods (call them "frontends") inside your cluster, how do the frontends find out and keep track of which IP address to connect to, so that the frontend can use the backend part of the workload?

Enter Services.

Services in Kubernetes

The Service API, part of Kubernetes, is an abstraction to help you expose groups of Pods over a network. Each Service object defines a logical set of endpoints (usually these endpoints are Pods) along with a policy about how to make those pods accessible.

For example, consider a stateless image-processing backend which is running with 3 replicas. Those replicas are fungible—frontends do not care which backend they use. While the actual Pods that compose the backend set may change, the frontend clients should not need to be aware of that, nor should they need to keep track of the set of backends themselves.

The Service abstraction enables this decoupling.

The set of Pods targeted by a Service is usually determined by a selector that you define. To learn about other ways to define Service endpoints, see Services without selectors.

If your workload speaks HTTP, you might choose to use an Ingress to control how web traffic reaches that workload. Ingress is not a Service type, but it acts as the entry point for your cluster. An Ingress lets you consolidate your routing rules into a single resource, so that you can expose multiple components of your workload, running separately in your cluster, behind a single listener.

The Gateway API for Kubernetes provides extra capabilities beyond Ingress and Service. You can add Gateway to your cluster - it is a family of extension APIs, implemented using CustomResourceDefinitions - and then use these to configure access to network services that are running in your cluster.

Cloud-native service discovery

If you're able to use Kubernetes APIs for service discovery in your application, you can query the API server for matching EndpointSlices. Kubernetes updates the EndpointSlices for a Service whenever the set of Pods in a Service changes.

For non-native applications, Kubernetes offers ways to place a network port or load balancer in between your application and the backend Pods.

Either way, your workload can use these service discovery mechanisms to find the target it wants to connect to.

Defining a Service

A Service is an object (the same way that a Pod or a ConfigMap is an object). You can create, view or modify Service definitions using the Kubernetes API. Usually you use a tool such as kubectl to make those API calls for you.

For example, suppose you have a set of Pods that each listen on TCP port 9376 and are labelled as app.kubernetes.io/name=MyApp. You can define a Service to publish that TCP listener:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
spec:
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80
      targetPort: 9376

Applying this manifest creates a new Service named "my-service" with the default ClusterIP service type. The Service targets TCP port 9376 on any Pod with the app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp label.

Kubernetes assigns this Service an IP address (the cluster IP), that is used by the virtual IP address mechanism. For more details on that mechanism, read Virtual IPs and Service Proxies.

The controller for that Service continuously scans for Pods that match its selector, and then makes any necessary updates to the set of EndpointSlices for the Service.

The name of a Service object must be a valid RFC 1035 label name.

Port definitions

Port definitions in Pods have names, and you can reference these names in the targetPort attribute of a Service. For example, we can bind the targetPort of the Service to the Pod port in the following way:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: nginx
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: proxy
spec:
  containers:
  - name: nginx
    image: nginx:stable
    ports:
      - containerPort: 80
        name: http-web-svc

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: nginx-service
spec:
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: proxy
  ports:
  - name: name-of-service-port
    protocol: TCP
    port: 80
    targetPort: http-web-svc

This works even if there is a mixture of Pods in the Service using a single configured name, with the same network protocol available via different port numbers. This offers a lot of flexibility for deploying and evolving your Services. For example, you can change the port numbers that Pods expose in the next version of your backend software, without breaking clients.

The default protocol for Services is TCP; you can also use any other supported protocol.

Because many Services need to expose more than one port, Kubernetes supports multiple port definitions for a single Service. Each port definition can have the same protocol, or a different one.

Services without selectors

Services most commonly abstract access to Kubernetes Pods thanks to the selector, but when used with a corresponding set of EndpointSlices objects and without a selector, the Service can abstract other kinds of backends, including ones that run outside the cluster.

For example:

  • You want to have an external database cluster in production, but in your test environment you use your own databases.
  • You want to point your Service to a Service in a different Namespace or on another cluster.
  • You are migrating a workload to Kubernetes. While evaluating the approach, you run only a portion of your backends in Kubernetes.

In any of these scenarios you can define a Service without specifying a selector to match Pods. For example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
spec:
  ports:
    - name: http
      protocol: TCP
      port: 80
      targetPort: 9376

Because this Service has no selector, the corresponding EndpointSlice (and legacy Endpoints) objects are not created automatically. You can map the Service to the network address and port where it's running, by adding an EndpointSlice object manually. For example:

apiVersion: discovery.k8s.io/v1
kind: EndpointSlice
metadata:
  name: my-service-1 # by convention, use the name of the Service
                     # as a prefix for the name of the EndpointSlice
  labels:
    # You should set the "kubernetes.io/service-name" label.
    # Set its value to match the name of the Service
    kubernetes.io/service-name: my-service
addressType: IPv4
ports:
  - name: http # should match with the name of the service port defined above
    appProtocol: http
    protocol: TCP
    port: 9376
endpoints:
  - addresses:
      - "10.4.5.6"
  - addresses:
      - "10.1.2.3"

Custom EndpointSlices

When you create an EndpointSlice object for a Service, you can use any name for the EndpointSlice. Each EndpointSlice in a namespace must have a unique name. You link an EndpointSlice to a Service by setting the kubernetes.io/service-name label on that EndpointSlice.

For an EndpointSlice that you create yourself, or in your own code, you should also pick a value to use for the label endpointslice.kubernetes.io/managed-by. If you create your own controller code to manage EndpointSlices, consider using a value similar to "my-domain.example/name-of-controller". If you are using a third party tool, use the name of the tool in all-lowercase and change spaces and other punctuation to dashes (-). If people are directly using a tool such as kubectl to manage EndpointSlices, use a name that describes this manual management, such as "staff" or "cluster-admins". You should avoid using the reserved value "controller", which identifies EndpointSlices managed by Kubernetes' own control plane.

Accessing a Service without a selector

Accessing a Service without a selector works the same as if it had a selector. In the example for a Service without a selector, traffic is routed to one of the two endpoints defined in the EndpointSlice manifest: a TCP connection to 10.1.2.3 or 10.4.5.6, on port 9376.

An ExternalName Service is a special case of Service that does not have selectors and uses DNS names instead. For more information, see the ExternalName section.

EndpointSlices

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.21 [stable]

EndpointSlices are objects that represent a subset (a slice) of the backing network endpoints for a Service.

Your Kubernetes cluster tracks how many endpoints each EndpointSlice represents. If there are so many endpoints for a Service that a threshold is reached, then Kubernetes adds another empty EndpointSlice and stores new endpoint information there. By default, Kubernetes makes a new EndpointSlice once the existing EndpointSlices all contain at least 100 endpoints. Kubernetes does not make the new EndpointSlice until an extra endpoint needs to be added.

See EndpointSlices for more information about this API.

Endpoints

In the Kubernetes API, an Endpoints (the resource kind is plural) defines a list of network endpoints, typically referenced by a Service to define which Pods the traffic can be sent to.

The EndpointSlice API is the recommended replacement for Endpoints.

Over-capacity endpoints

Kubernetes limits the number of endpoints that can fit in a single Endpoints object. When there are over 1000 backing endpoints for a Service, Kubernetes truncates the data in the Endpoints object. Because a Service can be linked with more than one EndpointSlice, the 1000 backing endpoint limit only affects the legacy Endpoints API.

In that case, Kubernetes selects at most 1000 possible backend endpoints to store into the Endpoints object, and sets an annotation on the Endpoints: endpoints.kubernetes.io/over-capacity: truncated. The control plane also removes that annotation if the number of backend Pods drops below 1000.

Traffic is still sent to backends, but any load balancing mechanism that relies on the legacy Endpoints API only sends traffic to at most 1000 of the available backing endpoints.

The same API limit means that you cannot manually update an Endpoints to have more than 1000 endpoints.

Application protocol

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.20 [stable]

The appProtocol field provides a way to specify an application protocol for each Service port. This is used as a hint for implementations to offer richer behavior for protocols that they understand. The value of this field is mirrored by the corresponding Endpoints and EndpointSlice objects.

This field follows standard Kubernetes label syntax. Valid values are one of:

  • IANA standard service names.

  • Implementation-defined prefixed names such as mycompany.com/my-custom-protocol.

  • Kubernetes-defined prefixed names:

Protocol Description
kubernetes.io/h2c HTTP/2 over cleartext as described in RFC 7540
kubernetes.io/ws WebSocket over cleartext as described in RFC 6455
kubernetes.io/wss WebSocket over TLS as described in RFC 6455

Multi-port Services

For some Services, you need to expose more than one port. Kubernetes lets you configure multiple port definitions on a Service object. When using multiple ports for a Service, you must give all of your ports names so that these are unambiguous. For example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
spec:
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  ports:
    - name: http
      protocol: TCP
      port: 80
      targetPort: 9376
    - name: https
      protocol: TCP
      port: 443
      targetPort: 9377

Service type

For some parts of your application (for example, frontends) you may want to expose a Service onto an external IP address, one that's accessible from outside of your cluster.

Kubernetes Service types allow you to specify what kind of Service you want.

The available type values and their behaviors are:

ClusterIP
Exposes the Service on a cluster-internal IP. Choosing this value makes the Service only reachable from within the cluster. This is the default that is used if you don't explicitly specify a type for a Service. You can expose the Service to the public internet using an Ingress or a Gateway.
NodePort
Exposes the Service on each Node's IP at a static port (the NodePort). To make the node port available, Kubernetes sets up a cluster IP address, the same as if you had requested a Service of type: ClusterIP.
LoadBalancer
Exposes the Service externally using an external load balancer. Kubernetes does not directly offer a load balancing component; you must provide one, or you can integrate your Kubernetes cluster with a cloud provider.
ExternalName
Maps the Service to the contents of the externalName field (for example, to the hostname api.foo.bar.example). The mapping configures your cluster's DNS server to return a CNAME record with that external hostname value. No proxying of any kind is set up.

The type field in the Service API is designed as nested functionality - each level adds to the previous. However there is an exception to this nested design. You can define a LoadBalancer Service by disabling the load balancer NodePort allocation.

type: ClusterIP

This default Service type assigns an IP address from a pool of IP addresses that your cluster has reserved for that purpose.

Several of the other types for Service build on the ClusterIP type as a foundation.

If you define a Service that has the .spec.clusterIP set to "None" then Kubernetes does not assign an IP address. See headless Services for more information.

Choosing your own IP address

You can specify your own cluster IP address as part of a Service creation request. To do this, set the .spec.clusterIP field. For example, if you already have an existing DNS entry that you wish to reuse, or legacy systems that are configured for a specific IP address and difficult to re-configure.

The IP address that you choose must be a valid IPv4 or IPv6 address from within the service-cluster-ip-range CIDR range that is configured for the API server. If you try to create a Service with an invalid clusterIP address value, the API server will return a 422 HTTP status code to indicate that there's a problem.

Read avoiding collisions to learn how Kubernetes helps reduce the risk and impact of two different Services both trying to use the same IP address.

type: NodePort

If you set the type field to NodePort, the Kubernetes control plane allocates a port from a range specified by --service-node-port-range flag (default: 30000-32767). Each node proxies that port (the same port number on every Node) into your Service. Your Service reports the allocated port in its .spec.ports[*].nodePort field.

Using a NodePort gives you the freedom to set up your own load balancing solution, to configure environments that are not fully supported by Kubernetes, or even to expose one or more nodes' IP addresses directly.

For a node port Service, Kubernetes additionally allocates a port (TCP, UDP or SCTP to match the protocol of the Service). Every node in the cluster configures itself to listen on that assigned port and to forward traffic to one of the ready endpoints associated with that Service. You'll be able to contact the type: NodePort Service, from outside the cluster, by connecting to any node using the appropriate protocol (for example: TCP), and the appropriate port (as assigned to that Service).

Choosing your own port

If you want a specific port number, you can specify a value in the nodePort field. The control plane will either allocate you that port or report that the API transaction failed. This means that you need to take care of possible port collisions yourself. You also have to use a valid port number, one that's inside the range configured for NodePort use.

Here is an example manifest for a Service of type: NodePort that specifies a NodePort value (30007, in this example):

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
spec:
  type: NodePort
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  ports:
    - port: 80
      # By default and for convenience, the `targetPort` is set to
      # the same value as the `port` field.
      targetPort: 80
      # Optional field
      # By default and for convenience, the Kubernetes control plane
      # will allocate a port from a range (default: 30000-32767)
      nodePort: 30007

Reserve Nodeport ranges to avoid collisions

The policy for assigning ports to NodePort services applies to both the auto-assignment and the manual assignment scenarios. When a user wants to create a NodePort service that uses a specific port, the target port may conflict with another port that has already been assigned.

To avoid this problem, the port range for NodePort services is divided into two bands. Dynamic port assignment uses the upper band by default, and it may use the lower band once the upper band has been exhausted. Users can then allocate from the lower band with a lower risk of port collision.

Custom IP address configuration for type: NodePort Services

You can set up nodes in your cluster to use a particular IP address for serving node port services. You might want to do this if each node is connected to multiple networks (for example: one network for application traffic, and another network for traffic between nodes and the control plane).

If you want to specify particular IP address(es) to proxy the port, you can set the --nodeport-addresses flag for kube-proxy or the equivalent nodePortAddresses field of the kube-proxy configuration file to particular IP block(s).

This flag takes a comma-delimited list of IP blocks (e.g. 10.0.0.0/8, 192.0.2.0/25) to specify IP address ranges that kube-proxy should consider as local to this node.

For example, if you start kube-proxy with the --nodeport-addresses=127.0.0.0/8 flag, kube-proxy only selects the loopback interface for NodePort Services. The default for --nodeport-addresses is an empty list. This means that kube-proxy should consider all available network interfaces for NodePort. (That's also compatible with earlier Kubernetes releases.)

type: LoadBalancer

On cloud providers which support external load balancers, setting the type field to LoadBalancer provisions a load balancer for your Service. The actual creation of the load balancer happens asynchronously, and information about the provisioned balancer is published in the Service's .status.loadBalancer field. For example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
spec:
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80
      targetPort: 9376
  clusterIP: 10.0.171.239
  type: LoadBalancer
status:
  loadBalancer:
    ingress:
    - ip: 192.0.2.127

Traffic from the external load balancer is directed at the backend Pods. The cloud provider decides how it is load balanced.

To implement a Service of type: LoadBalancer, Kubernetes typically starts off by making the changes that are equivalent to you requesting a Service of type: NodePort. The cloud-controller-manager component then configures the external load balancer to forward traffic to that assigned node port.

You can configure a load balanced Service to omit assigning a node port, provided that the cloud provider implementation supports this.

Some cloud providers allow you to specify the loadBalancerIP. In those cases, the load-balancer is created with the user-specified loadBalancerIP. If the loadBalancerIP field is not specified, the load balancer is set up with an ephemeral IP address. If you specify a loadBalancerIP but your cloud provider does not support the feature, the loadbalancerIP field that you set is ignored.

Node liveness impact on load balancer traffic

Load balancer health checks are critical to modern applications. They are used to determine which server (virtual machine, or IP address) the load balancer should dispatch traffic to. The Kubernetes APIs do not define how health checks have to be implemented for Kubernetes managed load balancers, instead it's the cloud providers (and the people implementing integration code) who decide on the behavior. Load balancer health checks are extensively used within the context of supporting the externalTrafficPolicy field for Services.

Load balancers with mixed protocol types

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

By default, for LoadBalancer type of Services, when there is more than one port defined, all ports must have the same protocol, and the protocol must be one which is supported by the cloud provider.

The feature gate MixedProtocolLBService (enabled by default for the kube-apiserver as of v1.24) allows the use of different protocols for LoadBalancer type of Services, when there is more than one port defined.

Disabling load balancer NodePort allocation

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

You can optionally disable node port allocation for a Service of type: LoadBalancer, by setting the field spec.allocateLoadBalancerNodePorts to false. This should only be used for load balancer implementations that route traffic directly to pods as opposed to using node ports. By default, spec.allocateLoadBalancerNodePorts is true and type LoadBalancer Services will continue to allocate node ports. If spec.allocateLoadBalancerNodePorts is set to false on an existing Service with allocated node ports, those node ports will not be de-allocated automatically. You must explicitly remove the nodePorts entry in every Service port to de-allocate those node ports.

Specifying class of load balancer implementation

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

For a Service with type set to LoadBalancer, the .spec.loadBalancerClass field enables you to use a load balancer implementation other than the cloud provider default.

By default, .spec.loadBalancerClass is not set and a LoadBalancer type of Service uses the cloud provider's default load balancer implementation if the cluster is configured with a cloud provider using the --cloud-provider component flag.

If you specify .spec.loadBalancerClass, it is assumed that a load balancer implementation that matches the specified class is watching for Services. Any default load balancer implementation (for example, the one provided by the cloud provider) will ignore Services that have this field set. spec.loadBalancerClass can be set on a Service of type LoadBalancer only. Once set, it cannot be changed. The value of spec.loadBalancerClass must be a label-style identifier, with an optional prefix such as "internal-vip" or "example.com/internal-vip". Unprefixed names are reserved for end-users.

Load balancer IP address mode

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.32 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

For a Service of type: LoadBalancer, a controller can set .status.loadBalancer.ingress.ipMode. The .status.loadBalancer.ingress.ipMode specifies how the load-balancer IP behaves. It may be specified only when the .status.loadBalancer.ingress.ip field is also specified.

There are two possible values for .status.loadBalancer.ingress.ipMode: "VIP" and "Proxy". The default value is "VIP" meaning that traffic is delivered to the node with the destination set to the load-balancer's IP and port. There are two cases when setting this to "Proxy", depending on how the load-balancer from the cloud provider delivers the traffics:

  • If the traffic is delivered to the node then DNATed to the pod, the destination would be set to the node's IP and node port;
  • If the traffic is delivered directly to the pod, the destination would be set to the pod's IP and port.

Service implementations may use this information to adjust traffic routing.

Internal load balancer

In a mixed environment it is sometimes necessary to route traffic from Services inside the same (virtual) network address block.

In a split-horizon DNS environment you would need two Services to be able to route both external and internal traffic to your endpoints.

To set an internal load balancer, add one of the following annotations to your Service depending on the cloud service provider you're using:

Select one of the tabs.

metadata:
  name: my-service
  annotations:
    networking.gke.io/load-balancer-type: "Internal"


metadata:
  name: my-service
  annotations:
    service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-internal: "true"


metadata:
  name: my-service
  annotations:
    service.beta.kubernetes.io/azure-load-balancer-internal: "true"


metadata:
  name: my-service
  annotations:
    service.kubernetes.io/ibm-load-balancer-cloud-provider-ip-type: "private"


metadata:
  name: my-service
  annotations:
    service.beta.kubernetes.io/openstack-internal-load-balancer: "true"


metadata:
  name: my-service
  annotations:
    service.beta.kubernetes.io/cce-load-balancer-internal-vpc: "true"


metadata:
  annotations:
    service.kubernetes.io/qcloud-loadbalancer-internal-subnetid: subnet-xxxxx


metadata:
  annotations:
    service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-address-type: "intranet"


metadata:
  name: my-service
  annotations:
    service.beta.kubernetes.io/oci-load-balancer-internal: true

type: ExternalName

Services of type ExternalName map a Service to a DNS name, not to a typical selector such as my-service or cassandra. You specify these Services with the spec.externalName parameter.

This Service definition, for example, maps the my-service Service in the prod namespace to my.database.example.com:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
  namespace: prod
spec:
  type: ExternalName
  externalName: my.database.example.com

When looking up the host my-service.prod.svc.cluster.local, the cluster DNS Service returns a CNAME record with the value my.database.example.com. Accessing my-service works in the same way as other Services but with the crucial difference that redirection happens at the DNS level rather than via proxying or forwarding. Should you later decide to move your database into your cluster, you can start its Pods, add appropriate selectors or endpoints, and change the Service's type.

Headless Services

Sometimes you don't need load-balancing and a single Service IP. In this case, you can create what are termed headless Services, by explicitly specifying "None" for the cluster IP address (.spec.clusterIP).

You can use a headless Service to interface with other service discovery mechanisms, without being tied to Kubernetes' implementation.

For headless Services, a cluster IP is not allocated, kube-proxy does not handle these Services, and there is no load balancing or proxying done by the platform for them.

A headless Service allows a client to connect to whichever Pod it prefers, directly. Services that are headless don't configure routes and packet forwarding using virtual IP addresses and proxies; instead, headless Services report the endpoint IP addresses of the individual pods via internal DNS records, served through the cluster's DNS service. To define a headless Service, you make a Service with .spec.type set to ClusterIP (which is also the default for type), and you additionally set .spec.clusterIP to None.

The string value None is a special case and is not the same as leaving the .spec.clusterIP field unset.

How DNS is automatically configured depends on whether the Service has selectors defined:

With selectors

For headless Services that define selectors, the endpoints controller creates EndpointSlices in the Kubernetes API, and modifies the DNS configuration to return A or AAAA records (IPv4 or IPv6 addresses) that point directly to the Pods backing the Service.

Without selectors

For headless Services that do not define selectors, the control plane does not create EndpointSlice objects. However, the DNS system looks for and configures either:

  • DNS CNAME records for type: ExternalName Services.
  • DNS A / AAAA records for all IP addresses of the Service's ready endpoints, for all Service types other than ExternalName.
    • For IPv4 endpoints, the DNS system creates A records.
    • For IPv6 endpoints, the DNS system creates AAAA records.

When you define a headless Service without a selector, the port must match the targetPort.

Discovering services

For clients running inside your cluster, Kubernetes supports two primary modes of finding a Service: environment variables and DNS.

Environment variables

When a Pod is run on a Node, the kubelet adds a set of environment variables for each active Service. It adds {SVCNAME}_SERVICE_HOST and {SVCNAME}_SERVICE_PORT variables, where the Service name is upper-cased and dashes are converted to underscores.

For example, the Service redis-primary which exposes TCP port 6379 and has been allocated cluster IP address 10.0.0.11, produces the following environment variables:

REDIS_PRIMARY_SERVICE_HOST=10.0.0.11
REDIS_PRIMARY_SERVICE_PORT=6379
REDIS_PRIMARY_PORT=tcp://10.0.0.11:6379
REDIS_PRIMARY_PORT_6379_TCP=tcp://10.0.0.11:6379
REDIS_PRIMARY_PORT_6379_TCP_PROTO=tcp
REDIS_PRIMARY_PORT_6379_TCP_PORT=6379
REDIS_PRIMARY_PORT_6379_TCP_ADDR=10.0.0.11

Kubernetes also supports and provides variables that are compatible with Docker Engine's "legacy container links" feature. You can read makeLinkVariables to see how this is implemented in Kubernetes.

DNS

You can (and almost always should) set up a DNS service for your Kubernetes cluster using an add-on.

A cluster-aware DNS server, such as CoreDNS, watches the Kubernetes API for new Services and creates a set of DNS records for each one. If DNS has been enabled throughout your cluster then all Pods should automatically be able to resolve Services by their DNS name.

For example, if you have a Service called my-service in a Kubernetes namespace my-ns, the control plane and the DNS Service acting together create a DNS record for my-service.my-ns. Pods in the my-ns namespace should be able to find the service by doing a name lookup for my-service (my-service.my-ns would also work).

Pods in other namespaces must qualify the name as my-service.my-ns. These names will resolve to the cluster IP assigned for the Service.

Kubernetes also supports DNS SRV (Service) records for named ports. If the my-service.my-ns Service has a port named http with the protocol set to TCP, you can do a DNS SRV query for _http._tcp.my-service.my-ns to discover the port number for http, as well as the IP address.

The Kubernetes DNS server is the only way to access ExternalName Services. You can find more information about ExternalName resolution in DNS for Services and Pods.

Virtual IP addressing mechanism

Read Virtual IPs and Service Proxies explains the mechanism Kubernetes provides to expose a Service with a virtual IP address.

Traffic policies

You can set the .spec.internalTrafficPolicy and .spec.externalTrafficPolicy fields to control how Kubernetes routes traffic to healthy (“ready”) backends.

See Traffic Policies for more details.

Traffic distribution

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [beta] (enabled by default: true)

The .spec.trafficDistribution field provides another way to influence traffic routing within a Kubernetes Service. While traffic policies focus on strict semantic guarantees, traffic distribution allows you to express preferences (such as routing to topologically closer endpoints). This can help optimize for performance, cost, or reliability. This optional field can be used if you have enabled the ServiceTrafficDistribution feature gate for your cluster and all of its nodes. In Kubernetes 1.32, the following field value is supported:

PreferClose
Indicates a preference for routing traffic to endpoints that are topologically proximate to the client. The interpretation of "topologically proximate" may vary across implementations and could encompass endpoints within the same node, rack, zone, or even region. Setting this value gives implementations permission to make different tradeoffs, e.g. optimizing for proximity rather than equal distribution of load. Users should not set this value if such tradeoffs are not acceptable.

If the field is not set, the implementation will apply its default routing strategy.

See Traffic Distribution for more details

Session stickiness

If you want to make sure that connections from a particular client are passed to the same Pod each time, you can configure session affinity based on the client's IP address. Read session affinity to learn more.

External IPs

If there are external IPs that route to one or more cluster nodes, Kubernetes Services can be exposed on those externalIPs. When network traffic arrives into the cluster, with the external IP (as destination IP) and the port matching that Service, rules and routes that Kubernetes has configured ensure that the traffic is routed to one of the endpoints for that Service.

When you define a Service, you can specify externalIPs for any service type. In the example below, the Service named "my-service" can be accessed by clients using TCP, on "198.51.100.32:80" (calculated from .spec.externalIPs[] and .spec.ports[].port).

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
spec:
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  ports:
    - name: http
      protocol: TCP
      port: 80
      targetPort: 49152
  externalIPs:
    - 198.51.100.32

API Object

Service is a top-level resource in the Kubernetes REST API. You can find more details about the Service API object.

What's next

Learn more about Services and how they fit into Kubernetes:

  • Follow the Connecting Applications with Services tutorial.
  • Read about Ingress, which exposes HTTP and HTTPS routes from outside the cluster to Services within your cluster.
  • Read about Gateway, an extension to Kubernetes that provides more flexibility than Ingress.

For more context, read the following:

5.2 - Ingress

Make your HTTP (or HTTPS) network service available using a protocol-aware configuration mechanism, that understands web concepts like URIs, hostnames, paths, and more. The Ingress concept lets you map traffic to different backends based on rules you define via the Kubernetes API.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.19 [stable]

An API object that manages external access to the services in a cluster, typically HTTP.

Ingress may provide load balancing, SSL termination and name-based virtual hosting.

Terminology

For clarity, this guide defines the following terms:

  • Node: A worker machine in Kubernetes, part of a cluster.
  • Cluster: A set of Nodes that run containerized applications managed by Kubernetes. For this example, and in most common Kubernetes deployments, nodes in the cluster are not part of the public internet.
  • Edge router: A router that enforces the firewall policy for your cluster. This could be a gateway managed by a cloud provider or a physical piece of hardware.
  • Cluster network: A set of links, logical or physical, that facilitate communication within a cluster according to the Kubernetes networking model.
  • Service: A Kubernetes Service that identifies a set of Pods using label selectors. Unless mentioned otherwise, Services are assumed to have virtual IPs only routable within the cluster network.

What is Ingress?

Ingress exposes HTTP and HTTPS routes from outside the cluster to services within the cluster. Traffic routing is controlled by rules defined on the Ingress resource.

Here is a simple example where an Ingress sends all its traffic to one Service:

ingress-diagram

Figure. Ingress

An Ingress may be configured to give Services externally-reachable URLs, load balance traffic, terminate SSL / TLS, and offer name-based virtual hosting. An Ingress controller is responsible for fulfilling the Ingress, usually with a load balancer, though it may also configure your edge router or additional frontends to help handle the traffic.

An Ingress does not expose arbitrary ports or protocols. Exposing services other than HTTP and HTTPS to the internet typically uses a service of type Service.Type=NodePort or Service.Type=LoadBalancer.

Prerequisites

You must have an Ingress controller to satisfy an Ingress. Only creating an Ingress resource has no effect.

You may need to deploy an Ingress controller such as ingress-nginx. You can choose from a number of Ingress controllers.

Ideally, all Ingress controllers should fit the reference specification. In reality, the various Ingress controllers operate slightly differently.

The Ingress resource

A minimal Ingress resource example:

service/networking/minimal-ingress.yaml 
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: minimal-ingress
  annotations:
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: /
spec:
  ingressClassName: nginx-example
  rules:
  - http:
      paths:
      - path: /testpath
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: test
            port:
              number: 80

An Ingress needs apiVersion, kind, metadata and spec fields. The name of an Ingress object must be a valid DNS subdomain name. For general information about working with config files, see deploying applications, configuring containers, managing resources. Ingress frequently uses annotations to configure some options depending on the Ingress controller, an example of which is the rewrite-target annotation. Different Ingress controllers support different annotations. Review the documentation for your choice of Ingress controller to learn which annotations are supported.

The Ingress spec has all the information needed to configure a load balancer or proxy server. Most importantly, it contains a list of rules matched against all incoming requests. Ingress resource only supports rules for directing HTTP(S) traffic.

If the ingressClassName is omitted, a default Ingress class should be defined.

There are some ingress controllers, that work without the definition of a default IngressClass. For example, the Ingress-NGINX controller can be configured with a flag --watch-ingress-without-class. It is recommended though, to specify the default IngressClass as shown below.

Ingress rules

Each HTTP rule contains the following information:

  • An optional host. In this example, no host is specified, so the rule applies to all inbound HTTP traffic through the IP address specified. If a host is provided (for example, foo.bar.com), the rules apply to that host.
  • A list of paths (for example, /testpath), each of which has an associated backend defined with a service.name and a service.port.name or service.port.number. Both the host and path must match the content of an incoming request before the load balancer directs traffic to the referenced Service.
  • A backend is a combination of Service and port names as described in the Service doc or a custom resource backend by way of a CRD. HTTP (and HTTPS) requests to the Ingress that match the host and path of the rule are sent to the listed backend.

A defaultBackend is often configured in an Ingress controller to service any requests that do not match a path in the spec.

DefaultBackend

An Ingress with no rules sends all traffic to a single default backend and .spec.defaultBackend is the backend that should handle requests in that case. The defaultBackend is conventionally a configuration option of the Ingress controller and is not specified in your Ingress resources. If no .spec.rules are specified, .spec.defaultBackend must be specified. If defaultBackend is not set, the handling of requests that do not match any of the rules will be up to the ingress controller (consult the documentation for your ingress controller to find out how it handles this case).

If none of the hosts or paths match the HTTP request in the Ingress objects, the traffic is routed to your default backend.

Resource backends

A Resource backend is an ObjectRef to another Kubernetes resource within the same namespace as the Ingress object. A Resource is a mutually exclusive setting with Service, and will fail validation if both are specified. A common usage for a Resource backend is to ingress data to an object storage backend with static assets.

service/networking/ingress-resource-backend.yaml 
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: ingress-resource-backend
spec:
  defaultBackend:
    resource:
      apiGroup: k8s.example.com
      kind: StorageBucket
      name: static-assets
  rules:
    - http:
        paths:
          - path: /icons
            pathType: ImplementationSpecific
            backend:
              resource:
                apiGroup: k8s.example.com
                kind: StorageBucket
                name: icon-assets

After creating the Ingress above, you can view it with the following command:

kubectl describe ingress ingress-resource-backend

Name:             ingress-resource-backend
Namespace:        default
Address:
Default backend:  APIGroup: k8s.example.com, Kind: StorageBucket, Name: static-assets
Rules:
  Host        Path  Backends
  ----        ----  --------
  *
              /icons   APIGroup: k8s.example.com, Kind: StorageBucket, Name: icon-assets
Annotations:  <none>
Events:       <none>

Path types

Each path in an Ingress is required to have a corresponding path type. Paths that do not include an explicit pathType will fail validation. There are three supported path types:

  • ImplementationSpecific: With this path type, matching is up to the IngressClass. Implementations can treat this as a separate pathType or treat it identically to Prefix or Exact path types.

  • Exact: Matches the URL path exactly and with case sensitivity.

  • Prefix: Matches based on a URL path prefix split by /. Matching is case sensitive and done on a path element by element basis. A path element refers to the list of labels in the path split by the / separator. A request is a match for path p if every p is an element-wise prefix of p of the request path.

Examples

Kind Path(s) Request path(s) Matches?
Prefix / (all paths) Yes
Exact /foo /foo Yes
Exact /foo /bar No
Exact /foo /foo/ No
Exact /foo/ /foo No
Prefix /foo /foo, /foo/ Yes
Prefix /foo/ /foo, /foo/ Yes
Prefix /aaa/bb /aaa/bbb No
Prefix /aaa/bbb /aaa/bbb Yes
Prefix /aaa/bbb/ /aaa/bbb Yes, ignores trailing slash
Prefix /aaa/bbb /aaa/bbb/ Yes, matches trailing slash
Prefix /aaa/bbb /aaa/bbb/ccc Yes, matches subpath
Prefix /aaa/bbb /aaa/bbbxyz No, does not match string prefix
Prefix /, /aaa /aaa/ccc Yes, matches /aaa prefix
Prefix /, /aaa, /aaa/bbb /aaa/bbb Yes, matches /aaa/bbb prefix
Prefix /, /aaa, /aaa/bbb /ccc Yes, matches / prefix
Prefix /aaa /ccc No, uses default backend
Mixed /foo (Prefix), /foo (Exact) /foo Yes, prefers Exact

Multiple matches

In some cases, multiple paths within an Ingress will match a request. In those cases precedence will be given first to the longest matching path. If two paths are still equally matched, precedence will be given to paths with an exact path type over prefix path type.

Hostname wildcards

Hosts can be precise matches (for example “foo.bar.com”) or a wildcard (for example “*.foo.com”). Precise matches require that the HTTP host header matches the host field. Wildcard matches require the HTTP host header is equal to the suffix of the wildcard rule.

Host Host header Match?
*.foo.com bar.foo.com Matches based on shared suffix
*.foo.com baz.bar.foo.com No match, wildcard only covers a single DNS label
*.foo.com foo.com No match, wildcard only covers a single DNS label
service/networking/ingress-wildcard-host.yaml 
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: ingress-wildcard-host
spec:
  rules:
  - host: "foo.bar.com"
    http:
      paths:
      - pathType: Prefix
        path: "/bar"
        backend:
          service:
            name: service1
            port:
              number: 80
  - host: "*.foo.com"
    http:
      paths:
      - pathType: Prefix
        path: "/foo"
        backend:
          service:
            name: service2
            port:
              number: 80

Ingress class

Ingresses can be implemented by different controllers, often with different configuration. Each Ingress should specify a class, a reference to an IngressClass resource that contains additional configuration including the name of the controller that should implement the class.

service/networking/external-lb.yaml 
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: IngressClass
metadata:
  name: external-lb
spec:
  controller: example.com/ingress-controller
  parameters:
    apiGroup: k8s.example.com
    kind: IngressParameters
    name: external-lb

The .spec.parameters field of an IngressClass lets you reference another resource that provides configuration related to that IngressClass.

The specific type of parameters to use depends on the ingress controller that you specify in the .spec.controller field of the IngressClass.

IngressClass scope

Depending on your ingress controller, you may be able to use parameters that you set cluster-wide, or just for one namespace.

The default scope for IngressClass parameters is cluster-wide.

If you set the .spec.parameters field and don't set .spec.parameters.scope, or if you set .spec.parameters.scope to Cluster, then the IngressClass refers to a cluster-scoped resource. The kind (in combination the apiGroup) of the parameters refers to a cluster-scoped API (possibly a custom resource), and the name of the parameters identifies a specific cluster scoped resource for that API.

For example:

---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: IngressClass
metadata:
  name: external-lb-1
spec:
  controller: example.com/ingress-controller
  parameters:
    # The parameters for this IngressClass are specified in a
    # ClusterIngressParameter (API group k8s.example.net) named
    # "external-config-1". This definition tells Kubernetes to
    # look for a cluster-scoped parameter resource.
    scope: Cluster
    apiGroup: k8s.example.net
    kind: ClusterIngressParameter
    name: external-config-1

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.23 [stable]

If you set the .spec.parameters field and set .spec.parameters.scope to Namespace, then the IngressClass refers to a namespaced-scoped resource. You must also set the namespace field within .spec.parameters to the namespace that contains the parameters you want to use.

The kind (in combination the apiGroup) of the parameters refers to a namespaced API (for example: ConfigMap), and the name of the parameters identifies a specific resource in the namespace you specified in namespace.

Namespace-scoped parameters help the cluster operator delegate control over the configuration (for example: load balancer settings, API gateway definition) that is used for a workload. If you used a cluster-scoped parameter then either:

  • the cluster operator team needs to approve a different team's changes every time there's a new configuration change being applied.
  • the cluster operator must define specific access controls, such as RBAC roles and bindings, that let the application team make changes to the cluster-scoped parameters resource.

The IngressClass API itself is always cluster-scoped.

Here is an example of an IngressClass that refers to parameters that are namespaced:

---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: IngressClass
metadata:
  name: external-lb-2
spec:
  controller: example.com/ingress-controller
  parameters:
    # The parameters for this IngressClass are specified in an
    # IngressParameter (API group k8s.example.com) named "external-config",
    # that's in the "external-configuration" namespace.
    scope: Namespace
    apiGroup: k8s.example.com
    kind: IngressParameter
    namespace: external-configuration
    name: external-config

Deprecated annotation

Before the IngressClass resource and ingressClassName field were added in Kubernetes 1.18, Ingress classes were specified with a kubernetes.io/ingress.class annotation on the Ingress. This annotation was never formally defined, but was widely supported by Ingress controllers.

The newer ingressClassName field on Ingresses is a replacement for that annotation, but is not a direct equivalent. While the annotation was generally used to reference the name of the Ingress controller that should implement the Ingress, the field is a reference to an IngressClass resource that contains additional Ingress configuration, including the name of the Ingress controller.

Default IngressClass

You can mark a particular IngressClass as default for your cluster. Setting the ingressclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class annotation to true on an IngressClass resource will ensure that new Ingresses without an ingressClassName field specified will be assigned this default IngressClass.

There are some ingress controllers, that work without the definition of a default IngressClass. For example, the Ingress-NGINX controller can be configured with a flag --watch-ingress-without-class. It is recommended though, to specify the default IngressClass:

service/networking/default-ingressclass.yaml 
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: IngressClass
metadata:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/component: controller
  name: nginx-example
  annotations:
    ingressclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class: "true"
spec:
  controller: k8s.io/ingress-nginx

Types of Ingress

Ingress backed by a single Service

There are existing Kubernetes concepts that allow you to expose a single Service (see alternatives). You can also do this with an Ingress by specifying a default backend with no rules.

service/networking/test-ingress.yaml 
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: test-ingress
spec:
  defaultBackend:
    service:
      name: test
      port:
        number: 80

If you create it using kubectl apply -f you should be able to view the state of the Ingress you added:

kubectl get ingress test-ingress

NAME           CLASS         HOSTS   ADDRESS         PORTS   AGE
test-ingress   external-lb   *       203.0.113.123   80      59s

Where 203.0.113.123 is the IP allocated by the Ingress controller to satisfy this Ingress.

Simple fanout

A fanout configuration routes traffic from a single IP address to more than one Service, based on the HTTP URI being requested. An Ingress allows you to keep the number of load balancers down to a minimum. For example, a setup like:

ingress-fanout-diagram

Figure. Ingress Fan Out

It would require an Ingress such as:

service/networking/simple-fanout-example.yaml 
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: simple-fanout-example
spec:
  rules:
  - host: foo.bar.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /foo
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: service1
            port:
              number: 4200
      - path: /bar
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: service2
            port:
              number: 8080

When you create the Ingress with kubectl apply -f:

kubectl describe ingress simple-fanout-example

Name:             simple-fanout-example
Namespace:        default
Address:          178.91.123.132
Default backend:  default-http-backend:80 (10.8.2.3:8080)
Rules:
  Host         Path  Backends
  ----         ----  --------
  foo.bar.com
               /foo   service1:4200 (10.8.0.90:4200)
               /bar   service2:8080 (10.8.0.91:8080)
Events:
  Type     Reason  Age                From                     Message
  ----     ------  ----               ----                     -------
  Normal   ADD     22s                loadbalancer-controller  default/test

The Ingress controller provisions an implementation-specific load balancer that satisfies the Ingress, as long as the Services (service1, service2) exist. When it has done so, you can see the address of the load balancer at the Address field.

Name based virtual hosting

Name-based virtual hosts support routing HTTP traffic to multiple host names at the same IP address.

ingress-namebase-diagram

Figure. Ingress Name Based Virtual hosting

The following Ingress tells the backing load balancer to route requests based on the Host header.

service/networking/name-virtual-host-ingress.yaml 
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: name-virtual-host-ingress
spec:
  rules:
  - host: foo.bar.com
    http:
      paths:
      - pathType: Prefix
        path: "/"
        backend:
          service:
            name: service1
            port:
              number: 80
  - host: bar.foo.com
    http:
      paths:
      - pathType: Prefix
        path: "/"
        backend:
          service:
            name: service2
            port:
              number: 80

If you create an Ingress resource without any hosts defined in the rules, then any web traffic to the IP address of your Ingress controller can be matched without a name based virtual host being required.

For example, the following Ingress routes traffic requested for first.bar.com to service1, second.bar.com to service2, and any traffic whose request host header doesn't match first.bar.com and second.bar.com to service3.

service/networking/name-virtual-host-ingress-no-third-host.yaml 
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: name-virtual-host-ingress-no-third-host
spec:
  rules:
  - host: first.bar.com
    http:
      paths:
      - pathType: Prefix
        path: "/"
        backend:
          service:
            name: service1
            port:
              number: 80
  - host: second.bar.com
    http:
      paths:
      - pathType: Prefix
        path: "/"
        backend:
          service:
            name: service2
            port:
              number: 80
  - http:
      paths:
      - pathType: Prefix
        path: "/"
        backend:
          service:
            name: service3
            port:
              number: 80

TLS

You can secure an Ingress by specifying a Secret that contains a TLS private key and certificate. The Ingress resource only supports a single TLS port, 443, and assumes TLS termination at the ingress point (traffic to the Service and its Pods is in plaintext). If the TLS configuration section in an Ingress specifies different hosts, they are multiplexed on the same port according to the hostname specified through the SNI TLS extension (provided the Ingress controller supports SNI). The TLS secret must contain keys named tls.crt and tls.key that contain the certificate and private key to use for TLS. For example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: testsecret-tls
  namespace: default
data:
  tls.crt: base64 encoded cert
  tls.key: base64 encoded key
type: kubernetes.io/tls

Referencing this secret in an Ingress tells the Ingress controller to secure the channel from the client to the load balancer using TLS. You need to make sure the TLS secret you created came from a certificate that contains a Common Name (CN), also known as a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) for https-example.foo.com.

service/networking/tls-example-ingress.yaml 
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: tls-example-ingress
spec:
  tls:
  - hosts:
      - https-example.foo.com
    secretName: testsecret-tls
  rules:
  - host: https-example.foo.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: service1
            port:
              number: 80

Load balancing

An Ingress controller is bootstrapped with some load balancing policy settings that it applies to all Ingress, such as the load balancing algorithm, backend weight scheme, and others. More advanced load balancing concepts (e.g. persistent sessions, dynamic weights) are not yet exposed through the Ingress. You can instead get these features through the load balancer used for a Service.

It's also worth noting that even though health checks are not exposed directly through the Ingress, there exist parallel concepts in Kubernetes such as readiness probes that allow you to achieve the same end result. Please review the controller specific documentation to see how they handle health checks (for example: nginx, or GCE).

Updating an Ingress

To update an existing Ingress to add a new Host, you can update it by editing the resource:

kubectl describe ingress test

Name:             test
Namespace:        default
Address:          178.91.123.132
Default backend:  default-http-backend:80 (10.8.2.3:8080)
Rules:
  Host         Path  Backends
  ----         ----  --------
  foo.bar.com
               /foo   service1:80 (10.8.0.90:80)
Annotations:
  nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target:  /
Events:
  Type     Reason  Age                From                     Message
  ----     ------  ----               ----                     -------
  Normal   ADD     35s                loadbalancer-controller  default/test

kubectl edit ingress test

This pops up an editor with the existing configuration in YAML format. Modify it to include the new Host:

spec:
  rules:
  - host: foo.bar.com
    http:
      paths:
      - backend:
          service:
            name: service1
            port:
              number: 80
        path: /foo
        pathType: Prefix
  - host: bar.baz.com
    http:
      paths:
      - backend:
          service:
            name: service2
            port:
              number: 80
        path: /foo
        pathType: Prefix
..

After you save your changes, kubectl updates the resource in the API server, which tells the Ingress controller to reconfigure the load balancer.

Verify this:

kubectl describe ingress test

Name:             test
Namespace:        default
Address:          178.91.123.132
Default backend:  default-http-backend:80 (10.8.2.3:8080)
Rules:
  Host         Path  Backends
  ----         ----  --------
  foo.bar.com
               /foo   service1:80 (10.8.0.90:80)
  bar.baz.com
               /foo   service2:80 (10.8.0.91:80)
Annotations:
  nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target:  /
Events:
  Type     Reason  Age                From                     Message
  ----     ------  ----               ----                     -------
  Normal   ADD     45s                loadbalancer-controller  default/test

You can achieve the same outcome by invoking kubectl replace -f on a modified Ingress YAML file.

Failing across availability zones

Techniques for spreading traffic across failure domains differ between cloud providers. Please check the documentation of the relevant Ingress controller for details.

Alternatives

You can expose a Service in multiple ways that don't directly involve the Ingress resource:

What's next

5.3 - Ingress Controllers

In order for an Ingress to work in your cluster, there must be an ingress controller running. You need to select at least one ingress controller and make sure it is set up in your cluster. This page lists common ingress controllers that you can deploy.

In order for the Ingress resource to work, the cluster must have an ingress controller running.

Unlike other types of controllers which run as part of the kube-controller-manager binary, Ingress controllers are not started automatically with a cluster. Use this page to choose the ingress controller implementation that best fits your cluster.

Kubernetes as a project supports and maintains AWS, GCE, and nginx ingress controllers.

Additional controllers

Using multiple Ingress controllers

You may deploy any number of ingress controllers using ingress class within a cluster. Note the .metadata.name of your ingress class resource. When you create an ingress you would need that name to specify the ingressClassName field on your Ingress object (refer to IngressSpec v1 reference). ingressClassName is a replacement of the older annotation method.

If you do not specify an IngressClass for an Ingress, and your cluster has exactly one IngressClass marked as default, then Kubernetes applies the cluster's default IngressClass to the Ingress. You mark an IngressClass as default by setting the ingressclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class annotation on that IngressClass, with the string value "true".

Ideally, all ingress controllers should fulfill this specification, but the various ingress controllers operate slightly differently.

What's next

5.4 - Gateway API

Gateway API is a family of API kinds that provide dynamic infrastructure provisioning and advanced traffic routing.

Make network services available by using an extensible, role-oriented, protocol-aware configuration mechanism. Gateway API is an add-on containing API kinds that provide dynamic infrastructure provisioning and advanced traffic routing.

Design principles

The following principles shaped the design and architecture of Gateway API:

  • Role-oriented: Gateway API kinds are modeled after organizational roles that are responsible for managing Kubernetes service networking:
    • Infrastructure Provider: Manages infrastructure that allows multiple isolated clusters to serve multiple tenants, e.g. a cloud provider.
    • Cluster Operator: Manages clusters and is typically concerned with policies, network access, application permissions, etc.
    • Application Developer: Manages an application running in a cluster and is typically concerned with application-level configuration and Service composition.
  • Portable: Gateway API specifications are defined as custom resources and are supported by many implementations.
  • Expressive: Gateway API kinds support functionality for common traffic routing use cases such as header-based matching, traffic weighting, and others that were only possible in Ingress by using custom annotations.
  • Extensible: Gateway allows for custom resources to be linked at various layers of the API. This makes granular customization possible at the appropriate places within the API structure.

Resource model

Gateway API has three stable API kinds:

  • GatewayClass: Defines a set of gateways with common configuration and managed by a controller that implements the class.

  • Gateway: Defines an instance of traffic handling infrastructure, such as cloud load balancer.

  • HTTPRoute: Defines HTTP-specific rules for mapping traffic from a Gateway listener to a representation of backend network endpoints. These endpoints are often represented as a Service.

Gateway API is organized into different API kinds that have interdependent relationships to support the role-oriented nature of organizations. A Gateway object is associated with exactly one GatewayClass; the GatewayClass describes the gateway controller responsible for managing Gateways of this class. One or more route kinds such as HTTPRoute, are then associated to Gateways. A Gateway can filter the routes that may be attached to its listeners, forming a bidirectional trust model with routes.

The following figure illustrates the relationships of the three stable Gateway API kinds:

A figure illustrating the relationships of the three stable Gateway API kinds

GatewayClass

Gateways can be implemented by different controllers, often with different configurations. A Gateway must reference a GatewayClass that contains the name of the controller that implements the class.

A minimal GatewayClass example:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: GatewayClass
metadata:
  name: example-class
spec:
  controllerName: example.com/gateway-controller

In this example, a controller that has implemented Gateway API is configured to manage GatewayClasses with the controller name example.com/gateway-controller. Gateways of this class will be managed by the implementation's controller.

See the GatewayClass reference for a full definition of this API kind.

Gateway

A Gateway describes an instance of traffic handling infrastructure. It defines a network endpoint that can be used for processing traffic, i.e. filtering, balancing, splitting, etc. for backends such as a Service. For example, a Gateway may represent a cloud load balancer or an in-cluster proxy server that is configured to accept HTTP traffic.

A minimal Gateway resource example:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: example-gateway
spec:
  gatewayClassName: example-class
  listeners:
  - name: http
    protocol: HTTP
    port: 80

In this example, an instance of traffic handling infrastructure is programmed to listen for HTTP traffic on port 80. Since the addresses field is unspecified, an address or hostname is assigned to the Gateway by the implementation's controller. This address is used as a network endpoint for processing traffic of backend network endpoints defined in routes.

See the Gateway reference for a full definition of this API kind.

HTTPRoute

The HTTPRoute kind specifies routing behavior of HTTP requests from a Gateway listener to backend network endpoints. For a Service backend, an implementation may represent the backend network endpoint as a Service IP or the backing Endpoints of the Service. An HTTPRoute represents configuration that is applied to the underlying Gateway implementation. For example, defining a new HTTPRoute may result in configuring additional traffic routes in a cloud load balancer or in-cluster proxy server.

A minimal HTTPRoute example:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: example-httproute
spec:
  parentRefs:
  - name: example-gateway
  hostnames:
  - "www.example.com"
  rules:
  - matches:
    - path:
        type: PathPrefix
        value: /login
    backendRefs:
    - name: example-svc
      port: 8080

In this example, HTTP traffic from Gateway example-gateway with the Host: header set to www.example.com and the request path specified as /login will be routed to Service example-svc on port 8080.

See the HTTPRoute reference for a full definition of this API kind.

Request flow

Here is a simple example of HTTP traffic being routed to a Service by using a Gateway and an HTTPRoute:

A diagram that provides an example of HTTP traffic being routed to a Service by using a Gateway and an HTTPRoute

In this example, the request flow for a Gateway implemented as a reverse proxy is:

  1. The client starts to prepare an HTTP request for the URL http://www.example.com
  2. The client's DNS resolver queries for the destination name and learns a mapping to one or more IP addresses associated with the Gateway.
  3. The client sends a request to the Gateway IP address; the reverse proxy receives the HTTP request and uses the Host: header to match a configuration that was derived from the Gateway and attached HTTPRoute.
  4. Optionally, the reverse proxy can perform request header and/or path matching based on match rules of the HTTPRoute.
  5. Optionally, the reverse proxy can modify the request; for example, to add or remove headers, based on filter rules of the HTTPRoute.
  6. Lastly, the reverse proxy forwards the request to one or more backends.

Conformance

Gateway API covers a broad set of features and is widely implemented. This combination requires clear conformance definitions and tests to ensure that the API provides a consistent experience wherever it is used.

See the conformance documentation to understand details such as release channels, support levels, and running conformance tests.

Migrating from Ingress

Gateway API is the successor to the Ingress API. However, it does not include the Ingress kind. As a result, a one-time conversion from your existing Ingress resources to Gateway API resources is necessary.

Refer to the ingress migration guide for details on migrating Ingress resources to Gateway API resources.

What's next

Instead of Gateway API resources being natively implemented by Kubernetes, the specifications are defined as Custom Resources supported by a wide range of implementations. Install the Gateway API CRDs or follow the installation instructions of your selected implementation. After installing an implementation, use the Getting Started guide to help you quickly start working with Gateway API.

Refer to the API specification for additional details of all Gateway API kinds.

5.5 - EndpointSlices

The EndpointSlice API is the mechanism that Kubernetes uses to let your Service scale to handle large numbers of backends, and allows the cluster to update its list of healthy backends efficiently.
FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.21 [stable]

Kubernetes' EndpointSlice API provides a way to track network endpoints within a Kubernetes cluster. EndpointSlices offer a more scalable and extensible alternative to Endpoints.

EndpointSlice API

In Kubernetes, an EndpointSlice contains references to a set of network endpoints. The control plane automatically creates EndpointSlices for any Kubernetes Service that has a selector specified. These EndpointSlices include references to all the Pods that match the Service selector. EndpointSlices group network endpoints together by unique combinations of protocol, port number, and Service name. The name of a EndpointSlice object must be a valid DNS subdomain name.

As an example, here's a sample EndpointSlice object, that's owned by the example Kubernetes Service.

apiVersion: discovery.k8s.io/v1
kind: EndpointSlice
metadata:
  name: example-abc
  labels:
    kubernetes.io/service-name: example
addressType: IPv4
ports:
  - name: http
    protocol: TCP
    port: 80
endpoints:
  - addresses:
      - "10.1.2.3"
    conditions:
      ready: true
    hostname: pod-1
    nodeName: node-1
    zone: us-west2-a

By default, the control plane creates and manages EndpointSlices to have no more than 100 endpoints each. You can configure this with the --max-endpoints-per-slice kube-controller-manager flag, up to a maximum of 1000.

EndpointSlices can act as the source of truth for kube-proxy when it comes to how to route internal traffic.

Address types

EndpointSlices support three address types:

  • IPv4
  • IPv6
  • FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name)

Each EndpointSlice object represents a specific IP address type. If you have a Service that is available via IPv4 and IPv6, there will be at least two EndpointSlice objects (one for IPv4, and one for IPv6).

Conditions

The EndpointSlice API stores conditions about endpoints that may be useful for consumers. The three conditions are ready, serving, and terminating.

Ready

ready is a condition that maps to a Pod's Ready condition. A running Pod with the Ready condition set to True should have this EndpointSlice condition also set to true. For compatibility reasons, ready is NEVER true when a Pod is terminating. Consumers should refer to the serving condition to inspect the readiness of terminating Pods. The only exception to this rule is for Services with spec.publishNotReadyAddresses set to true. Endpoints for these Services will always have the ready condition set to true.

Serving

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [stable]

The serving condition is almost identical to the ready condition. The difference is that consumers of the EndpointSlice API should check the serving condition if they care about pod readiness while the pod is also terminating.

Terminating

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.22 [beta]

Terminating is a condition that indicates whether an endpoint is terminating. For pods, this is any pod that has a deletion timestamp set.

Topology information

Each endpoint within an EndpointSlice can contain relevant topology information. The topology information includes the location of the endpoint and information about the corresponding Node and zone. These are available in the following per endpoint fields on EndpointSlices:

  • nodeName - The name of the Node this endpoint is on.
  • zone - The zone this endpoint is in.

Management

Most often, the control plane (specifically, the endpoint slice controller) creates and manages EndpointSlice objects. There are a variety of other use cases for EndpointSlices, such as service mesh implementations, that could result in other entities or controllers managing additional sets of EndpointSlices.

To ensure that multiple entities can manage EndpointSlices without interfering with each other, Kubernetes defines the label endpointslice.kubernetes.io/managed-by, which indicates the entity managing an EndpointSlice. The endpoint slice controller sets endpointslice-controller.k8s.io as the value for this label on all EndpointSlices it manages. Other entities managing EndpointSlices should also set a unique value for this label.

Ownership

In most use cases, EndpointSlices are owned by the Service that the endpoint slice object tracks endpoints for. This ownership is indicated by an owner reference on each EndpointSlice as well as a kubernetes.io/service-name label that enables simple lookups of all EndpointSlices belonging to a Service.

EndpointSlice mirroring

In some cases, applications create custom Endpoints resources. To ensure that these applications do not need to concurrently write to both Endpoints and EndpointSlice resources, the cluster's control plane mirrors most Endpoints resources to corresponding EndpointSlices.

The control plane mirrors Endpoints resources unless:

  • the Endpoints resource has a endpointslice.kubernetes.io/skip-mirror label set to true.
  • the Endpoints resource has a control-plane.alpha.kubernetes.io/leader annotation.
  • the corresponding Service resource does not exist.
  • the corresponding Service resource has a non-nil selector.

Individual Endpoints resources may translate into multiple EndpointSlices. This will occur if an Endpoints resource has multiple subsets or includes endpoints with multiple IP families (IPv4 and IPv6). A maximum of 1000 addresses per subset will be mirrored to EndpointSlices.

Distribution of EndpointSlices

Each EndpointSlice has a set of ports that applies to all endpoints within the resource. When named ports are used for a Service, Pods may end up with different target port numbers for the same named port, requiring different EndpointSlices. This is similar to the logic behind how subsets are grouped with Endpoints.

The control plane tries to fill EndpointSlices as full as possible, but does not actively rebalance them. The logic is fairly straightforward:

  1. Iterate through existing EndpointSlices, remove endpoints that are no longer desired and update matching endpoints that have changed.
  2. Iterate through EndpointSlices that have been modified in the first step and fill them up with any new endpoints needed.
  3. If there's still new endpoints left to add, try to fit them into a previously unchanged slice and/or create new ones.

Importantly, the third step prioritizes limiting EndpointSlice updates over a perfectly full distribution of EndpointSlices. As an example, if there are 10 new endpoints to add and 2 EndpointSlices with room for 5 more endpoints each, this approach will create a new EndpointSlice instead of filling up the 2 existing EndpointSlices. In other words, a single EndpointSlice creation is preferable to multiple EndpointSlice updates.

With kube-proxy running on each Node and watching EndpointSlices, every change to an EndpointSlice becomes relatively expensive since it will be transmitted to every Node in the cluster. This approach is intended to limit the number of changes that need to be sent to every Node, even if it may result with multiple EndpointSlices that are not full.

In practice, this less than ideal distribution should be rare. Most changes processed by the EndpointSlice controller will be small enough to fit in an existing EndpointSlice, and if not, a new EndpointSlice is likely going to be necessary soon anyway. Rolling updates of Deployments also provide a natural repacking of EndpointSlices with all Pods and their corresponding endpoints getting replaced.

Duplicate endpoints

Due to the nature of EndpointSlice changes, endpoints may be represented in more than one EndpointSlice at the same time. This naturally occurs as changes to different EndpointSlice objects can arrive at the Kubernetes client watch / cache at different times.

Comparison with Endpoints

The original Endpoints API provided a simple and straightforward way of tracking network endpoints in Kubernetes. As Kubernetes clusters and Services grew to handle more traffic and to send more traffic to more backend Pods, the limitations of that original API became more visible. Most notably, those included challenges with scaling to larger numbers of network endpoints.

Since all network endpoints for a Service were stored in a single Endpoints object, those Endpoints objects could get quite large. For Services that stayed stable (the same set of endpoints over a long period of time) the impact was less noticeable; even then, some use cases of Kubernetes weren't well served.

When a Service had a lot of backend endpoints and the workload was either scaling frequently, or rolling out new changes frequently, each update to the single Endpoints object for that Service meant a lot of traffic between Kubernetes cluster components (within the control plane, and also between nodes and the API server). This extra traffic also had a cost in terms of CPU use.

With EndpointSlices, adding or removing a single Pod triggers the same number of updates to clients that are watching for changes, but the size of those update message is much smaller at large scale.

EndpointSlices also enabled innovation around new features such dual-stack networking and topology-aware routing.

What's next

5.6 - Network Policies

If you want to control traffic flow at the IP address or port level (OSI layer 3 or 4), NetworkPolicies allow you to specify rules for traffic flow within your cluster, and also between Pods and the outside world. Your cluster must use a network plugin that supports NetworkPolicy enforcement.

If you want to control traffic flow at the IP address or port level for TCP, UDP, and SCTP protocols, then you might consider using Kubernetes NetworkPolicies for particular applications in your cluster. NetworkPolicies are an application-centric construct which allow you to specify how a pod is allowed to communicate with various network "entities" (we use the word "entity" here to avoid overloading the more common terms such as "endpoints" and "services", which have specific Kubernetes connotations) over the network. NetworkPolicies apply to a connection with a pod on one or both ends, and are not relevant to other connections.

The entities that a Pod can communicate with are identified through a combination of the following three identifiers:

  1. Other pods that are allowed (exception: a pod cannot block access to itself)
  2. Namespaces that are allowed
  3. IP blocks (exception: traffic to and from the node where a Pod is running is always allowed, regardless of the IP address of the Pod or the node)

When defining a pod- or namespace-based NetworkPolicy, you use a selector to specify what traffic is allowed to and from the Pod(s) that match the selector.

Meanwhile, when IP-based NetworkPolicies are created, we define policies based on IP blocks (CIDR ranges).

Prerequisites

Network policies are implemented by the network plugin. To use network policies, you must be using a networking solution which supports NetworkPolicy. Creating a NetworkPolicy resource without a controller that implements it will have no effect.

The two sorts of pod isolation

There are two sorts of isolation for a pod: isolation for egress, and isolation for ingress. They concern what connections may be established. "Isolation" here is not absolute, rather it means "some restrictions apply". The alternative, "non-isolated for $direction", means that no restrictions apply in the stated direction. The two sorts of isolation (or not) are declared independently, and are both relevant for a connection from one pod to another.

By default, a pod is non-isolated for egress; all outbound connections are allowed. A pod is isolated for egress if there is any NetworkPolicy that both selects the pod and has "Egress" in its policyTypes; we say that such a policy applies to the pod for egress. When a pod is isolated for egress, the only allowed connections from the pod are those allowed by the egress list of some NetworkPolicy that applies to the pod for egress. Reply traffic for those allowed connections will also be implicitly allowed. The effects of those egress lists combine additively.

By default, a pod is non-isolated for ingress; all inbound connections are allowed. A pod is isolated for ingress if there is any NetworkPolicy that both selects the pod and has "Ingress" in its policyTypes; we say that such a policy applies to the pod for ingress. When a pod is isolated for ingress, the only allowed connections into the pod are those from the pod's node and those allowed by the ingress list of some NetworkPolicy that applies to the pod for ingress. Reply traffic for those allowed connections will also be implicitly allowed. The effects of those ingress lists combine additively.

Network policies do not conflict; they are additive. If any policy or policies apply to a given pod for a given direction, the connections allowed in that direction from that pod is the union of what the applicable policies allow. Thus, order of evaluation does not affect the policy result.

For a connection from a source pod to a destination pod to be allowed, both the egress policy on the source pod and the ingress policy on the destination pod need to allow the connection. If either side does not allow the connection, it will not happen.

The NetworkPolicy resource

See the NetworkPolicy reference for a full definition of the resource.

An example NetworkPolicy might look like this:

service/networking/networkpolicy.yaml 
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: test-network-policy
  namespace: default
spec:
  podSelector:
    matchLabels:
      role: db
  policyTypes:
  - Ingress
  - Egress
  ingress:
  - from:
    - ipBlock:
        cidr: 172.17.0.0/16
        except:
        - 172.17.1.0/24
    - namespaceSelector:
        matchLabels:
          project: myproject
    - podSelector:
        matchLabels:
          role: frontend
    ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 6379
  egress:
  - to:
    - ipBlock:
        cidr: 10.0.0.0/24
    ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 5978

Mandatory Fields: As with all other Kubernetes config, a NetworkPolicy needs apiVersion, kind, and metadata fields. For general information about working with config files, see Configure a Pod to Use a ConfigMap, and Object Management.

spec: NetworkPolicy spec has all the information needed to define a particular network policy in the given namespace.

podSelector: Each NetworkPolicy includes a podSelector which selects the grouping of pods to which the policy applies. The example policy selects pods with the label "role=db". An empty podSelector selects all pods in the namespace.

policyTypes: Each NetworkPolicy includes a policyTypes list which may include either Ingress, Egress, or both. The policyTypes field indicates whether or not the given policy applies to ingress traffic to selected pod, egress traffic from selected pods, or both. If no policyTypes are specified on a NetworkPolicy then by default Ingress will always be set and Egress will be set if the NetworkPolicy has any egress rules.

ingress: Each NetworkPolicy may include a list of allowed ingress rules. Each rule allows traffic which matches both the from and ports sections. The example policy contains a single rule, which matches traffic on a single port, from one of three sources, the first specified via an ipBlock, the second via a namespaceSelector and the third via a podSelector.

egress: Each NetworkPolicy may include a list of allowed egress rules. Each rule allows traffic which matches both the to and ports sections. The example policy contains a single rule, which matches traffic on a single port to any destination in 10.0.0.0/24.

So, the example NetworkPolicy:

  1. isolates role=db pods in the default namespace for both ingress and egress traffic (if they weren't already isolated)

  2. (Ingress rules) allows connections to all pods in the default namespace with the label role=db on TCP port 6379 from:

    • any pod in the default namespace with the label role=frontend
    • any pod in a namespace with the label project=myproject
    • IP addresses in the ranges 172.17.0.0–172.17.0.255 and 172.17.2.0–172.17.255.255 (ie, all of 172.17.0.0/16 except 172.17.1.0/24)

  3. (Egress rules) allows connections from any pod in the default namespace with the label role=db to CIDR 10.0.0.0/24 on TCP port 5978

See the Declare Network Policy walkthrough for further examples.

Behavior of to and from selectors

There are four kinds of selectors that can be specified in an ingress from section or egress to section:

podSelector: This selects particular Pods in the same namespace as the NetworkPolicy which should be allowed as ingress sources or egress destinations.

namespaceSelector: This selects particular namespaces for which all Pods should be allowed as ingress sources or egress destinations.

namespaceSelector and podSelector: A single to/from entry that specifies both namespaceSelector and podSelector selects particular Pods within particular namespaces. Be careful to use correct YAML syntax. For example:

  ...
  ingress:
  - from:
    - namespaceSelector:
        matchLabels:
          user: alice
      podSelector:
        matchLabels:
          role: client
  ...

This policy contains a single from element allowing connections from Pods with the label role=client in namespaces with the label user=alice. But the following policy is different:

  ...
  ingress:
  - from:
    - namespaceSelector:
        matchLabels:
          user: alice
    - podSelector:
        matchLabels:
          role: client
  ...

It contains two elements in the from array, and allows connections from Pods in the local Namespace with the label role=client, or from any Pod in any namespace with the label user=alice.

When in doubt, use kubectl describe to see how Kubernetes has interpreted the policy.

ipBlock: This selects particular IP CIDR ranges to allow as ingress sources or egress destinations. These should be cluster-external IPs, since Pod IPs are ephemeral and unpredictable.

Cluster ingress and egress mechanisms often require rewriting the source or destination IP of packets. In cases where this happens, it is not defined whether this happens before or after NetworkPolicy processing, and the behavior may be different for different combinations of network plugin, cloud provider, Service implementation, etc.

In the case of ingress, this means that in some cases you may be able to filter incoming packets based on the actual original source IP, while in other cases, the "source IP" that the NetworkPolicy acts on may be the IP of a LoadBalancer or of the Pod's node, etc.

For egress, this means that connections from pods to Service IPs that get rewritten to cluster-external IPs may or may not be subject to ipBlock-based policies.

Default policies

By default, if no policies exist in a namespace, then all ingress and egress traffic is allowed to and from pods in that namespace. The following examples let you change the default behavior in that namespace.

Default deny all ingress traffic

You can create a "default" ingress isolation policy for a namespace by creating a NetworkPolicy that selects all pods but does not allow any ingress traffic to those pods.

service/networking/network-policy-default-deny-ingress.yaml 
---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: default-deny-ingress
spec:
  podSelector: {}
  policyTypes:
  - Ingress

This ensures that even pods that aren't selected by any other NetworkPolicy will still be isolated for ingress. This policy does not affect isolation for egress from any pod.

Allow all ingress traffic

If you want to allow all incoming connections to all pods in a namespace, you can create a policy that explicitly allows that.

service/networking/network-policy-allow-all-ingress.yaml 
---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: allow-all-ingress
spec:
  podSelector: {}
  ingress:
  - {}
  policyTypes:
  - Ingress

With this policy in place, no additional policy or policies can cause any incoming connection to those pods to be denied. This policy has no effect on isolation for egress from any pod.

Default deny all egress traffic

You can create a "default" egress isolation policy for a namespace by creating a NetworkPolicy that selects all pods but does not allow any egress traffic from those pods.

service/networking/network-policy-default-deny-egress.yaml 
---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: default-deny-egress
spec:
  podSelector: {}
  policyTypes:
  - Egress

This ensures that even pods that aren't selected by any other NetworkPolicy will not be allowed egress traffic. This policy does not change the ingress isolation behavior of any pod.

Allow all egress traffic

If you want to allow all connections from all pods in a namespace, you can create a policy that explicitly allows all outgoing connections from pods in that namespace.

service/networking/network-policy-allow-all-egress.yaml 
---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: allow-all-egress
spec:
  podSelector: {}
  egress:
  - {}
  policyTypes:
  - Egress

With this policy in place, no additional policy or policies can cause any outgoing connection from those pods to be denied. This policy has no effect on isolation for ingress to any pod.

Default deny all ingress and all egress traffic

You can create a "default" policy for a namespace which prevents all ingress AND egress traffic by creating the following NetworkPolicy in that namespace.

service/networking/network-policy-default-deny-all.yaml 
---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: default-deny-all
spec:
  podSelector: {}
  policyTypes:
  - Ingress
  - Egress

This ensures that even pods that aren't selected by any other NetworkPolicy will not be allowed ingress or egress traffic.

Network traffic filtering

NetworkPolicy is defined for layer 4 connections (TCP, UDP, and optionally SCTP). For all the other protocols, the behaviour may vary across network plugins.

When a deny all network policy is defined, it is only guaranteed to deny TCP, UDP and SCTP connections. For other protocols, such as ARP or ICMP, the behaviour is undefined. The same applies to allow rules: when a specific pod is allowed as ingress source or egress destination, it is undefined what happens with (for example) ICMP packets. Protocols such as ICMP may be allowed by some network plugins and denied by others.

Targeting a range of ports

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable]

When writing a NetworkPolicy, you can target a range of ports instead of a single port.

This is achievable with the usage of the endPort field, as the following example:

service/networking/networkpolicy-multiport-egress.yaml 
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: multi-port-egress
  namespace: default
spec:
  podSelector:
    matchLabels:
      role: db
  policyTypes:
    - Egress
  egress:
    - to:
        - ipBlock:
            cidr: 10.0.0.0/24
      ports:
        - protocol: TCP
          port: 32000
          endPort: 32768

The above rule allows any Pod with label role=db on the namespace default to communicate with any IP within the range 10.0.0.0/24 over TCP, provided that the target port is between the range 32000 and 32768.

The following restrictions apply when using this field:

  • The endPort field must be equal to or greater than the port field.
  • endPort can only be defined if port is also defined.
  • Both ports must be numeric.

Targeting multiple namespaces by label

In this scenario, your Egress NetworkPolicy targets more than one namespace using their label names. For this to work, you need to label the target namespaces. For example:

kubectl label namespace frontend namespace=frontend
kubectl label namespace backend namespace=backend

Add the labels under namespaceSelector in your NetworkPolicy document. For example:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: egress-namespaces
spec:
  podSelector:
    matchLabels:
      app: myapp
  policyTypes:
  - Egress
  egress:
  - to:
    - namespaceSelector:
        matchExpressions:
        - key: namespace
          operator: In
          values: ["frontend", "backend"]

Targeting a Namespace by its name

The Kubernetes control plane sets an immutable label kubernetes.io/metadata.name on all namespaces, the value of the label is the namespace name.

While NetworkPolicy cannot target a namespace by its name with some object field, you can use the standardized label to target a specific namespace.

Pod lifecycle

When a new NetworkPolicy object is created, it may take some time for a network plugin to handle the new object. If a pod that is affected by a NetworkPolicy is created before the network plugin has completed NetworkPolicy handling, that pod may be started unprotected, and isolation rules will be applied when the NetworkPolicy handling is completed.

Once the NetworkPolicy is handled by a network plugin,

  1. All newly created pods affected by a given NetworkPolicy will be isolated before they are started. Implementations of NetworkPolicy must ensure that filtering is effective throughout the Pod lifecycle, even from the very first instant that any container in that Pod is started. Because they are applied at Pod level, NetworkPolicies apply equally to init containers, sidecar containers, and regular containers.

  2. Allow rules will be applied eventually after the isolation rules (or may be applied at the same time). In the worst case, a newly created pod may have no network connectivity at all when it is first started, if isolation rules were already applied, but no allow rules were applied yet.

Every created NetworkPolicy will be handled by a network plugin eventually, but there is no way to tell from the Kubernetes API when exactly that happens.

Therefore, pods must be resilient against being started up with different network connectivity than expected. If you need to make sure the pod can reach certain destinations before being started, you can use an init container to wait for those destinations to be reachable before kubelet starts the app containers.

Every NetworkPolicy will be applied to all selected pods eventually. Because the network plugin may implement NetworkPolicy in a distributed manner, it is possible that pods may see a slightly inconsistent view of network policies when the pod is first created, or when pods or policies change. For example, a newly-created pod that is supposed to be able to reach both Pod A on Node 1 and Pod B on Node 2 may find that it can reach Pod A immediately, but cannot reach Pod B until a few seconds later.

NetworkPolicy and hostNetwork pods

NetworkPolicy behaviour for hostNetwork pods is undefined, but it should be limited to 2 possibilities:

  • The network plugin can distinguish hostNetwork pod traffic from all other traffic (including being able to distinguish traffic from different hostNetwork pods on the same node), and will apply NetworkPolicy to hostNetwork pods just like it does to pod-network pods.
  • The network plugin cannot properly distinguish hostNetwork pod traffic, and so it ignores hostNetwork pods when matching podSelector and namespaceSelector. Traffic to/from hostNetwork pods is treated the same as all other traffic to/from the node IP. (This is the most common implementation.)

This applies when

  1. a hostNetwork pod is selected by spec.podSelector.

      ...
  spec:
    podSelector:
      matchLabels:
        role: client
  ...

  2. a hostNetwork pod is selected by a podSelector or namespaceSelector in an ingress or egress rule.

      ...
  ingress:
    - from:
      - podSelector:
          matchLabels:
            role: client
  ...

At the same time, since hostNetwork pods have the same IP addresses as the nodes they reside on, their connections will be treated as node connections. For example, you can allow traffic from a hostNetwork Pod using an ipBlock rule.

What you can't do with network policies (at least, not yet)

As of Kubernetes 1.32, the following functionality does not exist in the NetworkPolicy API, but you might be able to implement workarounds using Operating System components (such as SELinux, OpenVSwitch, IPTables, and so on) or Layer 7 technologies (Ingress controllers, Service Mesh implementations) or admission controllers. In case you are new to network security in Kubernetes, its worth noting that the following User Stories cannot (yet) be implemented using the NetworkPolicy API.

  • Forcing internal cluster traffic to go through a common gateway (this might be best served with a service mesh or other proxy).
  • Anything TLS related (use a service mesh or ingress controller for this).
  • Node specific policies (you can use CIDR notation for these, but you cannot target nodes by their Kubernetes identities specifically).
  • Targeting of services by name (you can, however, target pods or namespaces by their labels, which is often a viable workaround).
  • Creation or management of "Policy requests" that are fulfilled by a third party.
  • Default policies which are applied to all namespaces or pods (there are some third party Kubernetes distributions and projects which can do this).
  • Advanced policy querying and reachability tooling.
  • The ability to log network security events (for example connections that are blocked or accepted).
  • The ability to explicitly deny policies (currently the model for NetworkPolicies are deny by default, with only the ability to add allow rules).
  • The ability to prevent loopback or incoming host traffic (Pods cannot currently block localhost access, nor do they have the ability to block access from their resident node).

NetworkPolicy's impact on existing connections

When the set of NetworkPolicies that applies to an existing connection changes - this could happen either due to a change in NetworkPolicies or if the relevant labels of the namespaces/pods selected by the policy (both subject and peers) are changed in the middle of an existing connection - it is implementation defined as to whether the change will take effect for that existing connection or not. Example: A policy is created that leads to denying a previously allowed connection, the underlying network plugin implementation is responsible for defining if that new policy will close the existing connections or not. It is recommended not to modify policies/pods/namespaces in ways that might affect existing connections.

What's next

5.7 - DNS for Services and Pods

Your workload can discover Services within your cluster using DNS; this page explains how that works.

Kubernetes creates DNS records for Services and Pods. You can contact Services with consistent DNS names instead of IP addresses.

Kubernetes publishes information about Pods and Services which is used to program DNS. Kubelet configures Pods' DNS so that running containers can lookup Services by name rather than IP.

Services defined in the cluster are assigned DNS names. By default, a client Pod's DNS search list includes the Pod's own namespace and the cluster's default domain.

Namespaces of Services

A DNS query may return different results based on the namespace of the Pod making it. DNS queries that don't specify a namespace are limited to the Pod's namespace. Access Services in other namespaces by specifying it in the DNS query.

For example, consider a Pod in a test namespace. A data Service is in the prod namespace.

A query for data returns no results, because it uses the Pod's test namespace.

A query for data.prod returns the intended result, because it specifies the namespace.

DNS queries may be expanded using the Pod's /etc/resolv.conf. Kubelet configures this file for each Pod. For example, a query for just data may be expanded to data.test.svc.cluster.local. The values of the search option are used to expand queries. To learn more about DNS queries, see the resolv.conf manual page.

nameserver 10.32.0.10
search <namespace>.svc.cluster.local svc.cluster.local cluster.local
options ndots:5

In summary, a Pod in the test namespace can successfully resolve either data.prod or data.prod.svc.cluster.local.

DNS Records

What objects get DNS records?

  1. Services
  2. Pods

The following sections detail the supported DNS record types and layout that is supported. Any other layout or names or queries that happen to work are considered implementation details and are subject to change without warning. For more up-to-date specification, see Kubernetes DNS-Based Service Discovery.

Services

A/AAAA records

"Normal" (not headless) Services are assigned DNS A and/or AAAA records, depending on the IP family or families of the Service, with a name of the form my-svc.my-namespace.svc.cluster-domain.example. This resolves to the cluster IP of the Service.

Headless Services (without a cluster IP) Services are also assigned DNS A and/or AAAA records, with a name of the form my-svc.my-namespace.svc.cluster-domain.example. Unlike normal Services, this resolves to the set of IPs of all of the Pods selected by the Service. Clients are expected to consume the set or else use standard round-robin selection from the set.

SRV records

SRV Records are created for named ports that are part of normal or headless services. For each named port, the SRV record has the form _port-name._port-protocol.my-svc.my-namespace.svc.cluster-domain.example. For a regular Service, this resolves to the port number and the domain name: my-svc.my-namespace.svc.cluster-domain.example. For a headless Service, this resolves to multiple answers, one for each Pod that is backing the Service, and contains the port number and the domain name of the Pod of the form hostname.my-svc.my-namespace.svc.cluster-domain.example.

Pods

A/AAAA records

Kube-DNS versions, prior to the implementation of the DNS specification, had the following DNS resolution:

pod-ipv4-address.my-namespace.pod.cluster-domain.example.

For example, if a Pod in the default namespace has the IP address 172.17.0.3, and the domain name for your cluster is cluster.local, then the Pod has a DNS name:

172-17-0-3.default.pod.cluster.local.

Any Pods exposed by a Service have the following DNS resolution available:

pod-ipv4-address.service-name.my-namespace.svc.cluster-domain.example.

Pod's hostname and subdomain fields

Currently when a Pod is created, its hostname (as observed from within the Pod) is the Pod's metadata.name value.

The Pod spec has an optional hostname field, which can be used to specify a different hostname. When specified, it takes precedence over the Pod's name to be the hostname of the Pod (again, as observed from within the Pod). For example, given a Pod with spec.hostname set to "my-host", the Pod will have its hostname set to "my-host".

The Pod spec also has an optional subdomain field which can be used to indicate that the pod is part of sub-group of the namespace. For example, a Pod with spec.hostname set to "foo", and spec.subdomain set to "bar", in namespace "my-namespace", will have its hostname set to "foo" and its fully qualified domain name (FQDN) set to "foo.bar.my-namespace.svc.cluster.local" (once more, as observed from within the Pod).

If there exists a headless Service in the same namespace as the Pod, with the same name as the subdomain, the cluster's DNS Server also returns A and/or AAAA records for the Pod's fully qualified hostname.

Example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: busybox-subdomain
spec:
  selector:
    name: busybox
  clusterIP: None
  ports:
  - name: foo # name is not required for single-port Services
    port: 1234
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: busybox1
  labels:
    name: busybox
spec:
  hostname: busybox-1
  subdomain: busybox-subdomain
  containers:
  - image: busybox:1.28
    command:
      - sleep
      - "3600"
    name: busybox
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: busybox2
  labels:
    name: busybox
spec:
  hostname: busybox-2
  subdomain: busybox-subdomain
  containers:
  - image: busybox:1.28
    command:
      - sleep
      - "3600"
    name: busybox

Given the above Service "busybox-subdomain" and the Pods which set spec.subdomain to "busybox-subdomain", the first Pod will see its own FQDN as "busybox-1.busybox-subdomain.my-namespace.svc.cluster-domain.example". DNS serves A and/or AAAA records at that name, pointing to the Pod's IP. Both Pods "busybox1" and "busybox2" will have their own address records.

An EndpointSlice can specify the DNS hostname for any endpoint addresses, along with its IP.

Pod's setHostnameAsFQDN field

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.22 [stable]

When a Pod is configured to have fully qualified domain name (FQDN), its hostname is the short hostname. For example, if you have a Pod with the fully qualified domain name busybox-1.busybox-subdomain.my-namespace.svc.cluster-domain.example, then by default the hostname command inside that Pod returns busybox-1 and the hostname --fqdn command returns the FQDN.

When you set setHostnameAsFQDN: true in the Pod spec, the kubelet writes the Pod's FQDN into the hostname for that Pod's namespace. In this case, both hostname and hostname --fqdn return the Pod's FQDN.

Pod's DNS Policy

DNS policies can be set on a per-Pod basis. Currently Kubernetes supports the following Pod-specific DNS policies. These policies are specified in the dnsPolicy field of a Pod Spec.

  • "Default": The Pod inherits the name resolution configuration from the node that the Pods run on. See related discussion for more details.
  • "ClusterFirst": Any DNS query that does not match the configured cluster domain suffix, such as "www.kubernetes.io", is forwarded to an upstream nameserver by the DNS server. Cluster administrators may have extra stub-domain and upstream DNS servers configured. See related discussion for details on how DNS queries are handled in those cases.
  • "ClusterFirstWithHostNet": For Pods running with hostNetwork, you should explicitly set its DNS policy to "ClusterFirstWithHostNet". Otherwise, Pods running with hostNetwork and "ClusterFirst" will fallback to the behavior of the "Default" policy.
    • Note: This is not supported on Windows. See below for details
  • "None": It allows a Pod to ignore DNS settings from the Kubernetes environment. All DNS settings are supposed to be provided using the dnsConfig field in the Pod Spec. See Pod's DNS config subsection below.

The example below shows a Pod with its DNS policy set to "ClusterFirstWithHostNet" because it has hostNetwork set to true.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: busybox
  namespace: default
spec:
  containers:
  - image: busybox:1.28
    command:
      - sleep
      - "3600"
    imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
    name: busybox
  restartPolicy: Always
  hostNetwork: true
  dnsPolicy: ClusterFirstWithHostNet

Pod's DNS Config

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.14 [stable]

Pod's DNS Config allows users more control on the DNS settings for a Pod.

The dnsConfig field is optional and it can work with any dnsPolicy settings. However, when a Pod's dnsPolicy is set to "None", the dnsConfig field has to be specified.

Below are the properties a user can specify in the dnsConfig field:

  • nameservers: a list of IP addresses that will be used as DNS servers for the Pod. There can be at most 3 IP addresses specified. When the Pod's dnsPolicy is set to "None", the list must contain at least one IP address, otherwise this property is optional. The servers listed will be combined to the base nameservers generated from the specified DNS policy with duplicate addresses removed.
  • searches: a list of DNS search domains for hostname lookup in the Pod. This property is optional. When specified, the provided list will be merged into the base search domain names generated from the chosen DNS policy. Duplicate domain names are removed. Kubernetes allows up to 32 search domains.
  • options: an optional list of objects where each object may have a name property (required) and a value property (optional). The contents in this property will be merged to the options generated from the specified DNS policy. Duplicate entries are removed.

The following is an example Pod with custom DNS settings:

service/networking/custom-dns.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  namespace: default
  name: dns-example
spec:
  containers:
    - name: test
      image: nginx
  dnsPolicy: "None"
  dnsConfig:
    nameservers:
      - 192.0.2.1 # this is an example
    searches:
      - ns1.svc.cluster-domain.example
      - my.dns.search.suffix
    options:
      - name: ndots
        value: "2"
      - name: edns0

When the Pod above is created, the container test gets the following contents in its /etc/resolv.conf file:

nameserver 192.0.2.1
search ns1.svc.cluster-domain.example my.dns.search.suffix
options ndots:2 edns0

For IPv6 setup, search path and name server should be set up like this:

kubectl exec -it dns-example -- cat /etc/resolv.conf

The output is similar to this:

nameserver 2001:db8:30::a
search default.svc.cluster-domain.example svc.cluster-domain.example cluster-domain.example
options ndots:5

DNS search domain list limits

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes 1.28 [stable]

Kubernetes itself does not limit the DNS Config until the length of the search domain list exceeds 32 or the total length of all search domains exceeds 2048. This limit applies to the node's resolver configuration file, the Pod's DNS Config, and the merged DNS Config respectively.

DNS resolution on Windows nodes

  • ClusterFirstWithHostNet is not supported for Pods that run on Windows nodes. Windows treats all names with a . as a FQDN and skips FQDN resolution.
  • On Windows, there are multiple DNS resolvers that can be used. As these come with slightly different behaviors, using the Resolve-DNSName powershell cmdlet for name query resolutions is recommended.
  • On Linux, you have a DNS suffix list, which is used after resolution of a name as fully qualified has failed. On Windows, you can only have 1 DNS suffix, which is the DNS suffix associated with that Pod's namespace (example: mydns.svc.cluster.local). Windows can resolve FQDNs, Services, or network name which can be resolved with this single suffix. For example, a Pod spawned in the default namespace, will have the DNS suffix default.svc.cluster.local. Inside a Windows Pod, you can resolve both kubernetes.default.svc.cluster.local and kubernetes, but not the partially qualified names (kubernetes.default or kubernetes.default.svc).

What's next

For guidance on administering DNS configurations, check Configure DNS Service

5.8 - IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack

Kubernetes lets you configure single-stack IPv4 networking, single-stack IPv6 networking, or dual stack networking with both network families active. This page explains how.
FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.23 [stable]

IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack networking enables the allocation of both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to Pods and Services.

IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack networking is enabled by default for your Kubernetes cluster starting in 1.21, allowing the simultaneous assignment of both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

Supported Features

IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack on your Kubernetes cluster provides the following features:

  • Dual-stack Pod networking (a single IPv4 and IPv6 address assignment per Pod)
  • IPv4 and IPv6 enabled Services
  • Pod off-cluster egress routing (eg. the Internet) via both IPv4 and IPv6 interfaces

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites are needed in order to utilize IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack Kubernetes clusters:

  • Kubernetes 1.20 or later

    For information about using dual-stack services with earlier Kubernetes versions, refer to the documentation for that version of Kubernetes.

  • Provider support for dual-stack networking (Cloud provider or otherwise must be able to provide Kubernetes nodes with routable IPv4/IPv6 network interfaces)

  • A network plugin that supports dual-stack networking.

Configure IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack

To configure IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack, set dual-stack cluster network assignments:

  • kube-apiserver:
    • --service-cluster-ip-range=<IPv4 CIDR>,<IPv6 CIDR>
  • kube-controller-manager:
    • --cluster-cidr=<IPv4 CIDR>,<IPv6 CIDR>
    • --service-cluster-ip-range=<IPv4 CIDR>,<IPv6 CIDR>
    • --node-cidr-mask-size-ipv4|--node-cidr-mask-size-ipv6 defaults to /24 for IPv4 and /64 for IPv6
  • kube-proxy:
    • --cluster-cidr=<IPv4 CIDR>,<IPv6 CIDR>
  • kubelet:
    • --node-ip=<IPv4 IP>,<IPv6 IP>
      • This option is required for bare metal dual-stack nodes (nodes that do not define a cloud provider with the --cloud-provider flag). If you are using a cloud provider and choose to override the node IPs chosen by the cloud provider, set the --node-ip option.
      • (The legacy built-in cloud providers do not support dual-stack --node-ip.)

Services

You can create Services which can use IPv4, IPv6, or both.

The address family of a Service defaults to the address family of the first service cluster IP range (configured via the --service-cluster-ip-range flag to the kube-apiserver).

When you define a Service you can optionally configure it as dual stack. To specify the behavior you want, you set the .spec.ipFamilyPolicy field to one of the following values:

  • SingleStack: Single-stack service. The control plane allocates a cluster IP for the Service, using the first configured service cluster IP range.
  • PreferDualStack: Allocates both IPv4 and IPv6 cluster IPs for the Service when dual-stack is enabled. If dual-stack is not enabled or supported, it falls back to single-stack behavior.
  • RequireDualStack: Allocates Service .spec.clusterIPs from both IPv4 and IPv6 address ranges when dual-stack is enabled. If dual-stack is not enabled or supported, the Service API object creation fails.
    • Selects the .spec.clusterIP from the list of .spec.clusterIPs based on the address family of the first element in the .spec.ipFamilies array.

If you would like to define which IP family to use for single stack or define the order of IP families for dual-stack, you can choose the address families by setting an optional field, .spec.ipFamilies, on the Service.

You can set .spec.ipFamilies to any of the following array values:

  • ["IPv4"]
  • ["IPv6"]
  • ["IPv4","IPv6"] (dual stack)
  • ["IPv6","IPv4"] (dual stack)

The first family you list is used for the legacy .spec.clusterIP field.

Dual-stack Service configuration scenarios

These examples demonstrate the behavior of various dual-stack Service configuration scenarios.

Dual-stack options on new Services

  1. This Service specification does not explicitly define .spec.ipFamilyPolicy. When you create this Service, Kubernetes assigns a cluster IP for the Service from the first configured service-cluster-ip-range and sets the .spec.ipFamilyPolicy to SingleStack. (Services without selectors and headless Services with selectors will behave in this same way.)

    service/networking/dual-stack-default-svc.yaml 
    apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
spec:
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80

  2. This Service specification explicitly defines PreferDualStack in .spec.ipFamilyPolicy. When you create this Service on a dual-stack cluster, Kubernetes assigns both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for the service. The control plane updates the .spec for the Service to record the IP address assignments. The field .spec.clusterIPs is the primary field, and contains both assigned IP addresses; .spec.clusterIP is a secondary field with its value calculated from .spec.clusterIPs.

    • For the .spec.clusterIP field, the control plane records the IP address that is from the same address family as the first service cluster IP range.
    • On a single-stack cluster, the .spec.clusterIPs and .spec.clusterIP fields both only list one address.
    • On a cluster with dual-stack enabled, specifying RequireDualStack in .spec.ipFamilyPolicy behaves the same as PreferDualStack.
    service/networking/dual-stack-preferred-svc.yaml 
    apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
spec:
  ipFamilyPolicy: PreferDualStack
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80

  3. This Service specification explicitly defines IPv6 and IPv4 in .spec.ipFamilies as well as defining PreferDualStack in .spec.ipFamilyPolicy. When Kubernetes assigns an IPv6 and IPv4 address in .spec.clusterIPs, .spec.clusterIP is set to the IPv6 address because that is the first element in the .spec.clusterIPs array, overriding the default.

    service/networking/dual-stack-preferred-ipfamilies-svc.yaml 
    apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
spec:
  ipFamilyPolicy: PreferDualStack
  ipFamilies:
  - IPv6
  - IPv4
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80

Dual-stack defaults on existing Services

These examples demonstrate the default behavior when dual-stack is newly enabled on a cluster where Services already exist. (Upgrading an existing cluster to 1.21 or beyond will enable dual-stack.)

  1. When dual-stack is enabled on a cluster, existing Services (whether IPv4 or IPv6) are configured by the control plane to set .spec.ipFamilyPolicy to SingleStack and set .spec.ipFamilies to the address family of the existing Service. The existing Service cluster IP will be stored in .spec.clusterIPs.

    service/networking/dual-stack-default-svc.yaml 
    apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
spec:
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80

    You can validate this behavior by using kubectl to inspect an existing service.

    kubectl get svc my-service -o yaml

    apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  name: my-service
spec:
  clusterIP: 10.0.197.123
  clusterIPs:
  - 10.0.197.123
  ipFamilies:
  - IPv4
  ipFamilyPolicy: SingleStack
  ports:
  - port: 80
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: 80
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  type: ClusterIP
status:
  loadBalancer: {}

  2. When dual-stack is enabled on a cluster, existing headless Services with selectors are configured by the control plane to set .spec.ipFamilyPolicy to SingleStack and set .spec.ipFamilies to the address family of the first service cluster IP range (configured via the --service-cluster-ip-range flag to the kube-apiserver) even though .spec.clusterIP is set to None.

    service/networking/dual-stack-default-svc.yaml 
    apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
spec:
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80

    You can validate this behavior by using kubectl to inspect an existing headless service with selectors.

    kubectl get svc my-service -o yaml

    apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  name: my-service
spec:
  clusterIP: None
  clusterIPs:
  - None
  ipFamilies:
  - IPv4
  ipFamilyPolicy: SingleStack
  ports:
  - port: 80
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: 80
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp

Switching Services between single-stack and dual-stack

Services can be changed from single-stack to dual-stack and from dual-stack to single-stack.

  1. To change a Service from single-stack to dual-stack, change .spec.ipFamilyPolicy from SingleStack to PreferDualStack or RequireDualStack as desired. When you change this Service from single-stack to dual-stack, Kubernetes assigns the missing address family so that the Service now has IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

    Edit the Service specification updating the .spec.ipFamilyPolicy from SingleStack to PreferDualStack.

    Before:

    spec:
  ipFamilyPolicy: SingleStack

    After:

    spec:
  ipFamilyPolicy: PreferDualStack

  2. To change a Service from dual-stack to single-stack, change .spec.ipFamilyPolicy from PreferDualStack or RequireDualStack to SingleStack. When you change this Service from dual-stack to single-stack, Kubernetes retains only the first element in the .spec.clusterIPs array, and sets .spec.clusterIP to that IP address and sets .spec.ipFamilies to the address family of .spec.clusterIPs.

Headless Services without selector

For Headless Services without selectors and without .spec.ipFamilyPolicy explicitly set, the .spec.ipFamilyPolicy field defaults to RequireDualStack.

Service type LoadBalancer

To provision a dual-stack load balancer for your Service:

  • Set the .spec.type field to LoadBalancer
  • Set .spec.ipFamilyPolicy field to PreferDualStack or RequireDualStack

Egress traffic

If you want to enable egress traffic in order to reach off-cluster destinations (eg. the public Internet) from a Pod that uses non-publicly routable IPv6 addresses, you need to enable the Pod to use a publicly routed IPv6 address via a mechanism such as transparent proxying or IP masquerading. The ip-masq-agent project supports IP masquerading on dual-stack clusters.

Windows support

Kubernetes on Windows does not support single-stack "IPv6-only" networking. However, dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 networking for pods and nodes with single-family services is supported.

You can use IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack networking with l2bridge networks.

You can read more about the different network modes for Windows within the Networking on Windows topic.

What's next

5.9 - Topology Aware Routing

Topology Aware Routing provides a mechanism to help keep network traffic within the zone where it originated. Preferring same-zone traffic between Pods in your cluster can help with reliability, performance (network latency and throughput), or cost.
FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.23 [beta]

Topology Aware Routing adjusts routing behavior to prefer keeping traffic in the zone it originated from. In some cases this can help reduce costs or improve network performance.

Motivation

Kubernetes clusters are increasingly deployed in multi-zone environments. Topology Aware Routing provides a mechanism to help keep traffic within the zone it originated from. When calculating the endpoints for a Service, the EndpointSlice controller considers the topology (region and zone) of each endpoint and populates the hints field to allocate it to a zone. Cluster components such as kube-proxy can then consume those hints, and use them to influence how the traffic is routed (favoring topologically closer endpoints).

Enabling Topology Aware Routing

You can enable Topology Aware Routing for a Service by setting the service.kubernetes.io/topology-mode annotation to Auto. When there are enough endpoints available in each zone, Topology Hints will be populated on EndpointSlices to allocate individual endpoints to specific zones, resulting in traffic being routed closer to where it originated from.

When it works best

This feature works best when:

1. Incoming traffic is evenly distributed

If a large proportion of traffic is originating from a single zone, that traffic could overload the subset of endpoints that have been allocated to that zone. This feature is not recommended when incoming traffic is expected to originate from a single zone.

2. The Service has 3 or more endpoints per zone

In a three zone cluster, this means 9 or more endpoints. If there are fewer than 3 endpoints per zone, there is a high (≈50%) probability that the EndpointSlice controller will not be able to allocate endpoints evenly and instead will fall back to the default cluster-wide routing approach.

How It Works

The "Auto" heuristic attempts to proportionally allocate a number of endpoints to each zone. Note that this heuristic works best for Services that have a significant number of endpoints.

EndpointSlice controller

The EndpointSlice controller is responsible for setting hints on EndpointSlices when this heuristic is enabled. The controller allocates a proportional amount of endpoints to each zone. This proportion is based on the allocatable CPU cores for nodes running in that zone. For example, if one zone had 2 CPU cores and another zone only had 1 CPU core, the controller would allocate twice as many endpoints to the zone with 2 CPU cores.

The following example shows what an EndpointSlice looks like when hints have been populated:

apiVersion: discovery.k8s.io/v1
kind: EndpointSlice
metadata:
  name: example-hints
  labels:
    kubernetes.io/service-name: example-svc
addressType: IPv4
ports:
  - name: http
    protocol: TCP
    port: 80
endpoints:
  - addresses:
      - "10.1.2.3"
    conditions:
      ready: true
    hostname: pod-1
    zone: zone-a
    hints:
      forZones:
        - name: "zone-a"

kube-proxy

The kube-proxy component filters the endpoints it routes to based on the hints set by the EndpointSlice controller. In most cases, this means that the kube-proxy is able to route traffic to endpoints in the same zone. Sometimes the controller allocates endpoints from a different zone to ensure more even distribution of endpoints between zones. This would result in some traffic being routed to other zones.

Safeguards

The Kubernetes control plane and the kube-proxy on each node apply some safeguard rules before using Topology Aware Hints. If these don't check out, the kube-proxy selects endpoints from anywhere in your cluster, regardless of the zone.

  1. Insufficient number of endpoints: If there are less endpoints than zones in a cluster, the controller will not assign any hints.

  2. Impossible to achieve balanced allocation: In some cases, it will be impossible to achieve a balanced allocation of endpoints among zones. For example, if zone-a is twice as large as zone-b, but there are only 2 endpoints, an endpoint allocated to zone-a may receive twice as much traffic as zone-b. The controller does not assign hints if it can't get this "expected overload" value below an acceptable threshold for each zone. Importantly this is not based on real-time feedback. It is still possible for individual endpoints to become overloaded.

  3. One or more Nodes has insufficient information: If any node does not have a topology.kubernetes.io/zone label or is not reporting a value for allocatable CPU, the control plane does not set any topology-aware endpoint hints and so kube-proxy does not filter endpoints by zone.

  4. One or more endpoints does not have a zone hint: When this happens, the kube-proxy assumes that a transition from or to Topology Aware Hints is underway. Filtering endpoints for a Service in this state would be dangerous so the kube-proxy falls back to using all endpoints.

  5. A zone is not represented in hints: If the kube-proxy is unable to find at least one endpoint with a hint targeting the zone it is running in, it falls back to using endpoints from all zones. This is most likely to happen as you add a new zone into your existing cluster.

Constraints

  • Topology Aware Hints are not used when internalTrafficPolicy is set to Local on a Service. It is possible to use both features in the same cluster on different Services, just not on the same Service.

  • This approach will not work well for Services that have a large proportion of traffic originating from a subset of zones. Instead this assumes that incoming traffic will be roughly proportional to the capacity of the Nodes in each zone.

  • The EndpointSlice controller ignores unready nodes as it calculates the proportions of each zone. This could have unintended consequences if a large portion of nodes are unready.

  • The EndpointSlice controller ignores nodes with the node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane or node-role.kubernetes.io/master label set. This could be problematic if workloads are also running on those nodes.

  • The EndpointSlice controller does not take into account tolerations when deploying or calculating the proportions of each zone. If the Pods backing a Service are limited to a subset of Nodes in the cluster, this will not be taken into account.

  • This may not work well with autoscaling. For example, if a lot of traffic is originating from a single zone, only the endpoints allocated to that zone will be handling that traffic. That could result in Horizontal Pod Autoscaler either not picking up on this event, or newly added pods starting in a different zone.

Custom heuristics

Kubernetes is deployed in many different ways, there is no single heuristic for allocating endpoints to zones will work for every use case. A key goal of this feature is to enable custom heuristics to be developed if the built in heuristic does not work for your use case. The first steps to enable custom heuristics were included in the 1.27 release. This is a limited implementation that may not yet cover some relevant and plausible situations.

What's next

5.10 - Networking on Windows

Kubernetes supports running nodes on either Linux or Windows. You can mix both kinds of node within a single cluster. This page provides an overview to networking specific to the Windows operating system.

Container networking on Windows

Networking for Windows containers is exposed through CNI plugins. Windows containers function similarly to virtual machines in regards to networking. Each container has a virtual network adapter (vNIC) which is connected to a Hyper-V virtual switch (vSwitch). The Host Networking Service (HNS) and the Host Compute Service (HCS) work together to create containers and attach container vNICs to networks. HCS is responsible for the management of containers whereas HNS is responsible for the management of networking resources such as:

  • Virtual networks (including creation of vSwitches)
  • Endpoints / vNICs
  • Namespaces
  • Policies including packet encapsulations, load-balancing rules, ACLs, and NAT rules.

The Windows HNS and vSwitch implement namespacing and can create virtual NICs as needed for a pod or container. However, many configurations such as DNS, routes, and metrics are stored in the Windows registry database rather than as files inside /etc, which is how Linux stores those configurations. The Windows registry for the container is separate from that of the host, so concepts like mapping /etc/resolv.conf from the host into a container don't have the same effect they would on Linux. These must be configured using Windows APIs run in the context of that container. Therefore CNI implementations need to call the HNS instead of relying on file mappings to pass network details into the pod or container.

Network modes

Windows supports five different networking drivers/modes: L2bridge, L2tunnel, Overlay (Beta), Transparent, and NAT. In a heterogeneous cluster with Windows and Linux worker nodes, you need to select a networking solution that is compatible on both Windows and Linux. The following table lists the out-of-tree plugins are supported on Windows, with recommendations on when to use each CNI:

Network Driver Description Container Packet Modifications Network Plugins Network Plugin Characteristics
L2bridge Containers are attached to an external vSwitch. Containers are attached to the underlay network, although the physical network doesn't need to learn the container MACs because they are rewritten on ingress/egress. MAC is rewritten to host MAC, IP may be rewritten to host IP using HNS OutboundNAT policy. win-bridge, Azure-CNI, Flannel host-gateway uses win-bridge win-bridge uses L2bridge network mode, connects containers to the underlay of hosts, offering best performance. Requires user-defined routes (UDR) for inter-node connectivity.
L2Tunnel This is a special case of l2bridge, but only used on Azure. All packets are sent to the virtualization host where SDN policy is applied. MAC rewritten, IP visible on the underlay network Azure-CNI Azure-CNI allows integration of containers with Azure vNET, and allows them to leverage the set of capabilities that Azure Virtual Network provides. For example, securely connect to Azure services or use Azure NSGs. See azure-cni for some examples
Overlay Containers are given a vNIC connected to an external vSwitch. Each overlay network gets its own IP subnet, defined by a custom IP prefix.The overlay network driver uses VXLAN encapsulation. Encapsulated with an outer header. win-overlay, Flannel VXLAN (uses win-overlay) win-overlay should be used when virtual container networks are desired to be isolated from underlay of hosts (e.g. for security reasons). Allows for IPs to be re-used for different overlay networks (which have different VNID tags) if you are restricted on IPs in your datacenter. This option requires KB4489899 on Windows Server 2019.
Transparent (special use case for ovn-kubernetes) Requires an external vSwitch. Containers are attached to an external vSwitch which enables intra-pod communication via logical networks (logical switches and routers). Packet is encapsulated either via GENEVE or STT tunneling to reach pods which are not on the same host.
Packets are forwarded or dropped via the tunnel metadata information supplied by the ovn network controller.
NAT is done for north-south communication.		 ovn-kubernetes Deploy via ansible. Distributed ACLs can be applied via Kubernetes policies. IPAM support. Load-balancing can be achieved without kube-proxy. NATing is done without using iptables/netsh.
NAT (not used in Kubernetes) Containers are given a vNIC connected to an internal vSwitch. DNS/DHCP is provided using an internal component called WinNAT MAC and IP is rewritten to host MAC/IP. nat Included here for completeness

As outlined above, the Flannel CNI plugin is also supported on Windows via the VXLAN network backend (Beta support ; delegates to win-overlay) and host-gateway network backend (stable support; delegates to win-bridge).

This plugin supports delegating to one of the reference CNI plugins (win-overlay, win-bridge), to work in conjunction with Flannel daemon on Windows (Flanneld) for automatic node subnet lease assignment and HNS network creation. This plugin reads in its own configuration file (cni.conf), and aggregates it with the environment variables from the FlannelD generated subnet.env file. It then delegates to one of the reference CNI plugins for network plumbing, and sends the correct configuration containing the node-assigned subnet to the IPAM plugin (for example: host-local).

For Node, Pod, and Service objects, the following network flows are supported for TCP/UDP traffic:

  • Pod → Pod (IP)
  • Pod → Pod (Name)
  • Pod → Service (Cluster IP)
  • Pod → Service (PQDN, but only if there are no ".")
  • Pod → Service (FQDN)
  • Pod → external (IP)
  • Pod → external (DNS)
  • Node → Pod
  • Pod → Node

IP address management (IPAM)

The following IPAM options are supported on Windows:

Load balancing and Services

A Kubernetes Service is an abstraction that defines a logical set of Pods and a means to access them over a network. In a cluster that includes Windows nodes, you can use the following types of Service:

  • NodePort
  • ClusterIP
  • LoadBalancer
  • ExternalName

Windows container networking differs in some important ways from Linux networking. The Microsoft documentation for Windows Container Networking provides additional details and background.

On Windows, you can use the following settings to configure Services and load balancing behavior:

Windows Service Settings
Feature Description Minimum Supported Windows OS build How to enable
Session affinity Ensures that connections from a particular client are passed to the same Pod each time. Windows Server 2022 Set service.spec.sessionAffinity to "ClientIP"
Direct Server Return (DSR) Load balancing mode where the IP address fixups and the LBNAT occurs at the container vSwitch port directly; service traffic arrives with the source IP set as the originating pod IP. Windows Server 2019 Set the following flags in kube-proxy: --feature-gates="WinDSR=true" --enable-dsr=true
Preserve-Destination Skips DNAT of service traffic, thereby preserving the virtual IP of the target service in packets reaching the backend Pod. Also disables node-node forwarding. Windows Server, version 1903 Set "preserve-destination": "true" in service annotations and enable DSR in kube-proxy.
IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack networking Native IPv4-to-IPv4 in parallel with IPv6-to-IPv6 communications to, from, and within a cluster Windows Server 2019 See IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack
Client IP preservation Ensures that source IP of incoming ingress traffic gets preserved. Also disables node-node forwarding. Windows Server 2019 Set service.spec.externalTrafficPolicy to "Local" and enable DSR in kube-proxy

Limitations

The following networking functionality is not supported on Windows nodes:

  • Host networking mode
  • Local NodePort access from the node itself (works for other nodes or external clients)
  • More than 64 backend pods (or unique destination addresses) for a single Service
  • IPv6 communication between Windows pods connected to overlay networks
  • Local Traffic Policy in non-DSR mode
  • Outbound communication using the ICMP protocol via the win-overlay, win-bridge, or using the Azure-CNI plugin.
    Specifically, the Windows data plane (VFP) doesn't support ICMP packet transpositions, and this means:
    • ICMP packets directed to destinations within the same network (such as pod to pod communication via ping) work as expected;
    • TCP/UDP packets work as expected;
    • ICMP packets directed to pass through a remote network (e.g. pod to external internet communication via ping) cannot be transposed and thus will not be routed back to their source;
    • Since TCP/UDP packets can still be transposed, you can substitute ping <destination> with curl <destination> when debugging connectivity with the outside world.

Other limitations:

  • Windows reference network plugins win-bridge and win-overlay do not implement CNI spec v0.4.0, due to a missing CHECK implementation.
  • The Flannel VXLAN CNI plugin has the following limitations on Windows:
    • Node-pod connectivity is only possible for local pods with Flannel v0.12.0 (or higher).
    • Flannel is restricted to using VNI 4096 and UDP port 4789. See the official Flannel VXLAN backend docs for more details on these parameters.

5.11 - Service ClusterIP allocation

In Kubernetes, Services are an abstract way to expose an application running on a set of Pods. Services can have a cluster-scoped virtual IP address (using a Service of type: ClusterIP). Clients can connect using that virtual IP address, and Kubernetes then load-balances traffic to that Service across the different backing Pods.

How Service ClusterIPs are allocated?

When Kubernetes needs to assign a virtual IP address for a Service, that assignment happens one of two ways:

dynamically
the cluster's control plane automatically picks a free IP address from within the configured IP range for type: ClusterIP Services.
statically
you specify an IP address of your choice, from within the configured IP range for Services.

Across your whole cluster, every Service ClusterIP must be unique. Trying to create a Service with a specific ClusterIP that has already been allocated will return an error.

Why do you need to reserve Service Cluster IPs?

Sometimes you may want to have Services running in well-known IP addresses, so other components and users in the cluster can use them.

The best example is the DNS Service for the cluster. As a soft convention, some Kubernetes installers assign the 10th IP address from the Service IP range to the DNS service. Assuming you configured your cluster with Service IP range 10.96.0.0/16 and you want your DNS Service IP to be 10.96.0.10, you'd have to create a Service like this:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    k8s-app: kube-dns
    kubernetes.io/cluster-service: "true"
    kubernetes.io/name: CoreDNS
  name: kube-dns
  namespace: kube-system
spec:
  clusterIP: 10.96.0.10
  ports:
  - name: dns
    port: 53
    protocol: UDP
    targetPort: 53
  - name: dns-tcp
    port: 53
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: 53
  selector:
    k8s-app: kube-dns
  type: ClusterIP

But, as it was explained before, the IP address 10.96.0.10 has not been reserved. If other Services are created before or in parallel with dynamic allocation, there is a chance they can allocate this IP. Hence, you will not be able to create the DNS Service because it will fail with a conflict error.

How can you avoid Service ClusterIP conflicts?

The allocation strategy implemented in Kubernetes to allocate ClusterIPs to Services reduces the risk of collision.

The ClusterIP range is divided, based on the formula min(max(16, cidrSize / 16), 256), described as never less than 16 or more than 256 with a graduated step between them.

Dynamic IP assignment uses the upper band by default, once this has been exhausted it will use the lower range. This will allow users to use static allocations on the lower band with a low risk of collision.

Examples

Example 1

This example uses the IP address range: 10.96.0.0/24 (CIDR notation) for the IP addresses of Services.

Range Size: 28 - 2 = 254
Band Offset: min(max(16, 256/16), 256) = min(16, 256) = 16
Static band start: 10.96.0.1
Static band end: 10.96.0.16
Range end: 10.96.0.254

pie showData title 10.96.0.0/24 "Static" : 16 "Dynamic" : 238

Example 2

This example uses the IP address range: 10.96.0.0/20 (CIDR notation) for the IP addresses of Services.

Range Size: 212 - 2 = 4094
Band Offset: min(max(16, 4096/16), 256) = min(256, 256) = 256
Static band start: 10.96.0.1
Static band end: 10.96.1.0
Range end: 10.96.15.254

pie showData title 10.96.0.0/20 "Static" : 256 "Dynamic" : 3838

Example 3

This example uses the IP address range: 10.96.0.0/16 (CIDR notation) for the IP addresses of Services.

Range Size: 216 - 2 = 65534
Band Offset: min(max(16, 65536/16), 256) = min(4096, 256) = 256
Static band start: 10.96.0.1
Static band ends: 10.96.1.0
Range end: 10.96.255.254

pie showData title 10.96.0.0/16 "Static" : 256 "Dynamic" : 65278

What's next

5.12 - Service Internal Traffic Policy

If two Pods in your cluster want to communicate, and both Pods are actually running on the same node, use Service Internal Traffic Policy to keep network traffic within that node. Avoiding a round trip via the cluster network can help with reliability, performance (network latency and throughput), or cost.
FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [stable]

Service Internal Traffic Policy enables internal traffic restrictions to only route internal traffic to endpoints within the node the traffic originated from. The "internal" traffic here refers to traffic originated from Pods in the current cluster. This can help to reduce costs and improve performance.

Using Service Internal Traffic Policy

You can enable the internal-only traffic policy for a Service, by setting its .spec.internalTrafficPolicy to Local. This tells kube-proxy to only use node local endpoints for cluster internal traffic.

The following example shows what a Service looks like when you set .spec.internalTrafficPolicy to Local:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
spec:
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80
      targetPort: 9376
  internalTrafficPolicy: Local

How it works

The kube-proxy filters the endpoints it routes to based on the spec.internalTrafficPolicy setting. When it's set to Local, only node local endpoints are considered. When it's Cluster (the default), or is not set, Kubernetes considers all endpoints.

What's next

6 - Storage

Ways to provide both long-term and temporary storage to Pods in your cluster.

6.1 - Volumes

On-disk files in a container are ephemeral, which presents some problems for non-trivial applications when running in containers. One problem occurs when a container crashes or is stopped. Container state is not saved so all of the files that were created or modified during the lifetime of the container are lost. During a crash, kubelet restarts the container with a clean state. Another problem occurs when multiple containers are running in a Pod and need to share files. It can be challenging to setup and access a shared filesystem across all of the containers. The Kubernetes volume abstraction solves both of these problems. Familiarity with Pods is suggested.

Background

Kubernetes supports many types of volumes. A Pod can use any number of volume types simultaneously. Ephemeral volume types have a lifetime of a pod, but persistent volumes exist beyond the lifetime of a pod. When a pod ceases to exist, Kubernetes destroys ephemeral volumes; however, Kubernetes does not destroy persistent volumes. For any kind of volume in a given pod, data is preserved across container restarts.

At its core, a volume is a directory, possibly with some data in it, which is accessible to the containers in a pod. How that directory comes to be, the medium that backs it, and the contents of it are determined by the particular volume type used.

To use a volume, specify the volumes to provide for the Pod in .spec.volumes and declare where to mount those volumes into containers in .spec.containers[*].volumeMounts. A process in a container sees a filesystem view composed from the initial contents of the container image, plus volumes (if defined) mounted inside the container. The process sees a root filesystem that initially matches the contents of the container image. Any writes to within that filesystem hierarchy, if allowed, affect what that process views when it performs a subsequent filesystem access. Volumes mount at the specified paths within the image. For each container defined within a Pod, you must independently specify where to mount each volume that the container uses.

Volumes cannot mount within other volumes (but see Using subPath for a related mechanism). Also, a volume cannot contain a hard link to anything in a different volume.

Types of volumes

Kubernetes supports several types of volumes.

awsElasticBlockStore (deprecated)

In Kubernetes 1.32, all operations for the in-tree awsElasticBlockStore type are redirected to the ebs.csi.aws.com CSI driver.

The AWSElasticBlockStore in-tree storage driver was deprecated in the Kubernetes v1.19 release and then removed entirely in the v1.27 release.

The Kubernetes project suggests that you use the AWS EBS third party storage driver instead.

azureDisk (deprecated)

In Kubernetes 1.32, all operations for the in-tree azureDisk type are redirected to the disk.csi.azure.com CSI driver.

The AzureDisk in-tree storage driver was deprecated in the Kubernetes v1.19 release and then removed entirely in the v1.27 release.

The Kubernetes project suggests that you use the Azure Disk third party storage driver instead.

azureFile (deprecated)

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.21 [deprecated]

The azureFile volume type mounts a Microsoft Azure File volume (SMB 2.1 and 3.0) into a pod.

For more details, see the azureFile volume plugin.

azureFile CSI migration

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [stable]

The CSIMigration feature for azureFile, when enabled, redirects all plugin operations from the existing in-tree plugin to the file.csi.azure.com Container Storage Interface (CSI) Driver. In order to use this feature, the Azure File CSI Driver must be installed on the cluster and the CSIMigrationAzureFile feature gates must be enabled.

Azure File CSI driver does not support using same volume with different fsgroups. If CSIMigrationAzureFile is enabled, using same volume with different fsgroups won't be supported at all.

azureFile CSI migration complete

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.21 [alpha]

To disable the azureFile storage plugin from being loaded by the controller manager and the kubelet, set the InTreePluginAzureFileUnregister flag to true.

cephfs (removed)

Kubernetes 1.32 does not include a cephfs volume type.

The cephfs in-tree storage driver was deprecated in the Kubernetes v1.28 release and then removed entirely in the v1.31 release.

cinder (deprecated)

In Kubernetes 1.32, all operations for the in-tree cinder type are redirected to the cinder.csi.openstack.org CSI driver.

The OpenStack Cinder in-tree storage driver was deprecated in the Kubernetes v1.11 release and then removed entirely in the v1.26 release.

The Kubernetes project suggests that you use the OpenStack Cinder third party storage driver instead.

configMap

A ConfigMap provides a way to inject configuration data into pods. The data stored in a ConfigMap can be referenced in a volume of type configMap and then consumed by containerized applications running in a pod.

When referencing a ConfigMap, you provide the name of the ConfigMap in the volume. You can customize the path to use for a specific entry in the ConfigMap. The following configuration shows how to mount the log-config ConfigMap onto a Pod called configmap-pod:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: configmap-pod
spec:
  containers:
    - name: test
      image: busybox:1.28
      command: ['sh', '-c', 'echo "The app is running!" && tail -f /dev/null']
      volumeMounts:
        - name: config-vol
          mountPath: /etc/config
  volumes:
    - name: config-vol
      configMap:
        name: log-config
        items:
          - key: log_level
            path: log_level

The log-config ConfigMap is mounted as a volume, and all contents stored in its log_level entry are mounted into the Pod at path /etc/config/log_level. Note that this path is derived from the volume's mountPath and the path keyed with log_level.

downwardAPI

A downwardAPI volume makes downward API data available to applications. Within the volume, you can find the exposed data as read-only files in plain text format.

See Expose Pod Information to Containers Through Files to learn more.

emptyDir

For a Pod that defines an emptyDir volume, the volume is created when the Pod is assigned to a node. As the name says, the emptyDir volume is initially empty. All containers in the Pod can read and write the same files in the emptyDir volume, though that volume can be mounted at the same or different paths in each container. When a Pod is removed from a node for any reason, the data in the emptyDir is deleted permanently.

Some uses for an emptyDir are:

  • scratch space, such as for a disk-based merge sort
  • checkpointing a long computation for recovery from crashes
  • holding files that a content-manager container fetches while a webserver container serves the data

The emptyDir.medium field controls where emptyDir volumes are stored. By default emptyDir volumes are stored on whatever medium that backs the node such as disk, SSD, or network storage, depending on your environment. If you set the emptyDir.medium field to "Memory", Kubernetes mounts a tmpfs (RAM-backed filesystem) for you instead. While tmpfs is very fast be aware that, unlike disks, files you write count against the memory limit of the container that wrote them.

A size limit can be specified for the default medium, which limits the capacity of the emptyDir volume. The storage is allocated from node ephemeral storage. If that is filled up from another source (for example, log files or image overlays), the emptyDir may run out of capacity before this limit. If no size is specified, memory backed volumes are sized to node allocatable memory.

emptyDir configuration example

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-pd
spec:
  containers:
  - image: registry.k8s.io/test-webserver
    name: test-container
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /cache
      name: cache-volume
  volumes:
  - name: cache-volume
    emptyDir:
      sizeLimit: 500Mi

emptyDir memory configuration example

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-pd
spec:
  containers:
  - image: registry.k8s.io/test-webserver
    name: test-container
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /cache
      name: cache-volume
  volumes:
  - name: cache-volume
    emptyDir:
      sizeLimit: 500Mi
      medium: Memory

fc (fibre channel)

An fc volume type allows an existing fibre channel block storage volume to mount in a Pod. You can specify single or multiple target world wide names (WWNs) using the parameter targetWWNs in your Volume configuration. If multiple WWNs are specified, targetWWNs expect that those WWNs are from multi-path connections.

See the fibre channel example for more details.

gcePersistentDisk (deprecated)

In Kubernetes 1.32, all operations for the in-tree gcePersistentDisk type are redirected to the pd.csi.storage.gke.io CSI driver.

The gcePersistentDisk in-tree storage driver was deprecated in the Kubernetes v1.17 release and then removed entirely in the v1.28 release.

The Kubernetes project suggests that you use the Google Compute Engine Persistent Disk CSI third party storage driver instead.

gitRepo (deprecated)

A gitRepo volume is an example of a volume plugin. This plugin mounts an empty directory and clones a git repository into this directory for your Pod to use.

Here is an example of a gitRepo volume:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: server
spec:
  containers:
  - image: nginx
    name: nginx
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /mypath
      name: git-volume
  volumes:
  - name: git-volume
    gitRepo:
      repository: "git@somewhere:me/my-git-repository.git"
      revision: "22f1d8406d464b0c0874075539c1f2e96c253775"

glusterfs (removed)

Kubernetes 1.32 does not include a glusterfs volume type.

The GlusterFS in-tree storage driver was deprecated in the Kubernetes v1.25 release and then removed entirely in the v1.26 release.

hostPath

A hostPath volume mounts a file or directory from the host node's filesystem into your Pod. This is not something that most Pods will need, but it offers a powerful escape hatch for some applications.

Some uses for a hostPath are:

  • running a container that needs access to node-level system components (such as a container that transfers system logs to a central location, accessing those logs using a read-only mount of /var/log)
  • making a configuration file stored on the host system available read-only to a static pod; unlike normal Pods, static Pods cannot access ConfigMaps

hostPath volume types

In addition to the required path property, you can optionally specify a type for a hostPath volume.

The available values for type are:

Value Behavior
‌"" Empty string (default) is for backward compatibility, which means that no checks will be performed before mounting the hostPath volume.
DirectoryOrCreate If nothing exists at the given path, an empty directory will be created there as needed with permission set to 0755, having the same group and ownership with Kubelet.
Directory A directory must exist at the given path
FileOrCreate If nothing exists at the given path, an empty file will be created there as needed with permission set to 0644, having the same group and ownership with Kubelet.
File A file must exist at the given path
Socket A UNIX socket must exist at the given path
CharDevice (Linux nodes only) A character device must exist at the given path
BlockDevice (Linux nodes only) A block device must exist at the given path

Some files or directories created on the underlying hosts might only be accessible by root. You then either need to run your process as root in a privileged container or modify the file permissions on the host to be able to read from (or write to) a hostPath volume.

hostPath configuration example


---
# This manifest mounts /data/foo on the host as /foo inside the
# single container that runs within the hostpath-example-linux Pod.
#
# The mount into the container is read-only.
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: hostpath-example-linux
spec:
  os: { name: linux }
  nodeSelector:
    kubernetes.io/os: linux
  containers:
  - name: example-container
    image: registry.k8s.io/test-webserver
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /foo
      name: example-volume
      readOnly: true
  volumes:
  - name: example-volume
    # mount /data/foo, but only if that directory already exists
    hostPath:
      path: /data/foo # directory location on host
      type: Directory # this field is optional



---
# This manifest mounts C:\Data\foo on the host as C:\foo, inside the
# single container that runs within the hostpath-example-windows Pod.
#
# The mount into the container is read-only.
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: hostpath-example-windows
spec:
  os: { name: windows }
  nodeSelector:
    kubernetes.io/os: windows
  containers:
  - name: example-container
    image: microsoft/windowsservercore:1709
    volumeMounts:
    - name: example-volume
      mountPath: "C:\\foo"
      readOnly: true
  volumes:
    # mount C:\Data\foo from the host, but only if that directory already exists
  - name: example-volume
    hostPath:
      path: "C:\\Data\\foo" # directory location on host
      type: Directory       # this field is optional

hostPath FileOrCreate configuration example

The following manifest defines a Pod that mounts /var/local/aaa inside the single container in the Pod. If the node does not already have a path /var/local/aaa, the kubelet creates it as a directory and then mounts it into the Pod.

If /var/local/aaa already exists but is not a directory, the Pod fails. Additionally, the kubelet attempts to make a file named /var/local/aaa/1.txt inside that directory (as seen from the host); if something already exists at that path and isn't a regular file, the Pod fails.

Here's the example manifest:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-webserver
spec:
  os: { name: linux }
  nodeSelector:
    kubernetes.io/os: linux
  containers:
  - name: test-webserver
    image: registry.k8s.io/test-webserver:latest
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /var/local/aaa
      name: mydir
    - mountPath: /var/local/aaa/1.txt
      name: myfile
  volumes:
  - name: mydir
    hostPath:
      # Ensure the file directory is created.
      path: /var/local/aaa
      type: DirectoryOrCreate
  - name: myfile
    hostPath:
      path: /var/local/aaa/1.txt
      type: FileOrCreate

image

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [alpha] (enabled by default: false)

An image volume source represents an OCI object (a container image or artifact) which is available on the kubelet's host machine.

One example to use the image volume source is:

pods/image-volumes.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: image-volume
spec:
  containers:
  - name: shell
    command: ["sleep", "infinity"]
    image: debian
    volumeMounts:
    - name: volume
      mountPath: /volume
  volumes:
  - name: volume
    image:
      reference: quay.io/crio/artifact:v1
      pullPolicy: IfNotPresent

The volume is resolved at pod startup depending on which pullPolicy value is provided:

Always
the kubelet always attempts to pull the reference. If the pull fails, the kubelet sets the Pod to Failed.
Never
the kubelet never pulls the reference and only uses a local image or artifact. The Pod becomes Failed if any layers of the image aren't already present locally, or if the manifest for that image isn't already cached.
IfNotPresent
the kubelet pulls if the reference isn't already present on disk. The Pod becomes Failed if the reference isn't present and the pull fails.

The volume gets re-resolved if the pod gets deleted and recreated, which means that new remote content will become available on pod recreation. A failure to resolve or pull the image during pod startup will block containers from starting and may add significant latency. Failures will be retried using normal volume backoff and will be reported on the pod reason and message.

The types of objects that may be mounted by this volume are defined by the container runtime implementation on a host machine and at minimum must include all valid types supported by the container image field. The OCI object gets mounted in a single directory (spec.containers[*].volumeMounts.mountPath) by will be mounted read-only. On Linux, the container runtime typically also mounts the volume with file execution blocked (noexec).

Beside that:

  • Sub path mounts for containers are not supported (spec.containers[*].volumeMounts.subpath).
  • The field spec.securityContext.fsGroupChangePolicy has no effect on this volume type.
  • The AlwaysPullImages Admission Controller does also work for this volume source like for container images.

The following fields are available for the image type:

reference
Artifact reference to be used. For example, you could specify registry.k8s.io/conformance:v1.32.0 to load the files from the Kubernetes conformance test image. Behaves in the same way as pod.spec.containers[*].image. Pull secrets will be assembled in the same way as for the container image by looking up node credentials, service account image pull secrets, and pod spec image pull secrets. This field is optional to allow higher level config management to default or override container images in workload controllers like Deployments and StatefulSets. More info about container images
pullPolicy
Policy for pulling OCI objects. Possible values are: Always, Never or IfNotPresent. Defaults to Always if :latest tag is specified, or IfNotPresent otherwise.

See the Use an Image Volume With a Pod example for more details on how to use the volume source.

iscsi

An iscsi volume allows an existing iSCSI (SCSI over IP) volume to be mounted into your Pod. Unlike emptyDir, which is erased when a Pod is removed, the contents of an iscsi volume are preserved and the volume is merely unmounted. This means that an iscsi volume can be pre-populated with data, and that data can be shared between pods.

A feature of iSCSI is that it can be mounted as read-only by multiple consumers simultaneously. This means that you can pre-populate a volume with your dataset and then serve it in parallel from as many Pods as you need. Unfortunately, iSCSI volumes can only be mounted by a single consumer in read-write mode. Simultaneous writers are not allowed.

See the iSCSI example for more details.

local

A local volume represents a mounted local storage device such as a disk, partition or directory.

Local volumes can only be used as a statically created PersistentVolume. Dynamic provisioning is not supported.

Compared to hostPath volumes, local volumes are used in a durable and portable manner without manually scheduling pods to nodes. The system is aware of the volume's node constraints by looking at the node affinity on the PersistentVolume.

However, local volumes are subject to the availability of the underlying node and are not suitable for all applications. If a node becomes unhealthy, then the local volume becomes inaccessible by the pod. The pod using this volume is unable to run. Applications using local volumes must be able to tolerate this reduced availability, as well as potential data loss, depending on the durability characteristics of the underlying disk.

The following example shows a PersistentVolume using a local volume and nodeAffinity:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: example-pv
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 100Gi
  volumeMode: Filesystem
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Delete
  storageClassName: local-storage
  local:
    path: /mnt/disks/ssd1
  nodeAffinity:
    required:
      nodeSelectorTerms:
      - matchExpressions:
        - key: kubernetes.io/hostname
          operator: In
          values:
          - example-node

You must set a PersistentVolume nodeAffinity when using local volumes. The Kubernetes scheduler uses the PersistentVolume nodeAffinity to schedule these Pods to the correct node.

PersistentVolume volumeMode can be set to "Block" (instead of the default value "Filesystem") to expose the local volume as a raw block device.

When using local volumes, it is recommended to create a StorageClass with volumeBindingMode set to WaitForFirstConsumer. For more details, see the local StorageClass example. Delaying volume binding ensures that the PersistentVolumeClaim binding decision will also be evaluated with any other node constraints the Pod may have, such as node resource requirements, node selectors, Pod affinity, and Pod anti-affinity.

An external static provisioner can be run separately for improved management of the local volume lifecycle. Note that this provisioner does not support dynamic provisioning yet. For an example on how to run an external local provisioner, see the local volume provisioner user guide.

nfs

An nfs volume allows an existing NFS (Network File System) share to be mounted into a Pod. Unlike emptyDir, which is erased when a Pod is removed, the contents of an nfs volume are preserved and the volume is merely unmounted. This means that an NFS volume can be pre-populated with data, and that data can be shared between pods. NFS can be mounted by multiple writers simultaneously.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-pd
spec:
  containers:
  - image: registry.k8s.io/test-webserver
    name: test-container
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /my-nfs-data
      name: test-volume
  volumes:
  - name: test-volume
    nfs:
      server: my-nfs-server.example.com
      path: /my-nfs-volume
      readOnly: true

See the NFS example for an example of mounting NFS volumes with PersistentVolumes.

persistentVolumeClaim

A persistentVolumeClaim volume is used to mount a PersistentVolume into a Pod. PersistentVolumeClaims are a way for users to "claim" durable storage (such as an iSCSI volume) without knowing the details of the particular cloud environment.

See the information about PersistentVolumes for more details.

portworxVolume (deprecated)

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [deprecated]

A portworxVolume is an elastic block storage layer that runs hyperconverged with Kubernetes. Portworx fingerprints storage in a server, tiers based on capabilities, and aggregates capacity across multiple servers. Portworx runs in-guest in virtual machines or on bare metal Linux nodes.

A portworxVolume can be dynamically created through Kubernetes or it can also be pre-provisioned and referenced inside a Pod. Here is an example Pod referencing a pre-provisioned Portworx volume:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-portworx-volume-pod
spec:
  containers:
  - image: registry.k8s.io/test-webserver
    name: test-container
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /mnt
      name: pxvol
  volumes:
  - name: pxvol
    # This Portworx volume must already exist.
    portworxVolume:
      volumeID: "pxvol"
      fsType: "<fs-type>"

For more details, see the Portworx volume examples.

Portworx CSI migration

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [beta]

By default, Kubernetes 1.32 attempts to migrate legacy Portworx volumes to use CSI. (CSI migration for Portworx has been available since Kubernetes v1.23, but was only turned on by default since the v1.31 release). If you want to disable automatic migration, you can set the CSIMigrationPortworx feature gate to false; you need to make that change for the kube-controller-manager and on every relevant kubelet.

It redirects all plugin operations from the existing in-tree plugin to the pxd.portworx.com Container Storage Interface (CSI) Driver. Portworx CSI Driver must be installed on the cluster.

projected

A projected volume maps several existing volume sources into the same directory. For more details, see projected volumes.

rbd (removed)

Kubernetes 1.32 does not include a rbd volume type.

The Rados Block Device (RBD) in-tree storage driver and its csi migration support were deprecated in the Kubernetes v1.28 release and then removed entirely in the v1.31 release.

secret

A secret volume is used to pass sensitive information, such as passwords, to Pods. You can store secrets in the Kubernetes API and mount them as files for use by pods without coupling to Kubernetes directly. secret volumes are backed by tmpfs (a RAM-backed filesystem) so they are never written to non-volatile storage.

For more details, see Configuring Secrets.

vsphereVolume (deprecated)

A vsphereVolume is used to mount a vSphere VMDK volume into your Pod. The contents of a volume are preserved when it is unmounted. It supports both VMFS and VSAN datastore.

For more information, see the vSphere volume examples.

vSphere CSI migration

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [stable]

In Kubernetes 1.32, all operations for the in-tree vsphereVolume type are redirected to the csi.vsphere.vmware.com CSI driver.

vSphere CSI driver must be installed on the cluster. You can find additional advice on how to migrate in-tree vsphereVolume in VMware's documentation page Migrating In-Tree vSphere Volumes to vSphere Container Storage Plug-in. If vSphere CSI Driver is not installed volume operations can not be performed on the PV created with the in-tree vsphereVolume type.

You must run vSphere 7.0u2 or later in order to migrate to the vSphere CSI driver.

If you are running a version of Kubernetes other than v1.32, consult the documentation for that version of Kubernetes.

vSphere CSI migration complete

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.19 [beta]

To turn off the vsphereVolume plugin from being loaded by the controller manager and the kubelet, you need to set InTreePluginvSphereUnregister feature flag to true. You must install a csi.vsphere.vmware.com CSI driver on all worker nodes.

Using subPath

Sometimes, it is useful to share one volume for multiple uses in a single pod. The volumeMounts[*].subPath property specifies a sub-path inside the referenced volume instead of its root.

The following example shows how to configure a Pod with a LAMP stack (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) using a single, shared volume. This sample subPath configuration is not recommended for production use.

The PHP application's code and assets map to the volume's html folder and the MySQL database is stored in the volume's mysql folder. For example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: my-lamp-site
spec:
    containers:
    - name: mysql
      image: mysql
      env:
      - name: MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD
        value: "rootpasswd"
      volumeMounts:
      - mountPath: /var/lib/mysql
        name: site-data
        subPath: mysql
    - name: php
      image: php:7.0-apache
      volumeMounts:
      - mountPath: /var/www/html
        name: site-data
        subPath: html
    volumes:
    - name: site-data
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: my-lamp-site-data

Using subPath with expanded environment variables

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.17 [stable]

Use the subPathExpr field to construct subPath directory names from downward API environment variables. The subPath and subPathExpr properties are mutually exclusive.

In this example, a Pod uses subPathExpr to create a directory pod1 within the hostPath volume /var/log/pods. The hostPath volume takes the Pod name from the downwardAPI. The host directory /var/log/pods/pod1 is mounted at /logs in the container.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pod1
spec:
  containers:
  - name: container1
    env:
    - name: POD_NAME
      valueFrom:
        fieldRef:
          apiVersion: v1
          fieldPath: metadata.name
    image: busybox:1.28
    command: [ "sh", "-c", "while [ true ]; do echo 'Hello'; sleep 10; done | tee -a /logs/hello.txt" ]
    volumeMounts:
    - name: workdir1
      mountPath: /logs
      # The variable expansion uses round brackets (not curly brackets).
      subPathExpr: $(POD_NAME)
  restartPolicy: Never
  volumes:
  - name: workdir1
    hostPath:
      path: /var/log/pods

Resources

The storage media (such as Disk or SSD) of an emptyDir volume is determined by the medium of the filesystem holding the kubelet root dir (typically /var/lib/kubelet). There is no limit on how much space an emptyDir or hostPath volume can consume, and no isolation between containers or between pods.

To learn about requesting space using a resource specification, see how to manage resources.

Out-of-tree volume plugins

The out-of-tree volume plugins include Container Storage Interface (CSI), and also FlexVolume (which is deprecated). These plugins enable storage vendors to create custom storage plugins without adding their plugin source code to the Kubernetes repository.

Previously, all volume plugins were "in-tree". The "in-tree" plugins were built, linked, compiled, and shipped with the core Kubernetes binaries. This meant that adding a new storage system to Kubernetes (a volume plugin) required checking code into the core Kubernetes code repository.

Both CSI and FlexVolume allow volume plugins to be developed independent of the Kubernetes code base, and deployed (installed) on Kubernetes clusters as extensions.

For storage vendors looking to create an out-of-tree volume plugin, please refer to the volume plugin FAQ.

csi

Container Storage Interface (CSI) defines a standard interface for container orchestration systems (like Kubernetes) to expose arbitrary storage systems to their container workloads.

Please read the CSI design proposal for more information.

Once a CSI compatible volume driver is deployed on a Kubernetes cluster, users may use the csi volume type to attach or mount the volumes exposed by the CSI driver.

A csi volume can be used in a Pod in three different ways:

The following fields are available to storage administrators to configure a CSI persistent volume:

  • driver: A string value that specifies the name of the volume driver to use. This value must correspond to the value returned in the GetPluginInfoResponse by the CSI driver as defined in the CSI spec. It is used by Kubernetes to identify which CSI driver to call out to, and by CSI driver components to identify which PV objects belong to the CSI driver.
  • volumeHandle: A string value that uniquely identifies the volume. This value must correspond to the value returned in the volume.id field of the CreateVolumeResponse by the CSI driver as defined in the CSI spec. The value is passed as volume_id on all calls to the CSI volume driver when referencing the volume.
  • readOnly: An optional boolean value indicating whether the volume is to be "ControllerPublished" (attached) as read only. Default is false. This value is passed to the CSI driver via the readonly field in the ControllerPublishVolumeRequest.
  • fsType: If the PV's VolumeMode is Filesystem then this field may be used to specify the filesystem that should be used to mount the volume. If the volume has not been formatted and formatting is supported, this value will be used to format the volume. This value is passed to the CSI driver via the VolumeCapability field of ControllerPublishVolumeRequest, NodeStageVolumeRequest, and NodePublishVolumeRequest.
  • volumeAttributes: A map of string to string that specifies static properties of a volume. This map must correspond to the map returned in the volume.attributes field of the CreateVolumeResponse by the CSI driver as defined in the CSI spec. The map is passed to the CSI driver via the volume_context field in the ControllerPublishVolumeRequest, NodeStageVolumeRequest, and NodePublishVolumeRequest.
  • controllerPublishSecretRef: A reference to the secret object containing sensitive information to pass to the CSI driver to complete the CSI ControllerPublishVolume and ControllerUnpublishVolume calls. This field is optional, and may be empty if no secret is required. If the Secret contains more than one secret, all secrets are passed.
  • nodeExpandSecretRef: A reference to the secret containing sensitive information to pass to the CSI driver to complete the CSI NodeExpandVolume call. This field is optional, and may be empty if no secret is required. If the object contains more than one secret, all secrets are passed. When you have configured secret data for node-initiated volume expansion, the kubelet passes that data via the NodeExpandVolume() call to the CSI driver. All supported versions of Kubernetes offer the nodeExpandSecretRef field, and have it available by default. Kubernetes releases prior to v1.25 did not include this support.
  • Enable the feature gate named CSINodeExpandSecret for each kube-apiserver and for the kubelet on every node. Since Kubernetes version 1.27 this feature has been enabled by default and no explicit enablement of the feature gate is required. You must also be using a CSI driver that supports or requires secret data during node-initiated storage resize operations.
  • nodePublishSecretRef: A reference to the secret object containing sensitive information to pass to the CSI driver to complete the CSI NodePublishVolume call. This field is optional, and may be empty if no secret is required. If the secret object contains more than one secret, all secrets are passed.
  • nodeStageSecretRef: A reference to the secret object containing sensitive information to pass to the CSI driver to complete the CSI NodeStageVolume call. This field is optional, and may be empty if no secret is required. If the Secret contains more than one secret, all secrets are passed.

CSI raw block volume support

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.18 [stable]

Vendors with external CSI drivers can implement raw block volume support in Kubernetes workloads.

You can set up your PersistentVolume/PersistentVolumeClaim with raw block volume support as usual, without any CSI specific changes.

CSI ephemeral volumes

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable]

You can directly configure CSI volumes within the Pod specification. Volumes specified in this way are ephemeral and do not persist across pod restarts. See Ephemeral Volumes for more information.

For more information on how to develop a CSI driver, refer to the kubernetes-csi documentation

Windows CSI proxy

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.22 [stable]

CSI node plugins need to perform various privileged operations like scanning of disk devices and mounting of file systems. These operations differ for each host operating system. For Linux worker nodes, containerized CSI node plugins are typically deployed as privileged containers. For Windows worker nodes, privileged operations for containerized CSI node plugins is supported using csi-proxy, a community-managed, stand-alone binary that needs to be pre-installed on each Windows node.

For more details, refer to the deployment guide of the CSI plugin you wish to deploy.

Migrating to CSI drivers from in-tree plugins

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable]

The CSIMigration feature directs operations against existing in-tree plugins to corresponding CSI plugins (which are expected to be installed and configured). As a result, operators do not have to make any configuration changes to existing Storage Classes, PersistentVolumes or PersistentVolumeClaims (referring to in-tree plugins) when transitioning to a CSI driver that supersedes an in-tree plugin.

The operations and features that are supported include: provisioning/delete, attach/detach, mount/unmount and resizing of volumes.

In-tree plugins that support CSIMigration and have a corresponding CSI driver implemented are listed in Types of Volumes.

The following in-tree plugins support persistent storage on Windows nodes:

flexVolume (deprecated)

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.23 [deprecated]

FlexVolume is an out-of-tree plugin interface that uses an exec-based model to interface with storage drivers. The FlexVolume driver binaries must be installed in a pre-defined volume plugin path on each node and in some cases the control plane nodes as well.

Pods interact with FlexVolume drivers through the flexVolume in-tree volume plugin. For more details, see the FlexVolume README document.

The following FlexVolume plugins, deployed as PowerShell scripts on the host, support Windows nodes:

Mount propagation

Mount propagation allows for sharing volumes mounted by a container to other containers in the same pod, or even to other pods on the same node.

Mount propagation of a volume is controlled by the mountPropagation field in containers[*].volumeMounts. Its values are:

  • None - This volume mount will not receive any subsequent mounts that are mounted to this volume or any of its subdirectories by the host. In similar fashion, no mounts created by the container will be visible on the host. This is the default mode.

    This mode is equal to rprivate mount propagation as described in mount(8)

    However, the CRI runtime may choose rslave mount propagation (i.e., HostToContainer) instead, when rprivate propagation is not applicable. cri-dockerd (Docker) is known to choose rslave mount propagation when the mount source contains the Docker daemon's root directory (/var/lib/docker).

  • HostToContainer - This volume mount will receive all subsequent mounts that are mounted to this volume or any of its subdirectories.

    In other words, if the host mounts anything inside the volume mount, the container will see it mounted there.

    Similarly, if any Pod with Bidirectional mount propagation to the same volume mounts anything there, the container with HostToContainer mount propagation will see it.

    This mode is equal to rslave mount propagation as described in the mount(8)

  • Bidirectional - This volume mount behaves the same the HostToContainer mount. In addition, all volume mounts created by the container will be propagated back to the host and to all containers of all pods that use the same volume.

    A typical use case for this mode is a Pod with a FlexVolume or CSI driver or a Pod that needs to mount something on the host using a hostPath volume.

    This mode is equal to rshared mount propagation as described in the mount(8)

Read-only mounts

A mount can be made read-only by setting the .spec.containers[].volumeMounts[].readOnly field to true. This does not make the volume itself read-only, but that specific container will not be able to write to it. Other containers in the Pod may mount the same volume as read-write.

On Linux, read-only mounts are not recursively read-only by default. For example, consider a Pod which mounts the hosts /mnt as a hostPath volume. If there is another filesystem mounted read-write on /mnt/<SUBMOUNT> (such as tmpfs, NFS, or USB storage), the volume mounted into the container(s) will also have a writeable /mnt/<SUBMOUNT>, even if the mount itself was specified as read-only.

Recursive read-only mounts

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [beta] (enabled by default: true)

Recursive read-only mounts can be enabled by setting the RecursiveReadOnlyMounts feature gate for kubelet and kube-apiserver, and setting the .spec.containers[].volumeMounts[].recursiveReadOnly field for a pod.

The allowed values are:

  • Disabled (default): no effect.

  • Enabled: makes the mount recursively read-only. Needs all the following requirements to be satisfied:

    • readOnly is set to true
    • mountPropagation is unset, or, set to None
    • The host is running with Linux kernel v5.12 or later
    • The CRI-level container runtime supports recursive read-only mounts
    • The OCI-level container runtime supports recursive read-only mounts. It will fail if any of these is not true.

  • IfPossible: attempts to apply Enabled, and falls back to Disabled if the feature is not supported by the kernel or the runtime class.

Example:

storage/rro.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: rro
spec:
  volumes:
    - name: mnt
      hostPath:
        # tmpfs is mounted on /mnt/tmpfs
        path: /mnt
  containers:
    - name: busybox
      image: busybox
      args: ["sleep", "infinity"]
      volumeMounts:
        # /mnt-rro/tmpfs is not writable
        - name: mnt
          mountPath: /mnt-rro
          readOnly: true
          mountPropagation: None
          recursiveReadOnly: Enabled
        # /mnt-ro/tmpfs is writable
        - name: mnt
          mountPath: /mnt-ro
          readOnly: true
        # /mnt-rw/tmpfs is writable
        - name: mnt
          mountPath: /mnt-rw

When this property is recognized by kubelet and kube-apiserver, the .status.containerStatuses[].volumeMounts[].recursiveReadOnly field is set to either Enabled or Disabled.

Implementations

The following container runtimes are known to support recursive read-only mounts.

CRI-level:

OCI-level:

What's next

Follow an example of deploying WordPress and MySQL with Persistent Volumes.

6.2 - Persistent Volumes

This document describes persistent volumes in Kubernetes. Familiarity with volumes, StorageClasses and VolumeAttributesClasses is suggested.

Introduction

Managing storage is a distinct problem from managing compute instances. The PersistentVolume subsystem provides an API for users and administrators that abstracts details of how storage is provided from how it is consumed. To do this, we introduce two new API resources: PersistentVolume and PersistentVolumeClaim.

A PersistentVolume (PV) is a piece of storage in the cluster that has been provisioned by an administrator or dynamically provisioned using Storage Classes. It is a resource in the cluster just like a node is a cluster resource. PVs are volume plugins like Volumes, but have a lifecycle independent of any individual Pod that uses the PV. This API object captures the details of the implementation of the storage, be that NFS, iSCSI, or a cloud-provider-specific storage system.

A PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) is a request for storage by a user. It is similar to a Pod. Pods consume node resources and PVCs consume PV resources. Pods can request specific levels of resources (CPU and Memory). Claims can request specific size and access modes (e.g., they can be mounted ReadWriteOnce, ReadOnlyMany, ReadWriteMany, or ReadWriteOncePod, see AccessModes).

While PersistentVolumeClaims allow a user to consume abstract storage resources, it is common that users need PersistentVolumes with varying properties, such as performance, for different problems. Cluster administrators need to be able to offer a variety of PersistentVolumes that differ in more ways than size and access modes, without exposing users to the details of how those volumes are implemented. For these needs, there is the StorageClass resource.

See the detailed walkthrough with working examples.

Lifecycle of a volume and claim

PVs are resources in the cluster. PVCs are requests for those resources and also act as claim checks to the resource. The interaction between PVs and PVCs follows this lifecycle:

Provisioning

There are two ways PVs may be provisioned: statically or dynamically.

Static

A cluster administrator creates a number of PVs. They carry the details of the real storage, which is available for use by cluster users. They exist in the Kubernetes API and are available for consumption.

Dynamic

When none of the static PVs the administrator created match a user's PersistentVolumeClaim, the cluster may try to dynamically provision a volume specially for the PVC. This provisioning is based on StorageClasses: the PVC must request a storage class and the administrator must have created and configured that class for dynamic provisioning to occur. Claims that request the class "" effectively disable dynamic provisioning for themselves.

To enable dynamic storage provisioning based on storage class, the cluster administrator needs to enable the DefaultStorageClass admission controller on the API server. This can be done, for example, by ensuring that DefaultStorageClass is among the comma-delimited, ordered list of values for the --enable-admission-plugins flag of the API server component. For more information on API server command-line flags, check kube-apiserver documentation.

Binding

A user creates, or in the case of dynamic provisioning, has already created, a PersistentVolumeClaim with a specific amount of storage requested and with certain access modes. A control loop in the control plane watches for new PVCs, finds a matching PV (if possible), and binds them together. If a PV was dynamically provisioned for a new PVC, the loop will always bind that PV to the PVC. Otherwise, the user will always get at least what they asked for, but the volume may be in excess of what was requested. Once bound, PersistentVolumeClaim binds are exclusive, regardless of how they were bound. A PVC to PV binding is a one-to-one mapping, using a ClaimRef which is a bi-directional binding between the PersistentVolume and the PersistentVolumeClaim.

Claims will remain unbound indefinitely if a matching volume does not exist. Claims will be bound as matching volumes become available. For example, a cluster provisioned with many 50Gi PVs would not match a PVC requesting 100Gi. The PVC can be bound when a 100Gi PV is added to the cluster.

Using

Pods use claims as volumes. The cluster inspects the claim to find the bound volume and mounts that volume for a Pod. For volumes that support multiple access modes, the user specifies which mode is desired when using their claim as a volume in a Pod.

Once a user has a claim and that claim is bound, the bound PV belongs to the user for as long as they need it. Users schedule Pods and access their claimed PVs by including a persistentVolumeClaim section in a Pod's volumes block. See Claims As Volumes for more details on this.

Storage Object in Use Protection

The purpose of the Storage Object in Use Protection feature is to ensure that PersistentVolumeClaims (PVCs) in active use by a Pod and PersistentVolume (PVs) that are bound to PVCs are not removed from the system, as this may result in data loss.

If a user deletes a PVC in active use by a Pod, the PVC is not removed immediately. PVC removal is postponed until the PVC is no longer actively used by any Pods. Also, if an admin deletes a PV that is bound to a PVC, the PV is not removed immediately. PV removal is postponed until the PV is no longer bound to a PVC.

You can see that a PVC is protected when the PVC's status is Terminating and the Finalizers list includes kubernetes.io/pvc-protection:

kubectl describe pvc hostpath
Name:          hostpath
Namespace:     default
StorageClass:  example-hostpath
Status:        Terminating
Volume:
Labels:        <none>
Annotations:   volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-class=example-hostpath
               volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-provisioner=example.com/hostpath
Finalizers:    [kubernetes.io/pvc-protection]
...

You can see that a PV is protected when the PV's status is Terminating and the Finalizers list includes kubernetes.io/pv-protection too:

kubectl describe pv task-pv-volume
Name:            task-pv-volume
Labels:          type=local
Annotations:     <none>
Finalizers:      [kubernetes.io/pv-protection]
StorageClass:    standard
Status:          Terminating
Claim:
Reclaim Policy:  Delete
Access Modes:    RWO
Capacity:        1Gi
Message:
Source:
    Type:          HostPath (bare host directory volume)
    Path:          /tmp/data
    HostPathType:
Events:            <none>

Reclaiming

When a user is done with their volume, they can delete the PVC objects from the API that allows reclamation of the resource. The reclaim policy for a PersistentVolume tells the cluster what to do with the volume after it has been released of its claim. Currently, volumes can either be Retained, Recycled, or Deleted.

Retain

The Retain reclaim policy allows for manual reclamation of the resource. When the PersistentVolumeClaim is deleted, the PersistentVolume still exists and the volume is considered "released". But it is not yet available for another claim because the previous claimant's data remains on the volume. An administrator can manually reclaim the volume with the following steps.

  1. Delete the PersistentVolume. The associated storage asset in external infrastructure still exists after the PV is deleted.
  2. Manually clean up the data on the associated storage asset accordingly.
  3. Manually delete the associated storage asset.

If you want to reuse the same storage asset, create a new PersistentVolume with the same storage asset definition.

Delete

For volume plugins that support the Delete reclaim policy, deletion removes both the PersistentVolume object from Kubernetes, as well as the associated storage asset in the external infrastructure. Volumes that were dynamically provisioned inherit the reclaim policy of their StorageClass, which defaults to Delete. The administrator should configure the StorageClass according to users' expectations; otherwise, the PV must be edited or patched after it is created. See Change the Reclaim Policy of a PersistentVolume.

Recycle

If supported by the underlying volume plugin, the Recycle reclaim policy performs a basic scrub (rm -rf /thevolume/*) on the volume and makes it available again for a new claim.

However, an administrator can configure a custom recycler Pod template using the Kubernetes controller manager command line arguments as described in the reference. The custom recycler Pod template must contain a volumes specification, as shown in the example below:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pv-recycler
  namespace: default
spec:
  restartPolicy: Never
  volumes:
  - name: vol
    hostPath:
      path: /any/path/it/will/be/replaced
  containers:
  - name: pv-recycler
    image: "registry.k8s.io/busybox"
    command: ["/bin/sh", "-c", "test -e /scrub && rm -rf /scrub/..?* /scrub/.[!.]* /scrub/*  && test -z \"$(ls -A /scrub)\" || exit 1"]
    volumeMounts:
    - name: vol
      mountPath: /scrub

However, the particular path specified in the custom recycler Pod template in the volumes part is replaced with the particular path of the volume that is being recycled.

PersistentVolume deletion protection finalizer

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [beta] (enabled by default: true)

Finalizers can be added on a PersistentVolume to ensure that PersistentVolumes having Delete reclaim policy are deleted only after the backing storage are deleted.

The finalizer external-provisioner.volume.kubernetes.io/finalizer(introduced in v1.31) is added to both dynamically provisioned and statically provisioned CSI volumes.

The finalizer kubernetes.io/pv-controller(introduced in v1.31) is added to dynamically provisioned in-tree plugin volumes and skipped for statically provisioned in-tree plugin volumes.

The following is an example of dynamically provisioned in-tree plugin volume:

kubectl describe pv pvc-74a498d6-3929-47e8-8c02-078c1ece4d78
Name:            pvc-74a498d6-3929-47e8-8c02-078c1ece4d78
Labels:          <none>
Annotations:     kubernetes.io/createdby: vsphere-volume-dynamic-provisioner
                 pv.kubernetes.io/bound-by-controller: yes
                 pv.kubernetes.io/provisioned-by: kubernetes.io/vsphere-volume
Finalizers:      [kubernetes.io/pv-protection kubernetes.io/pv-controller]
StorageClass:    vcp-sc
Status:          Bound
Claim:           default/vcp-pvc-1
Reclaim Policy:  Delete
Access Modes:    RWO
VolumeMode:      Filesystem
Capacity:        1Gi
Node Affinity:   <none>
Message:
Source:
    Type:               vSphereVolume (a Persistent Disk resource in vSphere)
    VolumePath:         [vsanDatastore] d49c4a62-166f-ce12-c464-020077ba5d46/kubernetes-dynamic-pvc-74a498d6-3929-47e8-8c02-078c1ece4d78.vmdk
    FSType:             ext4
    StoragePolicyName:  vSAN Default Storage Policy
Events:                 <none>

The finalizer external-provisioner.volume.kubernetes.io/finalizer is added for CSI volumes. The following is an example:

Name:            pvc-2f0bab97-85a8-4552-8044-eb8be45cf48d
Labels:          <none>
Annotations:     pv.kubernetes.io/provisioned-by: csi.vsphere.vmware.com
Finalizers:      [kubernetes.io/pv-protection external-provisioner.volume.kubernetes.io/finalizer]
StorageClass:    fast
Status:          Bound
Claim:           demo-app/nginx-logs
Reclaim Policy:  Delete
Access Modes:    RWO
VolumeMode:      Filesystem
Capacity:        200Mi
Node Affinity:   <none>
Message:
Source:
    Type:              CSI (a Container Storage Interface (CSI) volume source)
    Driver:            csi.vsphere.vmware.com
    FSType:            ext4
    VolumeHandle:      44830fa8-79b4-406b-8b58-621ba25353fd
    ReadOnly:          false
    VolumeAttributes:      storage.kubernetes.io/csiProvisionerIdentity=1648442357185-8081-csi.vsphere.vmware.com
                           type=vSphere CNS Block Volume
Events:                <none>

When the CSIMigration{provider} feature flag is enabled for a specific in-tree volume plugin, the kubernetes.io/pv-controller finalizer is replaced by the external-provisioner.volume.kubernetes.io/finalizer finalizer.

The finalizers ensure that the PV object is removed only after the volume is deleted from the storage backend provided the reclaim policy of the PV is Delete. This also ensures that the volume is deleted from storage backend irrespective of the order of deletion of PV and PVC.

Reserving a PersistentVolume

The control plane can bind PersistentVolumeClaims to matching PersistentVolumes in the cluster. However, if you want a PVC to bind to a specific PV, you need to pre-bind them.

By specifying a PersistentVolume in a PersistentVolumeClaim, you declare a binding between that specific PV and PVC. If the PersistentVolume exists and has not reserved PersistentVolumeClaims through its claimRef field, then the PersistentVolume and PersistentVolumeClaim will be bound.

The binding happens regardless of some volume matching criteria, including node affinity. The control plane still checks that storage class, access modes, and requested storage size are valid.

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: foo-pvc
  namespace: foo
spec:
  storageClassName: "" # Empty string must be explicitly set otherwise default StorageClass will be set
  volumeName: foo-pv
  ...

This method does not guarantee any binding privileges to the PersistentVolume. If other PersistentVolumeClaims could use the PV that you specify, you first need to reserve that storage volume. Specify the relevant PersistentVolumeClaim in the claimRef field of the PV so that other PVCs can not bind to it.

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: foo-pv
spec:
  storageClassName: ""
  claimRef:
    name: foo-pvc
    namespace: foo
  ...

This is useful if you want to consume PersistentVolumes that have their persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy set to Retain, including cases where you are reusing an existing PV.

Expanding Persistent Volumes Claims

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

Support for expanding PersistentVolumeClaims (PVCs) is enabled by default. You can expand the following types of volumes:

  • azureFile (deprecated)
  • csi
  • flexVolume (deprecated)
  • rbd (deprecated)
  • portworxVolume (deprecated)

You can only expand a PVC if its storage class's allowVolumeExpansion field is set to true.

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: example-vol-default
provisioner: vendor-name.example/magicstorage
parameters:
  resturl: "http://192.168.10.100:8080"
  restuser: ""
  secretNamespace: ""
  secretName: ""
allowVolumeExpansion: true

To request a larger volume for a PVC, edit the PVC object and specify a larger size. This triggers expansion of the volume that backs the underlying PersistentVolume. A new PersistentVolume is never created to satisfy the claim. Instead, an existing volume is resized.

CSI Volume expansion

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

Support for expanding CSI volumes is enabled by default but it also requires a specific CSI driver to support volume expansion. Refer to documentation of the specific CSI driver for more information.

Resizing a volume containing a file system

You can only resize volumes containing a file system if the file system is XFS, Ext3, or Ext4.

When a volume contains a file system, the file system is only resized when a new Pod is using the PersistentVolumeClaim in ReadWrite mode. File system expansion is either done when a Pod is starting up or when a Pod is running and the underlying file system supports online expansion.

FlexVolumes (deprecated since Kubernetes v1.23) allow resize if the driver is configured with the RequiresFSResize capability to true. The FlexVolume can be resized on Pod restart.

Resizing an in-use PersistentVolumeClaim

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

In this case, you don't need to delete and recreate a Pod or deployment that is using an existing PVC. Any in-use PVC automatically becomes available to its Pod as soon as its file system has been expanded. This feature has no effect on PVCs that are not in use by a Pod or deployment. You must create a Pod that uses the PVC before the expansion can complete.

Similar to other volume types - FlexVolume volumes can also be expanded when in-use by a Pod.

Recovering from Failure when Expanding Volumes

If a user specifies a new size that is too big to be satisfied by underlying storage system, expansion of PVC will be continuously retried until user or cluster administrator takes some action. This can be undesirable and hence Kubernetes provides following methods of recovering from such failures.

If expanding underlying storage fails, the cluster administrator can manually recover the Persistent Volume Claim (PVC) state and cancel the resize requests. Otherwise, the resize requests are continuously retried by the controller without administrator intervention.

  1. Mark the PersistentVolume(PV) that is bound to the PersistentVolumeClaim(PVC) with Retain reclaim policy.
  2. Delete the PVC. Since PV has Retain reclaim policy - we will not lose any data when we recreate the PVC.
  3. Delete the claimRef entry from PV specs, so as new PVC can bind to it. This should make the PV Available.
  4. Re-create the PVC with smaller size than PV and set volumeName field of the PVC to the name of the PV. This should bind new PVC to existing PV.
  5. Don't forget to restore the reclaim policy of the PV.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.23 [alpha] (enabled by default: false)

When using RecoverVolumeExpansionFailure feature, if expansion has failed for a PVC, you can retry expansion with a smaller size than the previously requested value. To request a new expansion attempt with a smaller proposed size, edit .spec.resources for that PVC and choose a value that is less than the value you previously tried. This is useful if expansion to a higher value did not succeed because of capacity constraint. If that has happened, or you suspect that it might have, you can retry expansion by specifying a size that is within the capacity limits of underlying storage provider. You can monitor status of resize operation by watching .status.allocatedResourceStatuses and events on the PVC.

Note that, although you can specify a lower amount of storage than what was requested previously, the new value must still be higher than .status.capacity. Kubernetes does not support shrinking a PVC to less than its current size.

Types of Persistent Volumes

PersistentVolume types are implemented as plugins. Kubernetes currently supports the following plugins:

  • csi - Container Storage Interface (CSI)
  • fc - Fibre Channel (FC) storage
  • hostPath - HostPath volume (for single node testing only; WILL NOT WORK in a multi-node cluster; consider using local volume instead)
  • iscsi - iSCSI (SCSI over IP) storage
  • local - local storage devices mounted on nodes.
  • nfs - Network File System (NFS) storage

The following types of PersistentVolume are deprecated but still available. If you are using these volume types except for flexVolume, cephfs and rbd, please install corresponding CSI drivers.

  • awsElasticBlockStore - AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) (migration on by default starting v1.23)
  • azureDisk - Azure Disk (migration on by default starting v1.23)
  • azureFile - Azure File (migration on by default starting v1.24)
  • cinder - Cinder (OpenStack block storage) (migration on by default starting v1.21)
  • flexVolume - FlexVolume (deprecated starting v1.23, no migration plan and no plan to remove support)
  • gcePersistentDisk - GCE Persistent Disk (migration on by default starting v1.23)
  • portworxVolume - Portworx volume (migration on by default starting v1.31)
  • vsphereVolume - vSphere VMDK volume (migration on by default starting v1.25)

Older versions of Kubernetes also supported the following in-tree PersistentVolume types:

  • cephfs (not available starting v1.31)
  • flocker - Flocker storage. (not available starting v1.25)
  • photonPersistentDisk - Photon controller persistent disk. (not available starting v1.15)
  • quobyte - Quobyte volume. (not available starting v1.25)
  • rbd - Rados Block Device (RBD) volume (not available starting v1.31)
  • scaleIO - ScaleIO volume. (not available starting v1.21)
  • storageos - StorageOS volume. (not available starting v1.25)

Persistent Volumes

Each PV contains a spec and status, which is the specification and status of the volume. The name of a PersistentVolume object must be a valid DNS subdomain name.

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: pv0003
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 5Gi
  volumeMode: Filesystem
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Recycle
  storageClassName: slow
  mountOptions:
    - hard
    - nfsvers=4.1
  nfs:
    path: /tmp
    server: 172.17.0.2

Capacity

Generally, a PV will have a specific storage capacity. This is set using the PV's capacity attribute which is a Quantity value.

Currently, storage size is the only resource that can be set or requested. Future attributes may include IOPS, throughput, etc.

Volume Mode

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.18 [stable]

Kubernetes supports two volumeModes of PersistentVolumes: Filesystem and Block.

volumeMode is an optional API parameter. Filesystem is the default mode used when volumeMode parameter is omitted.

A volume with volumeMode: Filesystem is mounted into Pods into a directory. If the volume is backed by a block device and the device is empty, Kubernetes creates a filesystem on the device before mounting it for the first time.

You can set the value of volumeMode to Block to use a volume as a raw block device. Such volume is presented into a Pod as a block device, without any filesystem on it. This mode is useful to provide a Pod the fastest possible way to access a volume, without any filesystem layer between the Pod and the volume. On the other hand, the application running in the Pod must know how to handle a raw block device. See Raw Block Volume Support for an example on how to use a volume with volumeMode: Block in a Pod.

Access Modes

A PersistentVolume can be mounted on a host in any way supported by the resource provider. As shown in the table below, providers will have different capabilities and each PV's access modes are set to the specific modes supported by that particular volume. For example, NFS can support multiple read/write clients, but a specific NFS PV might be exported on the server as read-only. Each PV gets its own set of access modes describing that specific PV's capabilities.

The access modes are:

ReadWriteOnce
the volume can be mounted as read-write by a single node. ReadWriteOnce access mode still can allow multiple pods to access the volume when the pods are running on the same node. For single pod access, please see ReadWriteOncePod.
ReadOnlyMany
the volume can be mounted as read-only by many nodes.
ReadWriteMany
the volume can be mounted as read-write by many nodes.
ReadWriteOncePod
FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [stable]
the volume can be mounted as read-write by a single Pod. Use ReadWriteOncePod access mode if you want to ensure that only one pod across the whole cluster can read that PVC or write to it.

In the CLI, the access modes are abbreviated to:

  • RWO - ReadWriteOnce
  • ROX - ReadOnlyMany
  • RWX - ReadWriteMany
  • RWOP - ReadWriteOncePod

Important! A volume can only be mounted using one access mode at a time, even if it supports many.

Volume Plugin ReadWriteOnce ReadOnlyMany ReadWriteMany ReadWriteOncePod
AzureFile ✓ ✓ ✓ -
CephFS ✓ ✓ ✓ -
CSI depends on the driver depends on the driver depends on the driver depends on the driver
FC ✓ ✓ - -
FlexVolume ✓ ✓ depends on the driver -
HostPath ✓ - - -
iSCSI ✓ ✓ - -
NFS ✓ ✓ ✓ -
RBD ✓ ✓ - -
VsphereVolume ✓ - - (works when Pods are collocated) -
PortworxVolume ✓ - ✓ -

Class

A PV can have a class, which is specified by setting the storageClassName attribute to the name of a StorageClass. A PV of a particular class can only be bound to PVCs requesting that class. A PV with no storageClassName has no class and can only be bound to PVCs that request no particular class.

In the past, the annotation volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-class was used instead of the storageClassName attribute. This annotation is still working; however, it will become fully deprecated in a future Kubernetes release.

Reclaim Policy

Current reclaim policies are:

  • Retain -- manual reclamation
  • Recycle -- basic scrub (rm -rf /thevolume/*)
  • Delete -- delete the volume

For Kubernetes 1.32, only nfs and hostPath volume types support recycling.

Mount Options

A Kubernetes administrator can specify additional mount options for when a Persistent Volume is mounted on a node.

The following volume types support mount options:

  • azureFile
  • cephfs (deprecated in v1.28)
  • cinder (deprecated in v1.18)
  • iscsi
  • nfs
  • rbd (deprecated in v1.28)
  • vsphereVolume

Mount options are not validated. If a mount option is invalid, the mount fails.

In the past, the annotation volume.beta.kubernetes.io/mount-options was used instead of the mountOptions attribute. This annotation is still working; however, it will become fully deprecated in a future Kubernetes release.

Node Affinity

A PV can specify node affinity to define constraints that limit what nodes this volume can be accessed from. Pods that use a PV will only be scheduled to nodes that are selected by the node affinity. To specify node affinity, set nodeAffinity in the .spec of a PV. The PersistentVolume API reference has more details on this field.

Phase

A PersistentVolume will be in one of the following phases:

Available
a free resource that is not yet bound to a claim
Bound
the volume is bound to a claim
Released
the claim has been deleted, but the associated storage resource is not yet reclaimed by the cluster
Failed
the volume has failed its (automated) reclamation

You can see the name of the PVC bound to the PV using kubectl describe persistentvolume <name>.

Phase transition timestamp

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

The .status field for a PersistentVolume can include an alpha lastPhaseTransitionTime field. This field records the timestamp of when the volume last transitioned its phase. For newly created volumes the phase is set to Pending and lastPhaseTransitionTime is set to the current time.

PersistentVolumeClaims

Each PVC contains a spec and status, which is the specification and status of the claim. The name of a PersistentVolumeClaim object must be a valid DNS subdomain name.

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: myclaim
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  volumeMode: Filesystem
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 8Gi
  storageClassName: slow
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      release: "stable"
    matchExpressions:
      - {key: environment, operator: In, values: [dev]}

Access Modes

Claims use the same conventions as volumes when requesting storage with specific access modes.

Volume Modes

Claims use the same convention as volumes to indicate the consumption of the volume as either a filesystem or block device.

Resources

Claims, like Pods, can request specific quantities of a resource. In this case, the request is for storage. The same resource model applies to both volumes and claims.

Selector

Claims can specify a label selector to further filter the set of volumes. Only the volumes whose labels match the selector can be bound to the claim. The selector can consist of two fields:

  • matchLabels - the volume must have a label with this value
  • matchExpressions - a list of requirements made by specifying key, list of values, and operator that relates the key and values. Valid operators include In, NotIn, Exists, and DoesNotExist.

All of the requirements, from both matchLabels and matchExpressions, are ANDed together – they must all be satisfied in order to match.

Class

A claim can request a particular class by specifying the name of a StorageClass using the attribute storageClassName. Only PVs of the requested class, ones with the same storageClassName as the PVC, can be bound to the PVC.

PVCs don't necessarily have to request a class. A PVC with its storageClassName set equal to "" is always interpreted to be requesting a PV with no class, so it can only be bound to PVs with no class (no annotation or one set equal to ""). A PVC with no storageClassName is not quite the same and is treated differently by the cluster, depending on whether the DefaultStorageClass admission plugin is turned on.

  • If the admission plugin is turned on, the administrator may specify a default StorageClass. All PVCs that have no storageClassName can be bound only to PVs of that default. Specifying a default StorageClass is done by setting the annotation storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class equal to true in a StorageClass object. If the administrator does not specify a default, the cluster responds to PVC creation as if the admission plugin were turned off. If more than one default StorageClass is specified, the newest default is used when the PVC is dynamically provisioned.
  • If the admission plugin is turned off, there is no notion of a default StorageClass. All PVCs that have storageClassName set to "" can be bound only to PVs that have storageClassName also set to "". However, PVCs with missing storageClassName can be updated later once default StorageClass becomes available. If the PVC gets updated it will no longer bind to PVs that have storageClassName also set to "".

See retroactive default StorageClass assignment for more details.

Depending on installation method, a default StorageClass may be deployed to a Kubernetes cluster by addon manager during installation.

When a PVC specifies a selector in addition to requesting a StorageClass, the requirements are ANDed together: only a PV of the requested class and with the requested labels may be bound to the PVC.

In the past, the annotation volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-class was used instead of storageClassName attribute. This annotation is still working; however, it won't be supported in a future Kubernetes release.

Retroactive default StorageClass assignment

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.28 [stable]

You can create a PersistentVolumeClaim without specifying a storageClassName for the new PVC, and you can do so even when no default StorageClass exists in your cluster. In this case, the new PVC creates as you defined it, and the storageClassName of that PVC remains unset until default becomes available.

When a default StorageClass becomes available, the control plane identifies any existing PVCs without storageClassName. For the PVCs that either have an empty value for storageClassName or do not have this key, the control plane then updates those PVCs to set storageClassName to match the new default StorageClass. If you have an existing PVC where the storageClassName is "", and you configure a default StorageClass, then this PVC will not get updated.

In order to keep binding to PVs with storageClassName set to "" (while a default StorageClass is present), you need to set the storageClassName of the associated PVC to "".

This behavior helps administrators change default StorageClass by removing the old one first and then creating or setting another one. This brief window while there is no default causes PVCs without storageClassName created at that time to not have any default, but due to the retroactive default StorageClass assignment this way of changing defaults is safe.

Claims As Volumes

Pods access storage by using the claim as a volume. Claims must exist in the same namespace as the Pod using the claim. The cluster finds the claim in the Pod's namespace and uses it to get the PersistentVolume backing the claim. The volume is then mounted to the host and into the Pod.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: mypod
spec:
  containers:
    - name: myfrontend
      image: nginx
      volumeMounts:
      - mountPath: "/var/www/html"
        name: mypd
  volumes:
    - name: mypd
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: myclaim

A Note on Namespaces

PersistentVolumes binds are exclusive, and since PersistentVolumeClaims are namespaced objects, mounting claims with "Many" modes (ROX, RWX) is only possible within one namespace.

PersistentVolumes typed hostPath

A hostPath PersistentVolume uses a file or directory on the Node to emulate network-attached storage. See an example of hostPath typed volume.

Raw Block Volume Support

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.18 [stable]

The following volume plugins support raw block volumes, including dynamic provisioning where applicable:

  • CSI
  • FC (Fibre Channel)
  • iSCSI
  • Local volume
  • OpenStack Cinder
  • RBD (deprecated)
  • RBD (Ceph Block Device; deprecated)
  • VsphereVolume

PersistentVolume using a Raw Block Volume

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: block-pv
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 10Gi
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  volumeMode: Block
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Retain
  fc:
    targetWWNs: ["50060e801049cfd1"]
    lun: 0
    readOnly: false

PersistentVolumeClaim requesting a Raw Block Volume

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: block-pvc
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  volumeMode: Block
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi

Pod specification adding Raw Block Device path in container

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pod-with-block-volume
spec:
  containers:
    - name: fc-container
      image: fedora:26
      command: ["/bin/sh", "-c"]
      args: [ "tail -f /dev/null" ]
      volumeDevices:
        - name: data
          devicePath: /dev/xvda
  volumes:
    - name: data
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: block-pvc

Binding Block Volumes

If a user requests a raw block volume by indicating this using the volumeMode field in the PersistentVolumeClaim spec, the binding rules differ slightly from previous releases that didn't consider this mode as part of the spec. Listed is a table of possible combinations the user and admin might specify for requesting a raw block device. The table indicates if the volume will be bound or not given the combinations: Volume binding matrix for statically provisioned volumes:

PV volumeMode PVC volumeMode Result
unspecified unspecified BIND
unspecified Block NO BIND
unspecified Filesystem BIND
Block unspecified NO BIND
Block Block BIND
Block Filesystem NO BIND
Filesystem Filesystem BIND
Filesystem Block NO BIND
Filesystem unspecified BIND

Volume Snapshot and Restore Volume from Snapshot Support

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.20 [stable]

Volume snapshots only support the out-of-tree CSI volume plugins. For details, see Volume Snapshots. In-tree volume plugins are deprecated. You can read about the deprecated volume plugins in the Volume Plugin FAQ.

Create a PersistentVolumeClaim from a Volume Snapshot

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: restore-pvc
spec:
  storageClassName: csi-hostpath-sc
  dataSource:
    name: new-snapshot-test
    kind: VolumeSnapshot
    apiGroup: snapshot.storage.k8s.io
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi

Volume Cloning

Volume Cloning only available for CSI volume plugins.

Create PersistentVolumeClaim from an existing PVC

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: cloned-pvc
spec:
  storageClassName: my-csi-plugin
  dataSource:
    name: existing-src-pvc-name
    kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi

Volume populators and data sources

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [beta]

Kubernetes supports custom volume populators. To use custom volume populators, you must enable the AnyVolumeDataSource feature gate for the kube-apiserver and kube-controller-manager.

Volume populators take advantage of a PVC spec field called dataSourceRef. Unlike the dataSource field, which can only contain either a reference to another PersistentVolumeClaim or to a VolumeSnapshot, the dataSourceRef field can contain a reference to any object in the same namespace, except for core objects other than PVCs. For clusters that have the feature gate enabled, use of the dataSourceRef is preferred over dataSource.

Cross namespace data sources

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [alpha]

Kubernetes supports cross namespace volume data sources. To use cross namespace volume data sources, you must enable the AnyVolumeDataSource and CrossNamespaceVolumeDataSource feature gates for the kube-apiserver and kube-controller-manager. Also, you must enable the CrossNamespaceVolumeDataSource feature gate for the csi-provisioner.

Enabling the CrossNamespaceVolumeDataSource feature gate allows you to specify a namespace in the dataSourceRef field.

Data source references

The dataSourceRef field behaves almost the same as the dataSource field. If one is specified while the other is not, the API server will give both fields the same value. Neither field can be changed after creation, and attempting to specify different values for the two fields will result in a validation error. Therefore the two fields will always have the same contents.

There are two differences between the dataSourceRef field and the dataSource field that users should be aware of:

  • The dataSource field ignores invalid values (as if the field was blank) while the dataSourceRef field never ignores values and will cause an error if an invalid value is used. Invalid values are any core object (objects with no apiGroup) except for PVCs.
  • The dataSourceRef field may contain different types of objects, while the dataSource field only allows PVCs and VolumeSnapshots.

When the CrossNamespaceVolumeDataSource feature is enabled, there are additional differences:

  • The dataSource field only allows local objects, while the dataSourceRef field allows objects in any namespaces.
  • When namespace is specified, dataSource and dataSourceRef are not synced.

Users should always use dataSourceRef on clusters that have the feature gate enabled, and fall back to dataSource on clusters that do not. It is not necessary to look at both fields under any circumstance. The duplicated values with slightly different semantics exist only for backwards compatibility. In particular, a mixture of older and newer controllers are able to interoperate because the fields are the same.

Using volume populators

Volume populators are controllers that can create non-empty volumes, where the contents of the volume are determined by a Custom Resource. Users create a populated volume by referring to a Custom Resource using the dataSourceRef field:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: populated-pvc
spec:
  dataSourceRef:
    name: example-name
    kind: ExampleDataSource
    apiGroup: example.storage.k8s.io
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi

Because volume populators are external components, attempts to create a PVC that uses one can fail if not all the correct components are installed. External controllers should generate events on the PVC to provide feedback on the status of the creation, including warnings if the PVC cannot be created due to some missing component.

You can install the alpha volume data source validator controller into your cluster. That controller generates warning Events on a PVC in the case that no populator is registered to handle that kind of data source. When a suitable populator is installed for a PVC, it's the responsibility of that populator controller to report Events that relate to volume creation and issues during the process.

Using a cross-namespace volume data source

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [alpha]

Create a ReferenceGrant to allow the namespace owner to accept the reference. You define a populated volume by specifying a cross namespace volume data source using the dataSourceRef field. You must already have a valid ReferenceGrant in the source namespace:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: ReferenceGrant
metadata:
  name: allow-ns1-pvc
  namespace: default
spec:
  from:
  - group: ""
    kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
    namespace: ns1
  to:
  - group: snapshot.storage.k8s.io
    kind: VolumeSnapshot
    name: new-snapshot-demo

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: foo-pvc
  namespace: ns1
spec:
  storageClassName: example
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 1Gi
  dataSourceRef:
    apiGroup: snapshot.storage.k8s.io
    kind: VolumeSnapshot
    name: new-snapshot-demo
    namespace: default
  volumeMode: Filesystem

Writing Portable Configuration

If you're writing configuration templates or examples that run on a wide range of clusters and need persistent storage, it is recommended that you use the following pattern:

  • Include PersistentVolumeClaim objects in your bundle of config (alongside Deployments, ConfigMaps, etc).
  • Do not include PersistentVolume objects in the config, since the user instantiating the config may not have permission to create PersistentVolumes.
  • Give the user the option of providing a storage class name when instantiating the template.
    • If the user provides a storage class name, put that value into the persistentVolumeClaim.storageClassName field. This will cause the PVC to match the right storage class if the cluster has StorageClasses enabled by the admin.
    • If the user does not provide a storage class name, leave the persistentVolumeClaim.storageClassName field as nil. This will cause a PV to be automatically provisioned for the user with the default StorageClass in the cluster. Many cluster environments have a default StorageClass installed, or administrators can create their own default StorageClass.
  • In your tooling, watch for PVCs that are not getting bound after some time and surface this to the user, as this may indicate that the cluster has no dynamic storage support (in which case the user should create a matching PV) or the cluster has no storage system (in which case the user cannot deploy config requiring PVCs).

What's next

API references

Read about the APIs described in this page:

6.3 - Projected Volumes

This document describes projected volumes in Kubernetes. Familiarity with volumes is suggested.

Introduction

A projected volume maps several existing volume sources into the same directory.

Currently, the following types of volume sources can be projected:

All sources are required to be in the same namespace as the Pod. For more details, see the all-in-one volume design document.

Example configuration with a secret, a downwardAPI, and a configMap

pods/storage/projected-secret-downwardapi-configmap.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: volume-test
spec:
  containers:
  - name: container-test
    image: busybox:1.28
    command: ["sleep", "3600"]
    volumeMounts:
    - name: all-in-one
      mountPath: "/projected-volume"
      readOnly: true
  volumes:
  - name: all-in-one
    projected:
      sources:
      - secret:
          name: mysecret
          items:
            - key: username
              path: my-group/my-username
      - downwardAPI:
          items:
            - path: "labels"
              fieldRef:
                fieldPath: metadata.labels
            - path: "cpu_limit"
              resourceFieldRef:
                containerName: container-test
                resource: limits.cpu
      - configMap:
          name: myconfigmap
          items:
            - key: config
              path: my-group/my-config

Example configuration: secrets with a non-default permission mode set

pods/storage/projected-secrets-nondefault-permission-mode.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: volume-test
spec:
  containers:
  - name: container-test
    image: busybox:1.28
    command: ["sleep", "3600"]
    volumeMounts:
    - name: all-in-one
      mountPath: "/projected-volume"
      readOnly: true
  volumes:
  - name: all-in-one
    projected:
      sources:
      - secret:
          name: mysecret
          items:
            - key: username
              path: my-group/my-username
      - secret:
          name: mysecret2
          items:
            - key: password
              path: my-group/my-password
              mode: 511

Each projected volume source is listed in the spec under sources. The parameters are nearly the same with two exceptions:

  • For secrets, the secretName field has been changed to name to be consistent with ConfigMap naming.
  • The defaultMode can only be specified at the projected level and not for each volume source. However, as illustrated above, you can explicitly set the mode for each individual projection.

serviceAccountToken projected volumes

You can inject the token for the current service account into a Pod at a specified path. For example:

pods/storage/projected-service-account-token.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: sa-token-test
spec:
  containers:
  - name: container-test
    image: busybox:1.28
    command: ["sleep", "3600"]
    volumeMounts:
    - name: token-vol
      mountPath: "/service-account"
      readOnly: true
  serviceAccountName: default
  volumes:
  - name: token-vol
    projected:
      sources:
      - serviceAccountToken:
          audience: api
          expirationSeconds: 3600
          path: token

The example Pod has a projected volume containing the injected service account token. Containers in this Pod can use that token to access the Kubernetes API server, authenticating with the identity of the pod's ServiceAccount. The audience field contains the intended audience of the token. A recipient of the token must identify itself with an identifier specified in the audience of the token, and otherwise should reject the token. This field is optional and it defaults to the identifier of the API server.

The expirationSeconds is the expected duration of validity of the service account token. It defaults to 1 hour and must be at least 10 minutes (600 seconds). An administrator can also limit its maximum value by specifying the --service-account-max-token-expiration option for the API server. The path field specifies a relative path to the mount point of the projected volume.

clusterTrustBundle projected volumes

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [alpha]

The clusterTrustBundle projected volume source injects the contents of one or more ClusterTrustBundle objects as an automatically-updating file in the container filesystem.

ClusterTrustBundles can be selected either by name or by signer name.

To select by name, use the name field to designate a single ClusterTrustBundle object.

To select by signer name, use the signerName field (and optionally the labelSelector field) to designate a set of ClusterTrustBundle objects that use the given signer name. If labelSelector is not present, then all ClusterTrustBundles for that signer are selected.

The kubelet deduplicates the certificates in the selected ClusterTrustBundle objects, normalizes the PEM representations (discarding comments and headers), reorders the certificates, and writes them into the file named by path. As the set of selected ClusterTrustBundles or their content changes, kubelet keeps the file up-to-date.

By default, the kubelet will prevent the pod from starting if the named ClusterTrustBundle is not found, or if signerName / labelSelector do not match any ClusterTrustBundles. If this behavior is not what you want, then set the optional field to true, and the pod will start up with an empty file at path.

pods/storage/projected-clustertrustbundle.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: sa-ctb-name-test
spec:
  containers:
  - name: container-test
    image: busybox
    command: ["sleep", "3600"]
    volumeMounts:
    - name: token-vol
      mountPath: "/root-certificates"
      readOnly: true
  serviceAccountName: default
  volumes:
  - name: token-vol
    projected:
      sources:
      - clusterTrustBundle:
          name: example
          path: example-roots.pem
      - clusterTrustBundle:
          signerName: "example.com/mysigner"
          labelSelector:
            matchLabels:
              version: live
          path: mysigner-roots.pem
          optional: true

SecurityContext interactions

The proposal for file permission handling in projected service account volume enhancement introduced the projected files having the correct owner permissions set.

Linux

In Linux pods that have a projected volume and RunAsUser set in the Pod SecurityContext, the projected files have the correct ownership set including container user ownership.

When all containers in a pod have the same runAsUser set in their PodSecurityContext or container SecurityContext, then the kubelet ensures that the contents of the serviceAccountToken volume are owned by that user, and the token file has its permission mode set to 0600.

Windows

In Windows pods that have a projected volume and RunAsUsername set in the Pod SecurityContext, the ownership is not enforced due to the way user accounts are managed in Windows. Windows stores and manages local user and group accounts in a database file called Security Account Manager (SAM). Each container maintains its own instance of the SAM database, to which the host has no visibility into while the container is running. Windows containers are designed to run the user mode portion of the OS in isolation from the host, hence the maintenance of a virtual SAM database. As a result, the kubelet running on the host does not have the ability to dynamically configure host file ownership for virtualized container accounts. It is recommended that if files on the host machine are to be shared with the container then they should be placed into their own volume mount outside of C:\.

By default, the projected files will have the following ownership as shown for an example projected volume file:

PS C:\> Get-Acl C:\var\run\secrets\kubernetes.io\serviceaccount\..2021_08_31_22_22_18.318230061\ca.crt | Format-List

Path   : Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\FileSystem::C:\var\run\secrets\kubernetes.io\serviceaccount\..2021_08_31_22_22_18.318230061\ca.crt
Owner  : BUILTIN\Administrators
Group  : NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Access : NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM Allow  FullControl
         BUILTIN\Administrators Allow  FullControl
         BUILTIN\Users Allow  ReadAndExecute, Synchronize
Audit  :
Sddl   : O:BAG:SYD:AI(A;ID;FA;;;SY)(A;ID;FA;;;BA)(A;ID;0x1200a9;;;BU)

This implies all administrator users like ContainerAdministrator will have read, write and execute access while, non-administrator users will have read and execute access.

6.4 - Ephemeral Volumes

This document describes ephemeral volumes in Kubernetes. Familiarity with volumes is suggested, in particular PersistentVolumeClaim and PersistentVolume.

Some applications need additional storage but don't care whether that data is stored persistently across restarts. For example, caching services are often limited by memory size and can move infrequently used data into storage that is slower than memory with little impact on overall performance.

Other applications expect some read-only input data to be present in files, like configuration data or secret keys.

Ephemeral volumes are designed for these use cases. Because volumes follow the Pod's lifetime and get created and deleted along with the Pod, Pods can be stopped and restarted without being limited to where some persistent volume is available.

Ephemeral volumes are specified inline in the Pod spec, which simplifies application deployment and management.

Types of ephemeral volumes

Kubernetes supports several different kinds of ephemeral volumes for different purposes:

emptyDir, configMap, downwardAPI, secret are provided as local ephemeral storage. They are managed by kubelet on each node.

CSI ephemeral volumes must be provided by third-party CSI storage drivers.

Generic ephemeral volumes can be provided by third-party CSI storage drivers, but also by any other storage driver that supports dynamic provisioning. Some CSI drivers are written specifically for CSI ephemeral volumes and do not support dynamic provisioning: those then cannot be used for generic ephemeral volumes.

The advantage of using third-party drivers is that they can offer functionality that Kubernetes itself does not support, for example storage with different performance characteristics than the disk that is managed by kubelet, or injecting different data.

CSI ephemeral volumes

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable]

Conceptually, CSI ephemeral volumes are similar to configMap, downwardAPI and secret volume types: the storage is managed locally on each node and is created together with other local resources after a Pod has been scheduled onto a node. Kubernetes has no concept of rescheduling Pods anymore at this stage. Volume creation has to be unlikely to fail, otherwise Pod startup gets stuck. In particular, storage capacity aware Pod scheduling is not supported for these volumes. They are currently also not covered by the storage resource usage limits of a Pod, because that is something that kubelet can only enforce for storage that it manages itself.

Here's an example manifest for a Pod that uses CSI ephemeral storage:

kind: Pod
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: my-csi-app
spec:
  containers:
    - name: my-frontend
      image: busybox:1.28
      volumeMounts:
      - mountPath: "/data"
        name: my-csi-inline-vol
      command: [ "sleep", "1000000" ]
  volumes:
    - name: my-csi-inline-vol
      csi:
        driver: inline.storage.kubernetes.io
        volumeAttributes:
          foo: bar

The volumeAttributes determine what volume is prepared by the driver. These attributes are specific to each driver and not standardized. See the documentation of each CSI driver for further instructions.

CSI driver restrictions

CSI ephemeral volumes allow users to provide volumeAttributes directly to the CSI driver as part of the Pod spec. A CSI driver allowing volumeAttributes that are typically restricted to administrators is NOT suitable for use in an inline ephemeral volume. For example, parameters that are normally defined in the StorageClass should not be exposed to users through the use of inline ephemeral volumes.

Cluster administrators who need to restrict the CSI drivers that are allowed to be used as inline volumes within a Pod spec may do so by:

  • Removing Ephemeral from volumeLifecycleModes in the CSIDriver spec, which prevents the driver from being used as an inline ephemeral volume.
  • Using an admission webhook to restrict how this driver is used.

Generic ephemeral volumes

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.23 [stable]

Generic ephemeral volumes are similar to emptyDir volumes in the sense that they provide a per-pod directory for scratch data that is usually empty after provisioning. But they may also have additional features:

  • Storage can be local or network-attached.
  • Volumes can have a fixed size that Pods are not able to exceed.
  • Volumes may have some initial data, depending on the driver and parameters.
  • Typical operations on volumes are supported assuming that the driver supports them, including snapshotting, cloning, resizing, and storage capacity tracking.

Example:

kind: Pod
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: my-app
spec:
  containers:
    - name: my-frontend
      image: busybox:1.28
      volumeMounts:
      - mountPath: "/scratch"
        name: scratch-volume
      command: [ "sleep", "1000000" ]
  volumes:
    - name: scratch-volume
      ephemeral:
        volumeClaimTemplate:
          metadata:
            labels:
              type: my-frontend-volume
          spec:
            accessModes: [ "ReadWriteOnce" ]
            storageClassName: "scratch-storage-class"
            resources:
              requests:
                storage: 1Gi

Lifecycle and PersistentVolumeClaim

The key design idea is that the parameters for a volume claim are allowed inside a volume source of the Pod. Labels, annotations and the whole set of fields for a PersistentVolumeClaim are supported. When such a Pod gets created, the ephemeral volume controller then creates an actual PersistentVolumeClaim object in the same namespace as the Pod and ensures that the PersistentVolumeClaim gets deleted when the Pod gets deleted.

That triggers volume binding and/or provisioning, either immediately if the StorageClass uses immediate volume binding or when the Pod is tentatively scheduled onto a node (WaitForFirstConsumer volume binding mode). The latter is recommended for generic ephemeral volumes because then the scheduler is free to choose a suitable node for the Pod. With immediate binding, the scheduler is forced to select a node that has access to the volume once it is available.

In terms of resource ownership, a Pod that has generic ephemeral storage is the owner of the PersistentVolumeClaim(s) that provide that ephemeral storage. When the Pod is deleted, the Kubernetes garbage collector deletes the PVC, which then usually triggers deletion of the volume because the default reclaim policy of storage classes is to delete volumes. You can create quasi-ephemeral local storage using a StorageClass with a reclaim policy of retain: the storage outlives the Pod, and in this case you need to ensure that volume clean up happens separately.

While these PVCs exist, they can be used like any other PVC. In particular, they can be referenced as data source in volume cloning or snapshotting. The PVC object also holds the current status of the volume.

PersistentVolumeClaim naming

Naming of the automatically created PVCs is deterministic: the name is a combination of the Pod name and volume name, with a hyphen (-) in the middle. In the example above, the PVC name will be my-app-scratch-volume. This deterministic naming makes it easier to interact with the PVC because one does not have to search for it once the Pod name and volume name are known.

The deterministic naming also introduces a potential conflict between different Pods (a Pod "pod-a" with volume "scratch" and another Pod with name "pod" and volume "a-scratch" both end up with the same PVC name "pod-a-scratch") and between Pods and manually created PVCs.

Such conflicts are detected: a PVC is only used for an ephemeral volume if it was created for the Pod. This check is based on the ownership relationship. An existing PVC is not overwritten or modified. But this does not resolve the conflict because without the right PVC, the Pod cannot start.

Security

Using generic ephemeral volumes allows users to create PVCs indirectly if they can create Pods, even if they do not have permission to create PVCs directly. Cluster administrators must be aware of this. If this does not fit their security model, they should use an admission webhook that rejects objects like Pods that have a generic ephemeral volume.

The normal namespace quota for PVCs still applies, so even if users are allowed to use this new mechanism, they cannot use it to circumvent other policies.

What's next

Ephemeral volumes managed by kubelet

See local ephemeral storage.

CSI ephemeral volumes

Generic ephemeral volumes

6.5 - Storage Classes

This document describes the concept of a StorageClass in Kubernetes. Familiarity with volumes and persistent volumes is suggested.

A StorageClass provides a way for administrators to describe the classes of storage they offer. Different classes might map to quality-of-service levels, or to backup policies, or to arbitrary policies determined by the cluster administrators. Kubernetes itself is unopinionated about what classes represent.

The Kubernetes concept of a storage class is similar to “profiles” in some other storage system designs.

StorageClass objects

Each StorageClass contains the fields provisioner, parameters, and reclaimPolicy, which are used when a PersistentVolume belonging to the class needs to be dynamically provisioned to satisfy a PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC).

The name of a StorageClass object is significant, and is how users can request a particular class. Administrators set the name and other parameters of a class when first creating StorageClass objects.

As an administrator, you can specify a default StorageClass that applies to any PVCs that don't request a specific class. For more details, see the PersistentVolumeClaim concept.

Here's an example of a StorageClass:

storage/storageclass-low-latency.yaml 
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: low-latency
  annotations:
    storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class: "false"
provisioner: csi-driver.example-vendor.example
reclaimPolicy: Retain # default value is Delete
allowVolumeExpansion: true
mountOptions:
  - discard # this might enable UNMAP / TRIM at the block storage layer
volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer
parameters:
  guaranteedReadWriteLatency: "true" # provider-specific

Default StorageClass

You can mark a StorageClass as the default for your cluster. For instructions on setting the default StorageClass, see Change the default StorageClass.

When a PVC does not specify a storageClassName, the default StorageClass is used.

If you set the storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class annotation to true on more than one StorageClass in your cluster, and you then create a PersistentVolumeClaim with no storageClassName set, Kubernetes uses the most recently created default StorageClass.

You can create a PersistentVolumeClaim without specifying a storageClassName for the new PVC, and you can do so even when no default StorageClass exists in your cluster. In this case, the new PVC creates as you defined it, and the storageClassName of that PVC remains unset until a default becomes available.

You can have a cluster without any default StorageClass. If you don't mark any StorageClass as default (and one hasn't been set for you by, for example, a cloud provider), then Kubernetes cannot apply that defaulting for PersistentVolumeClaims that need it.

If or when a default StorageClass becomes available, the control plane identifies any existing PVCs without storageClassName. For the PVCs that either have an empty value for storageClassName or do not have this key, the control plane then updates those PVCs to set storageClassName to match the new default StorageClass. If you have an existing PVC where the storageClassName is "", and you configure a default StorageClass, then this PVC will not get updated.

In order to keep binding to PVs with storageClassName set to "" (while a default StorageClass is present), you need to set the storageClassName of the associated PVC to "".

Provisioner

Each StorageClass has a provisioner that determines what volume plugin is used for provisioning PVs. This field must be specified.

Volume Plugin Internal Provisioner Config Example
AzureFile ✓ Azure File
CephFS - -
FC - -
FlexVolume - -
iSCSI - -
Local - Local
NFS - NFS
PortworxVolume ✓ Portworx Volume
RBD - Ceph RBD
VsphereVolume ✓ vSphere

You are not restricted to specifying the "internal" provisioners listed here (whose names are prefixed with "kubernetes.io" and shipped alongside Kubernetes). You can also run and specify external provisioners, which are independent programs that follow a specification defined by Kubernetes. Authors of external provisioners have full discretion over where their code lives, how the provisioner is shipped, how it needs to be run, what volume plugin it uses (including Flex), etc. The repository kubernetes-sigs/sig-storage-lib-external-provisioner houses a library for writing external provisioners that implements the bulk of the specification. Some external provisioners are listed under the repository kubernetes-sigs/sig-storage-lib-external-provisioner.

For example, NFS doesn't provide an internal provisioner, but an external provisioner can be used. There are also cases when 3rd party storage vendors provide their own external provisioner.

Reclaim policy

PersistentVolumes that are dynamically created by a StorageClass will have the reclaim policy specified in the reclaimPolicy field of the class, which can be either Delete or Retain. If no reclaimPolicy is specified when a StorageClass object is created, it will default to Delete.

PersistentVolumes that are created manually and managed via a StorageClass will have whatever reclaim policy they were assigned at creation.

Volume expansion

PersistentVolumes can be configured to be expandable. This allows you to resize the volume by editing the corresponding PVC object, requesting a new larger amount of storage.

The following types of volumes support volume expansion, when the underlying StorageClass has the field allowVolumeExpansion set to true.

Table of Volume types and the version of Kubernetes they require
Volume type Required Kubernetes version for volume expansion
Azure File 1.11
CSI 1.24
FlexVolume 1.13
Portworx 1.11
rbd 1.11

Mount options

PersistentVolumes that are dynamically created by a StorageClass will have the mount options specified in the mountOptions field of the class.

If the volume plugin does not support mount options but mount options are specified, provisioning will fail. Mount options are not validated on either the class or PV. If a mount option is invalid, the PV mount fails.

Volume binding mode

The volumeBindingMode field controls when volume binding and dynamic provisioning should occur. When unset, Immediate mode is used by default.

The Immediate mode indicates that volume binding and dynamic provisioning occurs once the PersistentVolumeClaim is created. For storage backends that are topology-constrained and not globally accessible from all Nodes in the cluster, PersistentVolumes will be bound or provisioned without knowledge of the Pod's scheduling requirements. This may result in unschedulable Pods.

A cluster administrator can address this issue by specifying the WaitForFirstConsumer mode which will delay the binding and provisioning of a PersistentVolume until a Pod using the PersistentVolumeClaim is created. PersistentVolumes will be selected or provisioned conforming to the topology that is specified by the Pod's scheduling constraints. These include, but are not limited to, resource requirements, node selectors, pod affinity and anti-affinity, and taints and tolerations.

The following plugins support WaitForFirstConsumer with dynamic provisioning:

  • CSI volumes, provided that the specific CSI driver supports this

The following plugins support WaitForFirstConsumer with pre-created PersistentVolume binding:

  • CSI volumes, provided that the specific CSI driver supports this
  • local
storage/storageclass/pod-volume-binding.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: task-pv-pod
spec:
  nodeSelector:
    kubernetes.io/hostname: kube-01
  volumes:
    - name: task-pv-storage
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: task-pv-claim
  containers:
    - name: task-pv-container
      image: nginx
      ports:
        - containerPort: 80
          name: "http-server"
      volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: "/usr/share/nginx/html"
          name: task-pv-storage

Allowed topologies

When a cluster operator specifies the WaitForFirstConsumer volume binding mode, it is no longer necessary to restrict provisioning to specific topologies in most situations. However, if still required, allowedTopologies can be specified.

This example demonstrates how to restrict the topology of provisioned volumes to specific zones and should be used as a replacement for the zone and zones parameters for the supported plugins.

storage/storageclass/storageclass-topology.yaml 
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: standard
provisioner:  example.com/example
parameters:
  type: pd-standard
volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer
allowedTopologies:
- matchLabelExpressions:
  - key: topology.kubernetes.io/zone
    values:
    - us-central-1a
    - us-central-1b

Parameters

StorageClasses have parameters that describe volumes belonging to the storage class. Different parameters may be accepted depending on the provisioner. When a parameter is omitted, some default is used.

There can be at most 512 parameters defined for a StorageClass. The total length of the parameters object including its keys and values cannot exceed 256 KiB.

AWS EBS

Kubernetes 1.32 does not include a awsElasticBlockStore volume type.

The AWSElasticBlockStore in-tree storage driver was deprecated in the Kubernetes v1.19 release and then removed entirely in the v1.27 release.

The Kubernetes project suggests that you use the AWS EBS out-of-tree storage driver instead.

Here is an example StorageClass for the AWS EBS CSI driver:

storage/storageclass/storageclass-aws-ebs.yaml 
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: ebs-sc
provisioner: ebs.csi.aws.com
volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer
parameters:
  csi.storage.k8s.io/fstype: xfs
  type: io1
  iopsPerGB: "50"
  encrypted: "true"
  tagSpecification_1: "key1=value1"
  tagSpecification_2: "key2=value2"
allowedTopologies:
- matchLabelExpressions:
  - key: topology.ebs.csi.aws.com/zone
    values:
    - us-east-2c

# `tagSpecification`: Tags with this prefix are applied to dynamically provisioned EBS volumes.

AWS EFS

To configure AWS EFS storage, you can use the out-of-tree AWS_EFS_CSI_DRIVER.

storage/storageclass/storageclass-aws-efs.yaml 
kind: StorageClass
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: efs-sc
provisioner: efs.csi.aws.com
parameters:
  provisioningMode: efs-ap
  fileSystemId: fs-92107410
  directoryPerms: "700"
  • provisioningMode: The type of volume to be provisioned by Amazon EFS. Currently, only access point based provisioning is supported (efs-ap).
  • fileSystemId: The file system under which the access point is created.
  • directoryPerms: The directory permissions of the root directory created by the access point.

For more details, refer to the AWS_EFS_CSI_Driver Dynamic Provisioning documentation.

NFS

To configure NFS storage, you can use the in-tree driver or the NFS CSI driver for Kubernetes (recommended).

storage/storageclass/storageclass-nfs.yaml 
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: example-nfs
provisioner: example.com/external-nfs
parameters:
  server: nfs-server.example.com
  path: /share
  readOnly: "false"
  • server: Server is the hostname or IP address of the NFS server.
  • path: Path that is exported by the NFS server.
  • readOnly: A flag indicating whether the storage will be mounted as read only (default false).

Kubernetes doesn't include an internal NFS provisioner. You need to use an external provisioner to create a StorageClass for NFS. Here are some examples:

vSphere

There are two types of provisioners for vSphere storage classes:

In-tree provisioners are deprecated. For more information on the CSI provisioner, see Kubernetes vSphere CSI Driver and vSphereVolume CSI migration.

CSI Provisioner

The vSphere CSI StorageClass provisioner works with Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. For an example, refer to the vSphere CSI repository.

vCP Provisioner

The following examples use the VMware Cloud Provider (vCP) StorageClass provisioner.

  1. Create a StorageClass with a user specified disk format.

    apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: fast
provisioner: kubernetes.io/vsphere-volume
parameters:
  diskformat: zeroedthick

    diskformat: thin, zeroedthick and eagerzeroedthick. Default: "thin".

  2. Create a StorageClass with a disk format on a user specified datastore.

    apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: fast
provisioner: kubernetes.io/vsphere-volume
parameters:
  diskformat: zeroedthick
  datastore: VSANDatastore

    datastore: The user can also specify the datastore in the StorageClass. The volume will be created on the datastore specified in the StorageClass, which in this case is VSANDatastore. This field is optional. If the datastore is not specified, then the volume will be created on the datastore specified in the vSphere config file used to initialize the vSphere Cloud Provider.

  3. Storage Policy Management inside kubernetes

    • Using existing vCenter SPBM policy

      One of the most important features of vSphere for Storage Management is policy based Management. Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) is a storage policy framework that provides a single unified control plane across a broad range of data services and storage solutions. SPBM enables vSphere administrators to overcome upfront storage provisioning challenges, such as capacity planning, differentiated service levels and managing capacity headroom.

      The SPBM policies can be specified in the StorageClass using the storagePolicyName parameter.

    • Virtual SAN policy support inside Kubernetes

      Vsphere Infrastructure (VI) Admins will have the ability to specify custom Virtual SAN Storage Capabilities during dynamic volume provisioning. You can now define storage requirements, such as performance and availability, in the form of storage capabilities during dynamic volume provisioning. The storage capability requirements are converted into a Virtual SAN policy which are then pushed down to the Virtual SAN layer when a persistent volume (virtual disk) is being created. The virtual disk is distributed across the Virtual SAN datastore to meet the requirements.

      You can see Storage Policy Based Management for dynamic provisioning of volumes for more details on how to use storage policies for persistent volumes management.

There are few vSphere examples which you try out for persistent volume management inside Kubernetes for vSphere.

Ceph RBD (deprecated)

storage/storageclass/storageclass-ceph-rbd.yaml 
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: fast
provisioner: kubernetes.io/rbd # This provisioner is deprecated
parameters:
  monitors: 198.19.254.105:6789
  adminId: kube
  adminSecretName: ceph-secret
  adminSecretNamespace: kube-system
  pool: kube
  userId: kube
  userSecretName: ceph-secret-user
  userSecretNamespace: default
  fsType: ext4
  imageFormat: "2"
  imageFeatures: "layering"

  • monitors: Ceph monitors, comma delimited. This parameter is required.

  • adminId: Ceph client ID that is capable of creating images in the pool. Default is "admin".

  • adminSecretName: Secret Name for adminId. This parameter is required. The provided secret must have type "kubernetes.io/rbd".

  • adminSecretNamespace: The namespace for adminSecretName. Default is "default".

  • pool: Ceph RBD pool. Default is "rbd".

  • userId: Ceph client ID that is used to map the RBD image. Default is the same as adminId.

  • userSecretName: The name of Ceph Secret for userId to map RBD image. It must exist in the same namespace as PVCs. This parameter is required. The provided secret must have type "kubernetes.io/rbd", for example created in this way:

    kubectl create secret generic ceph-secret --type="kubernetes.io/rbd" \
  --from-literal=key='QVFEQ1pMdFhPUnQrSmhBQUFYaERWNHJsZ3BsMmNjcDR6RFZST0E9PQ==' \
  --namespace=kube-system

  • userSecretNamespace: The namespace for userSecretName.

  • fsType: fsType that is supported by kubernetes. Default: "ext4".

  • imageFormat: Ceph RBD image format, "1" or "2". Default is "2".

  • imageFeatures: This parameter is optional and should only be used if you set imageFormat to "2". Currently supported features are layering only. Default is "", and no features are turned on.

Azure Disk

Kubernetes 1.32 does not include a azureDisk volume type.

The azureDisk in-tree storage driver was deprecated in the Kubernetes v1.19 release and then removed entirely in the v1.27 release.

The Kubernetes project suggests that you use the Azure Disk third party storage driver instead.

Azure File (deprecated)

storage/storageclass/storageclass-azure-file.yaml 
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: azurefile
provisioner: kubernetes.io/azure-file
parameters:
  skuName: Standard_LRS
  location: eastus
  storageAccount: azure_storage_account_name # example value
  • skuName: Azure storage account SKU tier. Default is empty.
  • location: Azure storage account location. Default is empty.
  • storageAccount: Azure storage account name. Default is empty. If a storage account is not provided, all storage accounts associated with the resource group are searched to find one that matches skuName and location. If a storage account is provided, it must reside in the same resource group as the cluster, and skuName and location are ignored.
  • secretNamespace: the namespace of the secret that contains the Azure Storage Account Name and Key. Default is the same as the Pod.
  • secretName: the name of the secret that contains the Azure Storage Account Name and Key. Default is azure-storage-account-<accountName>-secret
  • readOnly: a flag indicating whether the storage will be mounted as read only. Defaults to false which means a read/write mount. This setting will impact the ReadOnly setting in VolumeMounts as well.

During storage provisioning, a secret named by secretName is created for the mounting credentials. If the cluster has enabled both RBAC and Controller Roles, add the create permission of resource secret for clusterrole system:controller:persistent-volume-binder.

In a multi-tenancy context, it is strongly recommended to set the value for secretNamespace explicitly, otherwise the storage account credentials may be read by other users.

Portworx volume (deprecated)

storage/storageclass/storageclass-portworx-volume.yaml 
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: portworx-io-priority-high
provisioner: kubernetes.io/portworx-volume # This provisioner is deprecated
parameters:
  repl: "1"
  snap_interval: "70"
  priority_io: "high"
  • fs: filesystem to be laid out: none/xfs/ext4 (default: ext4).
  • block_size: block size in Kbytes (default: 32).
  • repl: number of synchronous replicas to be provided in the form of replication factor 1..3 (default: 1) A string is expected here i.e. "1" and not 1.
  • priority_io: determines whether the volume will be created from higher performance or a lower priority storage high/medium/low (default: low).
  • snap_interval: clock/time interval in minutes for when to trigger snapshots. Snapshots are incremental based on difference with the prior snapshot, 0 disables snaps (default: 0). A string is expected here i.e. "70" and not 70.
  • aggregation_level: specifies the number of chunks the volume would be distributed into, 0 indicates a non-aggregated volume (default: 0). A string is expected here i.e. "0" and not 0
  • ephemeral: specifies whether the volume should be cleaned-up after unmount or should be persistent. emptyDir use case can set this value to true and persistent volumes use case such as for databases like Cassandra should set to false, true/false (default false). A string is expected here i.e. "true" and not true.

Local

storage/storageclass/storageclass-local.yaml 
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: local-storage
provisioner: kubernetes.io/no-provisioner # indicates that this StorageClass does not support automatic provisioning
volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer

Local volumes do not support dynamic provisioning in Kubernetes 1.32; however a StorageClass should still be created to delay volume binding until a Pod is actually scheduled to the appropriate node. This is specified by the WaitForFirstConsumer volume binding mode.

Delaying volume binding allows the scheduler to consider all of a Pod's scheduling constraints when choosing an appropriate PersistentVolume for a PersistentVolumeClaim.

6.6 - Volume Attributes Classes

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [beta] (enabled by default: false)

This page assumes that you are familiar with StorageClasses, volumes and PersistentVolumes in Kubernetes.

A VolumeAttributesClass provides a way for administrators to describe the mutable "classes" of storage they offer. Different classes might map to different quality-of-service levels. Kubernetes itself is un-opinionated about what these classes represent.

This is a beta feature and disabled by default.

If you want to test the feature whilst it's beta, you need to enable the VolumeAttributesClass feature gate for the kube-controller-manager, kube-scheduler, and the kube-apiserver. You use the --feature-gates command line argument:

--feature-gates="...,VolumeAttributesClass=true"

You will also have to enable the storage.k8s.io/v1beta1 API group through the kube-apiserver runtime-config. You use the following command line argument:

--runtime-config=storage.k8s.io/v1beta1=true

You can also only use VolumeAttributesClasses with storage backed by Container Storage Interface, and only where the relevant CSI driver implements the ModifyVolume API.

The VolumeAttributesClass API

Each VolumeAttributesClass contains the driverName and parameters, which are used when a PersistentVolume (PV) belonging to the class needs to be dynamically provisioned or modified.

The name of a VolumeAttributesClass object is significant and is how users can request a particular class. Administrators set the name and other parameters of a class when first creating VolumeAttributesClass objects. While the name of a VolumeAttributesClass object in a PersistentVolumeClaim is mutable, the parameters in an existing class are immutable.

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: VolumeAttributesClass
metadata:
  name: silver
driverName: pd.csi.storage.gke.io
parameters:
  provisioned-iops: "3000"
  provisioned-throughput: "50"

Provisioner

Each VolumeAttributesClass has a provisioner that determines what volume plugin is used for provisioning PVs. The field driverName must be specified.

The feature support for VolumeAttributesClass is implemented in kubernetes-csi/external-provisioner.

You are not restricted to specifying the kubernetes-csi/external-provisioner. You can also run and specify external provisioners, which are independent programs that follow a specification defined by Kubernetes. Authors of external provisioners have full discretion over where their code lives, how the provisioner is shipped, how it needs to be run, what volume plugin it uses, etc.

Resizer

Each VolumeAttributesClass has a resizer that determines what volume plugin is used for modifying PVs. The field driverName must be specified.

The modifying volume feature support for VolumeAttributesClass is implemented in kubernetes-csi/external-resizer.

For example, an existing PersistentVolumeClaim is using a VolumeAttributesClass named silver:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: test-pv-claim
spec:
  …
  volumeAttributesClassName: silver
  …

A new VolumeAttributesClass gold is available in the cluster:

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: VolumeAttributesClass
metadata:
  name: gold
driverName: pd.csi.storage.gke.io
parameters:
  iops: "4000"
  throughput: "60"

The end user can update the PVC with the new VolumeAttributesClass gold and apply:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: test-pv-claim
spec:
  …
  volumeAttributesClassName: gold
  …

Parameters

VolumeAttributeClasses have parameters that describe volumes belonging to them. Different parameters may be accepted depending on the provisioner or the resizer. For example, the value 4000, for the parameter iops, and the parameter throughput are specific to GCE PD. When a parameter is omitted, the default is used at volume provisioning. If a user applies the PVC with a different VolumeAttributesClass with omitted parameters, the default value of the parameters may be used depending on the CSI driver implementation. Please refer to the related CSI driver documentation for more details.

There can be at most 512 parameters defined for a VolumeAttributesClass. The total length of the parameters object including its keys and values cannot exceed 256 KiB.

6.7 - Dynamic Volume Provisioning

Dynamic volume provisioning allows storage volumes to be created on-demand. Without dynamic provisioning, cluster administrators have to manually make calls to their cloud or storage provider to create new storage volumes, and then create PersistentVolume objects to represent them in Kubernetes. The dynamic provisioning feature eliminates the need for cluster administrators to pre-provision storage. Instead, it automatically provisions storage when users create PersistentVolumeClaim objects.

Background

The implementation of dynamic volume provisioning is based on the API object StorageClass from the API group storage.k8s.io. A cluster administrator can define as many StorageClass objects as needed, each specifying a volume plugin (aka provisioner) that provisions a volume and the set of parameters to pass to that provisioner when provisioning. A cluster administrator can define and expose multiple flavors of storage (from the same or different storage systems) within a cluster, each with a custom set of parameters. This design also ensures that end users don't have to worry about the complexity and nuances of how storage is provisioned, but still have the ability to select from multiple storage options.

More information on storage classes can be found here.

Enabling Dynamic Provisioning

To enable dynamic provisioning, a cluster administrator needs to pre-create one or more StorageClass objects for users. StorageClass objects define which provisioner should be used and what parameters should be passed to that provisioner when dynamic provisioning is invoked. The name of a StorageClass object must be a valid DNS subdomain name.

The following manifest creates a storage class "slow" which provisions standard disk-like persistent disks.

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: slow
provisioner: kubernetes.io/gce-pd
parameters:
  type: pd-standard

The following manifest creates a storage class "fast" which provisions SSD-like persistent disks.

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: fast
provisioner: kubernetes.io/gce-pd
parameters:
  type: pd-ssd

Using Dynamic Provisioning

Users request dynamically provisioned storage by including a storage class in their PersistentVolumeClaim. Before Kubernetes v1.6, this was done via the volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-class annotation. However, this annotation is deprecated since v1.9. Users now can and should instead use the storageClassName field of the PersistentVolumeClaim object. The value of this field must match the name of a StorageClass configured by the administrator (see below).

To select the "fast" storage class, for example, a user would create the following PersistentVolumeClaim:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: claim1
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  storageClassName: fast
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 30Gi

This claim results in an SSD-like Persistent Disk being automatically provisioned. When the claim is deleted, the volume is destroyed.

Defaulting Behavior

Dynamic provisioning can be enabled on a cluster such that all claims are dynamically provisioned if no storage class is specified. A cluster administrator can enable this behavior by:

An administrator can mark a specific StorageClass as default by adding the storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class annotation to it. When a default StorageClass exists in a cluster and a user creates a PersistentVolumeClaim with storageClassName unspecified, the DefaultStorageClass admission controller automatically adds the storageClassName field pointing to the default storage class.

Note that if you set the storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class annotation to true on more than one StorageClass in your cluster, and you then create a PersistentVolumeClaim with no storageClassName set, Kubernetes uses the most recently created default StorageClass.

Topology Awareness

In Multi-Zone clusters, Pods can be spread across Zones in a Region. Single-Zone storage backends should be provisioned in the Zones where Pods are scheduled. This can be accomplished by setting the Volume Binding Mode.

6.8 - Volume Snapshots

In Kubernetes, a VolumeSnapshot represents a snapshot of a volume on a storage system. This document assumes that you are already familiar with Kubernetes persistent volumes.

Introduction

Similar to how API resources PersistentVolume and PersistentVolumeClaim are used to provision volumes for users and administrators, VolumeSnapshotContent and VolumeSnapshot API resources are provided to create volume snapshots for users and administrators.

A VolumeSnapshotContent is a snapshot taken from a volume in the cluster that has been provisioned by an administrator. It is a resource in the cluster just like a PersistentVolume is a cluster resource.

A VolumeSnapshot is a request for snapshot of a volume by a user. It is similar to a PersistentVolumeClaim.

VolumeSnapshotClass allows you to specify different attributes belonging to a VolumeSnapshot. These attributes may differ among snapshots taken from the same volume on the storage system and therefore cannot be expressed by using the same StorageClass of a PersistentVolumeClaim.

Volume snapshots provide Kubernetes users with a standardized way to copy a volume's contents at a particular point in time without creating an entirely new volume. This functionality enables, for example, database administrators to backup databases before performing edit or delete modifications.

Users need to be aware of the following when using this feature:

  • API Objects VolumeSnapshot, VolumeSnapshotContent, and VolumeSnapshotClass are CRDs, not part of the core API.
  • VolumeSnapshot support is only available for CSI drivers.
  • As part of the deployment process of VolumeSnapshot, the Kubernetes team provides a snapshot controller to be deployed into the control plane, and a sidecar helper container called csi-snapshotter to be deployed together with the CSI driver. The snapshot controller watches VolumeSnapshot and VolumeSnapshotContent objects and is responsible for the creation and deletion of VolumeSnapshotContent object. The sidecar csi-snapshotter watches VolumeSnapshotContent objects and triggers CreateSnapshot and DeleteSnapshot operations against a CSI endpoint.
  • There is also a validating webhook server which provides tightened validation on snapshot objects. This should be installed by the Kubernetes distros along with the snapshot controller and CRDs, not CSI drivers. It should be installed in all Kubernetes clusters that has the snapshot feature enabled.
  • CSI drivers may or may not have implemented the volume snapshot functionality. The CSI drivers that have provided support for volume snapshot will likely use the csi-snapshotter. See CSI Driver documentation for details.
  • The CRDs and snapshot controller installations are the responsibility of the Kubernetes distribution.

For advanced use cases, such as creating group snapshots of multiple volumes, see the external CSI Volume Group Snapshot documentation.

Lifecycle of a volume snapshot and volume snapshot content

VolumeSnapshotContents are resources in the cluster. VolumeSnapshots are requests for those resources. The interaction between VolumeSnapshotContents and VolumeSnapshots follow this lifecycle:

Provisioning Volume Snapshot

There are two ways snapshots may be provisioned: pre-provisioned or dynamically provisioned.

Pre-provisioned

A cluster administrator creates a number of VolumeSnapshotContents. They carry the details of the real volume snapshot on the storage system which is available for use by cluster users. They exist in the Kubernetes API and are available for consumption.

Dynamic

Instead of using a pre-existing snapshot, you can request that a snapshot to be dynamically taken from a PersistentVolumeClaim. The VolumeSnapshotClass specifies storage provider-specific parameters to use when taking a snapshot.

Binding

The snapshot controller handles the binding of a VolumeSnapshot object with an appropriate VolumeSnapshotContent object, in both pre-provisioned and dynamically provisioned scenarios. The binding is a one-to-one mapping.

In the case of pre-provisioned binding, the VolumeSnapshot will remain unbound until the requested VolumeSnapshotContent object is created.

Persistent Volume Claim as Snapshot Source Protection

The purpose of this protection is to ensure that in-use PersistentVolumeClaim API objects are not removed from the system while a snapshot is being taken from it (as this may result in data loss).

While a snapshot is being taken of a PersistentVolumeClaim, that PersistentVolumeClaim is in-use. If you delete a PersistentVolumeClaim API object in active use as a snapshot source, the PersistentVolumeClaim object is not removed immediately. Instead, removal of the PersistentVolumeClaim object is postponed until the snapshot is readyToUse or aborted.

Delete

Deletion is triggered by deleting the VolumeSnapshot object, and the DeletionPolicy will be followed. If the DeletionPolicy is Delete, then the underlying storage snapshot will be deleted along with the VolumeSnapshotContent object. If the DeletionPolicy is Retain, then both the underlying snapshot and VolumeSnapshotContent remain.

VolumeSnapshots

Each VolumeSnapshot contains a spec and a status.

apiVersion: snapshot.storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: VolumeSnapshot
metadata:
  name: new-snapshot-test
spec:
  volumeSnapshotClassName: csi-hostpath-snapclass
  source:
    persistentVolumeClaimName: pvc-test

persistentVolumeClaimName is the name of the PersistentVolumeClaim data source for the snapshot. This field is required for dynamically provisioning a snapshot.

A volume snapshot can request a particular class by specifying the name of a VolumeSnapshotClass using the attribute volumeSnapshotClassName. If nothing is set, then the default class is used if available.

For pre-provisioned snapshots, you need to specify a volumeSnapshotContentName as the source for the snapshot as shown in the following example. The volumeSnapshotContentName source field is required for pre-provisioned snapshots.

apiVersion: snapshot.storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: VolumeSnapshot
metadata:
  name: test-snapshot
spec:
  source:
    volumeSnapshotContentName: test-content

Volume Snapshot Contents

Each VolumeSnapshotContent contains a spec and status. In dynamic provisioning, the snapshot common controller creates VolumeSnapshotContent objects. Here is an example:

apiVersion: snapshot.storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: VolumeSnapshotContent
metadata:
  name: snapcontent-72d9a349-aacd-42d2-a240-d775650d2455
spec:
  deletionPolicy: Delete
  driver: hostpath.csi.k8s.io
  source:
    volumeHandle: ee0cfb94-f8d4-11e9-b2d8-0242ac110002
  sourceVolumeMode: Filesystem
  volumeSnapshotClassName: csi-hostpath-snapclass
  volumeSnapshotRef:
    name: new-snapshot-test
    namespace: default
    uid: 72d9a349-aacd-42d2-a240-d775650d2455

volumeHandle is the unique identifier of the volume created on the storage backend and returned by the CSI driver during the volume creation. This field is required for dynamically provisioning a snapshot. It specifies the volume source of the snapshot.

For pre-provisioned snapshots, you (as cluster administrator) are responsible for creating the VolumeSnapshotContent object as follows.

apiVersion: snapshot.storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: VolumeSnapshotContent
metadata:
  name: new-snapshot-content-test
spec:
  deletionPolicy: Delete
  driver: hostpath.csi.k8s.io
  source:
    snapshotHandle: 7bdd0de3-aaeb-11e8-9aae-0242ac110002
  sourceVolumeMode: Filesystem
  volumeSnapshotRef:
    name: new-snapshot-test
    namespace: default

snapshotHandle is the unique identifier of the volume snapshot created on the storage backend. This field is required for the pre-provisioned snapshots. It specifies the CSI snapshot id on the storage system that this VolumeSnapshotContent represents.

sourceVolumeMode is the mode of the volume whose snapshot is taken. The value of the sourceVolumeMode field can be either Filesystem or Block. If the source volume mode is not specified, Kubernetes treats the snapshot as if the source volume's mode is unknown.

volumeSnapshotRef is the reference of the corresponding VolumeSnapshot. Note that when the VolumeSnapshotContent is being created as a pre-provisioned snapshot, the VolumeSnapshot referenced in volumeSnapshotRef might not exist yet.

Converting the volume mode of a Snapshot

If the VolumeSnapshots API installed on your cluster supports the sourceVolumeMode field, then the API has the capability to prevent unauthorized users from converting the mode of a volume.

To check if your cluster has capability for this feature, run the following command:

$ kubectl get crd volumesnapshotcontent -o yaml

If you want to allow users to create a PersistentVolumeClaim from an existing VolumeSnapshot, but with a different volume mode than the source, the annotation snapshot.storage.kubernetes.io/allow-volume-mode-change: "true"needs to be added to the VolumeSnapshotContent that corresponds to the VolumeSnapshot.

For pre-provisioned snapshots, spec.sourceVolumeMode needs to be populated by the cluster administrator.

An example VolumeSnapshotContent resource with this feature enabled would look like:

apiVersion: snapshot.storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: VolumeSnapshotContent
metadata:
  name: new-snapshot-content-test
  annotations:
    - snapshot.storage.kubernetes.io/allow-volume-mode-change: "true"
spec:
  deletionPolicy: Delete
  driver: hostpath.csi.k8s.io
  source:
    snapshotHandle: 7bdd0de3-aaeb-11e8-9aae-0242ac110002
  sourceVolumeMode: Filesystem
  volumeSnapshotRef:
    name: new-snapshot-test
    namespace: default

Provisioning Volumes from Snapshots

You can provision a new volume, pre-populated with data from a snapshot, by using the dataSource field in the PersistentVolumeClaim object.

For more details, see Volume Snapshot and Restore Volume from Snapshot.

6.9 - Volume Snapshot Classes

This document describes the concept of VolumeSnapshotClass in Kubernetes. Familiarity with volume snapshots and storage classes is suggested.

Introduction

Just like StorageClass provides a way for administrators to describe the "classes" of storage they offer when provisioning a volume, VolumeSnapshotClass provides a way to describe the "classes" of storage when provisioning a volume snapshot.

The VolumeSnapshotClass Resource

Each VolumeSnapshotClass contains the fields driver, deletionPolicy, and parameters, which are used when a VolumeSnapshot belonging to the class needs to be dynamically provisioned.

The name of a VolumeSnapshotClass object is significant, and is how users can request a particular class. Administrators set the name and other parameters of a class when first creating VolumeSnapshotClass objects, and the objects cannot be updated once they are created.

apiVersion: snapshot.storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: VolumeSnapshotClass
metadata:
  name: csi-hostpath-snapclass
driver: hostpath.csi.k8s.io
deletionPolicy: Delete
parameters:

Administrators can specify a default VolumeSnapshotClass for VolumeSnapshots that don't request any particular class to bind to by adding the snapshot.storage.kubernetes.io/is-default-class: "true" annotation:

apiVersion: snapshot.storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: VolumeSnapshotClass
metadata:
  name: csi-hostpath-snapclass
  annotations:
    snapshot.storage.kubernetes.io/is-default-class: "true"
driver: hostpath.csi.k8s.io
deletionPolicy: Delete
parameters:

Driver

Volume snapshot classes have a driver that determines what CSI volume plugin is used for provisioning VolumeSnapshots. This field must be specified.

DeletionPolicy

Volume snapshot classes have a deletionPolicy. It enables you to configure what happens to a VolumeSnapshotContent when the VolumeSnapshot object it is bound to is to be deleted. The deletionPolicy of a volume snapshot class can either be Retain or Delete. This field must be specified.

If the deletionPolicy is Delete, then the underlying storage snapshot will be deleted along with the VolumeSnapshotContent object. If the deletionPolicy is Retain, then both the underlying snapshot and VolumeSnapshotContent remain.

Parameters

Volume snapshot classes have parameters that describe volume snapshots belonging to the volume snapshot class. Different parameters may be accepted depending on the driver.

6.10 - CSI Volume Cloning

This document describes the concept of cloning existing CSI Volumes in Kubernetes. Familiarity with Volumes is suggested.

Introduction

The CSI Volume Cloning feature adds support for specifying existing PVCs in the dataSource field to indicate a user would like to clone a Volume.

A Clone is defined as a duplicate of an existing Kubernetes Volume that can be consumed as any standard Volume would be. The only difference is that upon provisioning, rather than creating a "new" empty Volume, the back end device creates an exact duplicate of the specified Volume.

The implementation of cloning, from the perspective of the Kubernetes API, adds the ability to specify an existing PVC as a dataSource during new PVC creation. The source PVC must be bound and available (not in use).

Users need to be aware of the following when using this feature:

  • Cloning support (VolumePVCDataSource) is only available for CSI drivers.
  • Cloning support is only available for dynamic provisioners.
  • CSI drivers may or may not have implemented the volume cloning functionality.
  • You can only clone a PVC when it exists in the same namespace as the destination PVC (source and destination must be in the same namespace).
  • Cloning is supported with a different Storage Class.
    • Destination volume can be the same or a different storage class as the source.
    • Default storage class can be used and storageClassName omitted in the spec.
  • Cloning can only be performed between two volumes that use the same VolumeMode setting (if you request a block mode volume, the source MUST also be block mode)

Provisioning

Clones are provisioned like any other PVC with the exception of adding a dataSource that references an existing PVC in the same namespace.

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
    name: clone-of-pvc-1
    namespace: myns
spec:
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  storageClassName: cloning
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 5Gi
  dataSource:
    kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
    name: pvc-1

The result is a new PVC with the name clone-of-pvc-1 that has the exact same content as the specified source pvc-1.

Usage

Upon availability of the new PVC, the cloned PVC is consumed the same as other PVC. It's also expected at this point that the newly created PVC is an independent object. It can be consumed, cloned, snapshotted, or deleted independently and without consideration for it's original dataSource PVC. This also implies that the source is not linked in any way to the newly created clone, it may also be modified or deleted without affecting the newly created clone.

6.11 - Storage Capacity

Storage capacity is limited and may vary depending on the node on which a pod runs: network-attached storage might not be accessible by all nodes, or storage is local to a node to begin with.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

This page describes how Kubernetes keeps track of storage capacity and how the scheduler uses that information to schedule Pods onto nodes that have access to enough storage capacity for the remaining missing volumes. Without storage capacity tracking, the scheduler may choose a node that doesn't have enough capacity to provision a volume and multiple scheduling retries will be needed.

Before you begin

Kubernetes v1.32 includes cluster-level API support for storage capacity tracking. To use this you must also be using a CSI driver that supports capacity tracking. Consult the documentation for the CSI drivers that you use to find out whether this support is available and, if so, how to use it. If you are not running Kubernetes v1.32, check the documentation for that version of Kubernetes.

API

There are two API extensions for this feature:

  • CSIStorageCapacity objects: these get produced by a CSI driver in the namespace where the driver is installed. Each object contains capacity information for one storage class and defines which nodes have access to that storage.
  • The CSIDriverSpec.StorageCapacity field: when set to true, the Kubernetes scheduler will consider storage capacity for volumes that use the CSI driver.

Scheduling

Storage capacity information is used by the Kubernetes scheduler if:

  • a Pod uses a volume that has not been created yet,
  • that volume uses a StorageClass which references a CSI driver and uses WaitForFirstConsumer volume binding mode, and
  • the CSIDriver object for the driver has StorageCapacity set to true.

In that case, the scheduler only considers nodes for the Pod which have enough storage available to them. This check is very simplistic and only compares the size of the volume against the capacity listed in CSIStorageCapacity objects with a topology that includes the node.

For volumes with Immediate volume binding mode, the storage driver decides where to create the volume, independently of Pods that will use the volume. The scheduler then schedules Pods onto nodes where the volume is available after the volume has been created.

For CSI ephemeral volumes, scheduling always happens without considering storage capacity. This is based on the assumption that this volume type is only used by special CSI drivers which are local to a node and do not need significant resources there.

Rescheduling

When a node has been selected for a Pod with WaitForFirstConsumer volumes, that decision is still tentative. The next step is that the CSI storage driver gets asked to create the volume with a hint that the volume is supposed to be available on the selected node.

Because Kubernetes might have chosen a node based on out-dated capacity information, it is possible that the volume cannot really be created. The node selection is then reset and the Kubernetes scheduler tries again to find a node for the Pod.

Limitations

Storage capacity tracking increases the chance that scheduling works on the first try, but cannot guarantee this because the scheduler has to decide based on potentially out-dated information. Usually, the same retry mechanism as for scheduling without any storage capacity information handles scheduling failures.

One situation where scheduling can fail permanently is when a Pod uses multiple volumes: one volume might have been created already in a topology segment which then does not have enough capacity left for another volume. Manual intervention is necessary to recover from this, for example by increasing capacity or deleting the volume that was already created.

What's next

6.12 - Node-specific Volume Limits

This page describes the maximum number of volumes that can be attached to a Node for various cloud providers.

Cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft typically have a limit on how many volumes can be attached to a Node. It is important for Kubernetes to respect those limits. Otherwise, Pods scheduled on a Node could get stuck waiting for volumes to attach.

Kubernetes default limits

The Kubernetes scheduler has default limits on the number of volumes that can be attached to a Node:

Cloud serviceMaximum volumes per Node
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)39
Google Persistent Disk16
Microsoft Azure Disk Storage16

Custom limits

You can change these limits by setting the value of the KUBE_MAX_PD_VOLS environment variable, and then starting the scheduler. CSI drivers might have a different procedure, see their documentation on how to customize their limits.

Use caution if you set a limit that is higher than the default limit. Consult the cloud provider's documentation to make sure that Nodes can actually support the limit you set.

The limit applies to the entire cluster, so it affects all Nodes.

Dynamic volume limits

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.17 [stable]

Dynamic volume limits are supported for following volume types.

  • Amazon EBS
  • Google Persistent Disk
  • Azure Disk
  • CSI

For volumes managed by in-tree volume plugins, Kubernetes automatically determines the Node type and enforces the appropriate maximum number of volumes for the node. For example:

  • On Google Compute Engine, up to 127 volumes can be attached to a node, depending on the node type.

  • For Amazon EBS disks on M5,C5,R5,T3 and Z1D instance types, Kubernetes allows only 25 volumes to be attached to a Node. For other instance types on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Kubernetes allows 39 volumes to be attached to a Node.

  • On Azure, up to 64 disks can be attached to a node, depending on the node type. For more details, refer to Sizes for virtual machines in Azure.

  • If a CSI storage driver advertises a maximum number of volumes for a Node (using NodeGetInfo), the kube-scheduler honors that limit. Refer to the CSI specifications for details.

  • For volumes managed by in-tree plugins that have been migrated to a CSI driver, the maximum number of volumes will be the one reported by the CSI driver.

6.13 - Volume Health Monitoring

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.21 [alpha]

CSI volume health monitoring allows CSI Drivers to detect abnormal volume conditions from the underlying storage systems and report them as events on PVCs or Pods.

Volume health monitoring

Kubernetes volume health monitoring is part of how Kubernetes implements the Container Storage Interface (CSI). Volume health monitoring feature is implemented in two components: an External Health Monitor controller, and the kubelet.

If a CSI Driver supports Volume Health Monitoring feature from the controller side, an event will be reported on the related PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) when an abnormal volume condition is detected on a CSI volume.

The External Health Monitor controller also watches for node failure events. You can enable node failure monitoring by setting the enable-node-watcher flag to true. When the external health monitor detects a node failure event, the controller reports an Event will be reported on the PVC to indicate that pods using this PVC are on a failed node.

If a CSI Driver supports Volume Health Monitoring feature from the node side, an Event will be reported on every Pod using the PVC when an abnormal volume condition is detected on a CSI volume. In addition, Volume Health information is exposed as Kubelet VolumeStats metrics. A new metric kubelet_volume_stats_health_status_abnormal is added. This metric includes two labels: namespace and persistentvolumeclaim. The count is either 1 or 0. 1 indicates the volume is unhealthy, 0 indicates volume is healthy. For more information, please check KEP.

What's next

See the CSI driver documentation to find out which CSI drivers have implemented this feature.

6.14 - Windows Storage

This page provides an storage overview specific to the Windows operating system.

Persistent storage

Windows has a layered filesystem driver to mount container layers and create a copy filesystem based on NTFS. All file paths in the container are resolved only within the context of that container.

  • With Docker, volume mounts can only target a directory in the container, and not an individual file. This limitation does not apply to containerd.
  • Volume mounts cannot project files or directories back to the host filesystem.
  • Read-only filesystems are not supported because write access is always required for the Windows registry and SAM database. However, read-only volumes are supported.
  • Volume user-masks and permissions are not available. Because the SAM is not shared between the host & container, there's no mapping between them. All permissions are resolved within the context of the container.

As a result, the following storage functionality is not supported on Windows nodes:

  • Volume subpath mounts: only the entire volume can be mounted in a Windows container
  • Subpath volume mounting for Secrets
  • Host mount projection
  • Read-only root filesystem (mapped volumes still support readOnly)
  • Block device mapping
  • Memory as the storage medium (for example, emptyDir.medium set to Memory)
  • File system features like uid/gid; per-user Linux filesystem permissions
  • Setting secret permissions with DefaultMode (due to UID/GID dependency)
  • NFS based storage/volume support
  • Expanding the mounted volume (resizefs)

Kubernetes volumes enable complex applications, with data persistence and Pod volume sharing requirements, to be deployed on Kubernetes. Management of persistent volumes associated with a specific storage back-end or protocol includes actions such as provisioning/de-provisioning/resizing of volumes, attaching/detaching a volume to/from a Kubernetes node and mounting/dismounting a volume to/from individual containers in a pod that needs to persist data.

Volume management components are shipped as Kubernetes volume plugin. The following broad classes of Kubernetes volume plugins are supported on Windows:

In-tree volume plugins

The following in-tree plugins support persistent storage on Windows nodes:

7 - Configuration

Resources that Kubernetes provides for configuring Pods.

7.1 - Configuration Best Practices

This document highlights and consolidates configuration best practices that are introduced throughout the user guide, Getting Started documentation, and examples.

This is a living document. If you think of something that is not on this list but might be useful to others, please don't hesitate to file an issue or submit a PR.

General Configuration Tips

  • When defining configurations, specify the latest stable API version.

  • Configuration files should be stored in version control before being pushed to the cluster. This allows you to quickly roll back a configuration change if necessary. It also aids cluster re-creation and restoration.

  • Write your configuration files using YAML rather than JSON. Though these formats can be used interchangeably in almost all scenarios, YAML tends to be more user-friendly.

  • Group related objects into a single file whenever it makes sense. One file is often easier to manage than several. See the guestbook-all-in-one.yaml file as an example of this syntax.

  • Note also that many kubectl commands can be called on a directory. For example, you can call kubectl apply on a directory of config files.

  • Don't specify default values unnecessarily: simple, minimal configuration will make errors less likely.

  • Put object descriptions in annotations, to allow better introspection.

"Naked" Pods versus ReplicaSets, Deployments, and Jobs

  • Don't use naked Pods (that is, Pods not bound to a ReplicaSet or Deployment) if you can avoid it. Naked Pods will not be rescheduled in the event of a node failure.

    A Deployment, which both creates a ReplicaSet to ensure that the desired number of Pods is always available, and specifies a strategy to replace Pods (such as RollingUpdate), is almost always preferable to creating Pods directly, except for some explicit restartPolicy: Never scenarios. A Job may also be appropriate.

Services

  • Create a Service before its corresponding backend workloads (Deployments or ReplicaSets), and before any workloads that need to access it. When Kubernetes starts a container, it provides environment variables pointing to all the Services which were running when the container was started. For example, if a Service named foo exists, all containers will get the following variables in their initial environment:

    FOO_SERVICE_HOST=<the host the Service is running on>
FOO_SERVICE_PORT=<the port the Service is running on>

    This does imply an ordering requirement - any Service that a Pod wants to access must be created before the Pod itself, or else the environment variables will not be populated. DNS does not have this restriction.

  • An optional (though strongly recommended) cluster add-on is a DNS server. The DNS server watches the Kubernetes API for new Services and creates a set of DNS records for each. If DNS has been enabled throughout the cluster then all Pods should be able to do name resolution of Services automatically.

  • Don't specify a hostPort for a Pod unless it is absolutely necessary. When you bind a Pod to a hostPort, it limits the number of places the Pod can be scheduled, because each <hostIP, hostPort, protocol> combination must be unique. If you don't specify the hostIP and protocol explicitly, Kubernetes will use 0.0.0.0 as the default hostIP and TCP as the default protocol.

    If you only need access to the port for debugging purposes, you can use the apiserver proxy or kubectl port-forward.

    If you explicitly need to expose a Pod's port on the node, consider using a NodePort Service before resorting to hostPort.

  • Avoid using hostNetwork, for the same reasons as hostPort.

  • Use headless Services (which have a ClusterIP of None) for service discovery when you don't need kube-proxy load balancing.

Using Labels

  • Define and use labels that identify semantic attributes of your application or Deployment, such as { app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp, tier: frontend, phase: test, deployment: v3 }. You can use these labels to select the appropriate Pods for other resources; for example, a Service that selects all tier: frontend Pods, or all phase: test components of app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp. See the guestbook app for examples of this approach.

    A Service can be made to span multiple Deployments by omitting release-specific labels from its selector. When you need to update a running service without downtime, use a Deployment.

    A desired state of an object is described by a Deployment, and if changes to that spec are applied, the deployment controller changes the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate.

  • Use the Kubernetes common labels for common use cases. These standardized labels enrich the metadata in a way that allows tools, including kubectl and dashboard, to work in an interoperable way.

  • You can manipulate labels for debugging. Because Kubernetes controllers (such as ReplicaSet) and Services match to Pods using selector labels, removing the relevant labels from a Pod will stop it from being considered by a controller or from being served traffic by a Service. If you remove the labels of an existing Pod, its controller will create a new Pod to take its place. This is a useful way to debug a previously "live" Pod in a "quarantine" environment. To interactively remove or add labels, use kubectl label.

Using kubectl

  • Use kubectl apply -f <directory>. This looks for Kubernetes configuration in all .yaml, .yml, and .json files in <directory> and passes it to apply.

  • Use label selectors for get and delete operations instead of specific object names. See the sections on label selectors and using labels effectively.

  • Use kubectl create deployment and kubectl expose to quickly create single-container Deployments and Services. See Use a Service to Access an Application in a Cluster for an example.

7.2 - ConfigMaps

A ConfigMap is an API object used to store non-confidential data in key-value pairs. Pods can consume ConfigMaps as environment variables, command-line arguments, or as configuration files in a volume.

A ConfigMap allows you to decouple environment-specific configuration from your container images, so that your applications are easily portable.

Motivation

Use a ConfigMap for setting configuration data separately from application code.

For example, imagine that you are developing an application that you can run on your own computer (for development) and in the cloud (to handle real traffic). You write the code to look in an environment variable named DATABASE_HOST. Locally, you set that variable to localhost. In the cloud, you set it to refer to a Kubernetes Service that exposes the database component to your cluster. This lets you fetch a container image running in the cloud and debug the exact same code locally if needed.

ConfigMap object

A ConfigMap is an API object that lets you store configuration for other objects to use. Unlike most Kubernetes objects that have a spec, a ConfigMap has data and binaryData fields. These fields accept key-value pairs as their values. Both the data field and the binaryData are optional. The data field is designed to contain UTF-8 strings while the binaryData field is designed to contain binary data as base64-encoded strings.

The name of a ConfigMap must be a valid DNS subdomain name.

Each key under the data or the binaryData field must consist of alphanumeric characters, -, _ or .. The keys stored in data must not overlap with the keys in the binaryData field.

Starting from v1.19, you can add an immutable field to a ConfigMap definition to create an immutable ConfigMap.

ConfigMaps and Pods

You can write a Pod spec that refers to a ConfigMap and configures the container(s) in that Pod based on the data in the ConfigMap. The Pod and the ConfigMap must be in the same namespace.

Here's an example ConfigMap that has some keys with single values, and other keys where the value looks like a fragment of a configuration format.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: game-demo
data:
  # property-like keys; each key maps to a simple value
  player_initial_lives: "3"
  ui_properties_file_name: "user-interface.properties"

  # file-like keys
  game.properties: |
    enemy.types=aliens,monsters
    player.maximum-lives=5    
  user-interface.properties: |
    color.good=purple
    color.bad=yellow
    allow.textmode=true

There are four different ways that you can use a ConfigMap to configure a container inside a Pod:

  1. Inside a container command and args
  2. Environment variables for a container
  3. Add a file in read-only volume, for the application to read
  4. Write code to run inside the Pod that uses the Kubernetes API to read a ConfigMap

These different methods lend themselves to different ways of modeling the data being consumed. For the first three methods, the kubelet uses the data from the ConfigMap when it launches container(s) for a Pod.

The fourth method means you have to write code to read the ConfigMap and its data. However, because you're using the Kubernetes API directly, your application can subscribe to get updates whenever the ConfigMap changes, and react when that happens. By accessing the Kubernetes API directly, this technique also lets you access a ConfigMap in a different namespace.

Here's an example Pod that uses values from game-demo to configure a Pod:

configmap/configure-pod.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: configmap-demo-pod
spec:
  containers:
    - name: demo
      image: alpine
      command: ["sleep", "3600"]
      env:
        # Define the environment variable
        - name: PLAYER_INITIAL_LIVES # Notice that the case is different here
                                     # from the key name in the ConfigMap.
          valueFrom:
            configMapKeyRef:
              name: game-demo           # The ConfigMap this value comes from.
              key: player_initial_lives # The key to fetch.
        - name: UI_PROPERTIES_FILE_NAME
          valueFrom:
            configMapKeyRef:
              name: game-demo
              key: ui_properties_file_name
      volumeMounts:
      - name: config
        mountPath: "/config"
        readOnly: true
  volumes:
  # You set volumes at the Pod level, then mount them into containers inside that Pod
  - name: config
    configMap:
      # Provide the name of the ConfigMap you want to mount.
      name: game-demo
      # An array of keys from the ConfigMap to create as files
      items:
      - key: "game.properties"
        path: "game.properties"
      - key: "user-interface.properties"
        path: "user-interface.properties"

A ConfigMap doesn't differentiate between single line property values and multi-line file-like values. What matters is how Pods and other objects consume those values.

For this example, defining a volume and mounting it inside the demo container as /config creates two files, /config/game.properties and /config/user-interface.properties, even though there are four keys in the ConfigMap. This is because the Pod definition specifies an items array in the volumes section. If you omit the items array entirely, every key in the ConfigMap becomes a file with the same name as the key, and you get 4 files.

Using ConfigMaps

ConfigMaps can be mounted as data volumes. ConfigMaps can also be used by other parts of the system, without being directly exposed to the Pod. For example, ConfigMaps can hold data that other parts of the system should use for configuration.

The most common way to use ConfigMaps is to configure settings for containers running in a Pod in the same namespace. You can also use a ConfigMap separately.

For example, you might encounter addons or operators that adjust their behavior based on a ConfigMap.

Using ConfigMaps as files from a Pod

To consume a ConfigMap in a volume in a Pod:

  1. Create a ConfigMap or use an existing one. Multiple Pods can reference the same ConfigMap.
  2. Modify your Pod definition to add a volume under .spec.volumes[]. Name the volume anything, and have a .spec.volumes[].configMap.name field set to reference your ConfigMap object.
  3. Add a .spec.containers[].volumeMounts[] to each container that needs the ConfigMap. Specify .spec.containers[].volumeMounts[].readOnly = true and .spec.containers[].volumeMounts[].mountPath to an unused directory name where you would like the ConfigMap to appear.
  4. Modify your image or command line so that the program looks for files in that directory. Each key in the ConfigMap data map becomes the filename under mountPath.

This is an example of a Pod that mounts a ConfigMap in a volume:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: mypod
spec:
  containers:
  - name: mypod
    image: redis
    volumeMounts:
    - name: foo
      mountPath: "/etc/foo"
      readOnly: true
  volumes:
  - name: foo
    configMap:
      name: myconfigmap

Each ConfigMap you want to use needs to be referred to in .spec.volumes.

If there are multiple containers in the Pod, then each container needs its own volumeMounts block, but only one .spec.volumes is needed per ConfigMap.

Mounted ConfigMaps are updated automatically

When a ConfigMap currently consumed in a volume is updated, projected keys are eventually updated as well. The kubelet checks whether the mounted ConfigMap is fresh on every periodic sync. However, the kubelet uses its local cache for getting the current value of the ConfigMap. The type of the cache is configurable using the configMapAndSecretChangeDetectionStrategy field in the KubeletConfiguration struct. A ConfigMap can be either propagated by watch (default), ttl-based, or by redirecting all requests directly to the API server. As a result, the total delay from the moment when the ConfigMap is updated to the moment when new keys are projected to the Pod can be as long as the kubelet sync period + cache propagation delay, where the cache propagation delay depends on the chosen cache type (it equals to watch propagation delay, ttl of cache, or zero correspondingly).

ConfigMaps consumed as environment variables are not updated automatically and require a pod restart.

Using Configmaps as environment variables

To use a Configmap in an environment variable in a Pod:

  1. For each container in your Pod specification, add an environment variable for each Configmap key that you want to use to the env[].valueFrom.configMapKeyRef field.
  2. Modify your image and/or command line so that the program looks for values in the specified environment variables.

This is an example of defining a ConfigMap as a pod environment variable:

The following ConfigMap (myconfigmap.yaml) stores two properties: username and access_level:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: myconfigmap
data:
  username: k8s-admin
  access_level: "1"

The following command will create the ConfigMap object:

kubectl apply -f myconfigmap.yaml

The following Pod consumes the content of the ConfigMap as environment variables:

configmap/env-configmap.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: env-configmap
spec:
  containers:
    - name: app
      command: ["/bin/sh", "-c", "printenv"]
      image: busybox:latest
      envFrom:
        - configMapRef:
            name: myconfigmap

The envFrom field instructs Kubernetes to create environment variables from the sources nested within it. The inner configMapRef refers to a ConfigMap by its name and selects all its key-value pairs. Add the Pod to your cluster, then retrieve its logs to see the output from the printenv command. This should confirm that the two key-value pairs from the ConfigMap have been set as environment variables:

kubectl apply -f env-configmap.yaml

kubectl logs pod/ env-configmap

The output is similar to this:

...
username: "k8s-admin"
access_level: "1"
...

Sometimes a Pod won't require access to all the values in a ConfigMap. For example, you could have another Pod which only uses the username value from the ConfigMap. For this use case, you can use the env.valueFrom syntax instead, which lets you select individual keys in a ConfigMap. The name of the environment variable can also be different from the key within the ConfigMap. For example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: env-configmap
spec:
  containers:
  - name: envars-test-container
    image: nginx
    env:
    - name: CONFIGMAP_USERNAME
      valueFrom:
        configMapKeyRef:
          name: myconfigmap
          key: username

In the Pod created from this manifest, you will see that the environment variable CONFIGMAP_USERNAME is set to the value of the username value from the ConfigMap. Other keys from the ConfigMap data are not copied into the environment.

It's important to note that the range of characters allowed for environment variable names in pods is restricted. If any keys do not meet the rules, those keys are not made available to your container, though the Pod is allowed to start.

Immutable ConfigMaps

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.21 [stable]

The Kubernetes feature Immutable Secrets and ConfigMaps provides an option to set individual Secrets and ConfigMaps as immutable. For clusters that extensively use ConfigMaps (at least tens of thousands of unique ConfigMap to Pod mounts), preventing changes to their data has the following advantages:

  • protects you from accidental (or unwanted) updates that could cause applications outages
  • improves performance of your cluster by significantly reducing load on kube-apiserver, by closing watches for ConfigMaps marked as immutable.

You can create an immutable ConfigMap by setting the immutable field to true. For example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  ...
data:
  ...
immutable: true

Once a ConfigMap is marked as immutable, it is not possible to revert this change nor to mutate the contents of the data or the binaryData field. You can only delete and recreate the ConfigMap. Because existing Pods maintain a mount point to the deleted ConfigMap, it is recommended to recreate these pods.

What's next

7.3 - Secrets

A Secret is an object that contains a small amount of sensitive data such as a password, a token, or a key. Such information might otherwise be put in a Pod specification or in a container image. Using a Secret means that you don't need to include confidential data in your application code.

Because Secrets can be created independently of the Pods that use them, there is less risk of the Secret (and its data) being exposed during the workflow of creating, viewing, and editing Pods. Kubernetes, and applications that run in your cluster, can also take additional precautions with Secrets, such as avoiding writing sensitive data to nonvolatile storage.

Secrets are similar to ConfigMaps but are specifically intended to hold confidential data.

See Information security for Secrets for more details.

Uses for Secrets

You can use Secrets for purposes such as the following:

The Kubernetes control plane also uses Secrets; for example, bootstrap token Secrets are a mechanism to help automate node registration.

Use case: dotfiles in a secret volume

You can make your data "hidden" by defining a key that begins with a dot. This key represents a dotfile or "hidden" file. For example, when the following Secret is mounted into a volume, secret-volume, the volume will contain a single file, called .secret-file, and the dotfile-test-container will have this file present at the path /etc/secret-volume/.secret-file.

secret/dotfile-secret.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: dotfile-secret
data:
  .secret-file: dmFsdWUtMg0KDQo=
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: secret-dotfiles-pod
spec:
  volumes:
    - name: secret-volume
      secret:
        secretName: dotfile-secret
  containers:
    - name: dotfile-test-container
      image: registry.k8s.io/busybox
      command:
        - ls
        - "-l"
        - "/etc/secret-volume"
      volumeMounts:
        - name: secret-volume
          readOnly: true
          mountPath: "/etc/secret-volume"

Use case: Secret visible to one container in a Pod

Consider a program that needs to handle HTTP requests, do some complex business logic, and then sign some messages with an HMAC. Because it has complex application logic, there might be an unnoticed remote file reading exploit in the server, which could expose the private key to an attacker.

This could be divided into two processes in two containers: a frontend container which handles user interaction and business logic, but which cannot see the private key; and a signer container that can see the private key, and responds to simple signing requests from the frontend (for example, over localhost networking).

With this partitioned approach, an attacker now has to trick the application server into doing something rather arbitrary, which may be harder than getting it to read a file.

Alternatives to Secrets

Rather than using a Secret to protect confidential data, you can pick from alternatives.

Here are some of your options:

  • If your cloud-native component needs to authenticate to another application that you know is running within the same Kubernetes cluster, you can use a ServiceAccount and its tokens to identify your client.
  • There are third-party tools that you can run, either within or outside your cluster, that manage sensitive data. For example, a service that Pods access over HTTPS, that reveals a Secret if the client correctly authenticates (for example, with a ServiceAccount token).
  • For authentication, you can implement a custom signer for X.509 certificates, and use CertificateSigningRequests to let that custom signer issue certificates to Pods that need them.
  • You can use a device plugin to expose node-local encryption hardware to a specific Pod. For example, you can schedule trusted Pods onto nodes that provide a Trusted Platform Module, configured out-of-band.

You can also combine two or more of those options, including the option to use Secret objects themselves.

For example: implement (or deploy) an operator that fetches short-lived session tokens from an external service, and then creates Secrets based on those short-lived session tokens. Pods running in your cluster can make use of the session tokens, and operator ensures they are valid. This separation means that you can run Pods that are unaware of the exact mechanisms for issuing and refreshing those session tokens.

Types of Secret

When creating a Secret, you can specify its type using the type field of the Secret resource, or certain equivalent kubectl command line flags (if available). The Secret type is used to facilitate programmatic handling of the Secret data.

Kubernetes provides several built-in types for some common usage scenarios. These types vary in terms of the validations performed and the constraints Kubernetes imposes on them.

Built-in Type Usage
Opaque arbitrary user-defined data
kubernetes.io/service-account-token ServiceAccount token
kubernetes.io/dockercfg serialized ~/.dockercfg file
kubernetes.io/dockerconfigjson serialized ~/.docker/config.json file
kubernetes.io/basic-auth credentials for basic authentication
kubernetes.io/ssh-auth credentials for SSH authentication
kubernetes.io/tls data for a TLS client or server
bootstrap.kubernetes.io/token bootstrap token data

You can define and use your own Secret type by assigning a non-empty string as the type value for a Secret object (an empty string is treated as an Opaque type).

Kubernetes doesn't impose any constraints on the type name. However, if you are using one of the built-in types, you must meet all the requirements defined for that type.

If you are defining a type of Secret that's for public use, follow the convention and structure the Secret type to have your domain name before the name, separated by a /. For example: cloud-hosting.example.net/cloud-api-credentials.

Opaque Secrets

Opaque is the default Secret type if you don't explicitly specify a type in a Secret manifest. When you create a Secret using kubectl, you must use the generic subcommand to indicate an Opaque Secret type. For example, the following command creates an empty Secret of type Opaque:

kubectl create secret generic empty-secret
kubectl get secret empty-secret

The output looks like:

NAME           TYPE     DATA   AGE
empty-secret   Opaque   0      2m6s

The DATA column shows the number of data items stored in the Secret. In this case, 0 means you have created an empty Secret.

ServiceAccount token Secrets

A kubernetes.io/service-account-token type of Secret is used to store a token credential that identifies a ServiceAccount. This is a legacy mechanism that provides long-lived ServiceAccount credentials to Pods.

In Kubernetes v1.22 and later, the recommended approach is to obtain a short-lived, automatically rotating ServiceAccount token by using the TokenRequest API instead. You can get these short-lived tokens using the following methods:

When using this Secret type, you need to ensure that the kubernetes.io/service-account.name annotation is set to an existing ServiceAccount name. If you are creating both the ServiceAccount and the Secret objects, you should create the ServiceAccount object first.

After the Secret is created, a Kubernetes controller fills in some other fields such as the kubernetes.io/service-account.uid annotation, and the token key in the data field, which is populated with an authentication token.

The following example configuration declares a ServiceAccount token Secret:

secret/serviceaccount-token-secret.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: secret-sa-sample
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/service-account.name: "sa-name"
type: kubernetes.io/service-account-token
data:
  extra: YmFyCg==

After creating the Secret, wait for Kubernetes to populate the token key in the data field.

See the ServiceAccount documentation for more information on how ServiceAccounts work. You can also check the automountServiceAccountToken field and the serviceAccountName field of the Pod for information on referencing ServiceAccount credentials from within Pods.

Docker config Secrets

If you are creating a Secret to store credentials for accessing a container image registry, you must use one of the following type values for that Secret:

  • kubernetes.io/dockercfg: store a serialized ~/.dockercfg which is the legacy format for configuring Docker command line. The Secret data field contains a .dockercfg key whose value is the content of a base64 encoded ~/.dockercfg file.
  • kubernetes.io/dockerconfigjson: store a serialized JSON that follows the same format rules as the ~/.docker/config.json file, which is a new format for ~/.dockercfg. The Secret data field must contain a .dockerconfigjson key for which the value is the content of a base64 encoded ~/.docker/config.json file.

Below is an example for a kubernetes.io/dockercfg type of Secret:

secret/dockercfg-secret.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: secret-dockercfg
type: kubernetes.io/dockercfg
data:
  .dockercfg: |
    eyJhdXRocyI6eyJodHRwczovL2V4YW1wbGUvdjEvIjp7ImF1dGgiOiJvcGVuc2VzYW1lIn19fQo=

When you create Docker config Secrets using a manifest, the API server checks whether the expected key exists in the data field, and it verifies if the value provided can be parsed as a valid JSON. The API server doesn't validate if the JSON actually is a Docker config file.

You can also use kubectl to create a Secret for accessing a container registry, such as when you don't have a Docker configuration file:

kubectl create secret docker-registry secret-tiger-docker \
  --docker-email=tiger@acme.example \
  --docker-username=tiger \
  --docker-password=pass1234 \
  --docker-server=my-registry.example:5000

This command creates a Secret of type kubernetes.io/dockerconfigjson.

Retrieve the .data.dockerconfigjson field from that new Secret and decode the data:

kubectl get secret secret-tiger-docker -o jsonpath='{.data.*}' | base64 -d

The output is equivalent to the following JSON document (which is also a valid Docker configuration file):

{
  "auths": {
    "my-registry.example:5000": {
      "username": "tiger",
      "password": "pass1234",
      "email": "tiger@acme.example",
      "auth": "dGlnZXI6cGFzczEyMzQ="
    }
  }
}

Basic authentication Secret

The kubernetes.io/basic-auth type is provided for storing credentials needed for basic authentication. When using this Secret type, the data field of the Secret must contain one of the following two keys:

  • username: the user name for authentication
  • password: the password or token for authentication

Both values for the above two keys are base64 encoded strings. You can alternatively provide the clear text content using the stringData field in the Secret manifest.

The following manifest is an example of a basic authentication Secret:

secret/basicauth-secret.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: secret-basic-auth
type: kubernetes.io/basic-auth
stringData:
  username: admin # required field for kubernetes.io/basic-auth
  password: t0p-Secret # required field for kubernetes.io/basic-auth

The basic authentication Secret type is provided only for convenience. You can create an Opaque type for credentials used for basic authentication. However, using the defined and public Secret type (kubernetes.io/basic-auth) helps other people to understand the purpose of your Secret, and sets a convention for what key names to expect.

SSH authentication Secrets

The builtin type kubernetes.io/ssh-auth is provided for storing data used in SSH authentication. When using this Secret type, you will have to specify a ssh-privatekey key-value pair in the data (or stringData) field as the SSH credential to use.

The following manifest is an example of a Secret used for SSH public/private key authentication:

secret/ssh-auth-secret.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: secret-ssh-auth
type: kubernetes.io/ssh-auth
data:
  # the data is abbreviated in this example
  ssh-privatekey: |
    UG91cmluZzYlRW1vdGljb24lU2N1YmE=

The SSH authentication Secret type is provided only for convenience. You can create an Opaque type for credentials used for SSH authentication. However, using the defined and public Secret type (kubernetes.io/ssh-auth) helps other people to understand the purpose of your Secret, and sets a convention for what key names to expect. The Kubernetes API verifies that the required keys are set for a Secret of this type.

TLS Secrets

The kubernetes.io/tls Secret type is for storing a certificate and its associated key that are typically used for TLS.

One common use for TLS Secrets is to configure encryption in transit for an Ingress, but you can also use it with other resources or directly in your workload. When using this type of Secret, the tls.key and the tls.crt key must be provided in the data (or stringData) field of the Secret configuration, although the API server doesn't actually validate the values for each key.

As an alternative to using stringData, you can use the data field to provide the base64 encoded certificate and private key. For details, see Constraints on Secret names and data.

The following YAML contains an example config for a TLS Secret:

secret/tls-auth-secret.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: secret-tls
type: kubernetes.io/tls
data:
  # values are base64 encoded, which obscures them but does NOT provide
  # any useful level of confidentiality
  tls.crt: |
    LS0tLS1CRUdJTiBDRVJUSUZJQ0FURS0tLS0tCk1JSUNVakNDQWJzQ0FnMytNQTBHQ1NxR1NJYjNE
    UUVCQlFVQU1JR2JNUXN3Q1FZRFZRUUdFd0pLVURFT01Bd0cKQTFVRUNCTUZWRzlyZVc4eEVEQU9C
    Z05WQkFjVEIwTm9kVzh0YTNVeEVUQVBCZ05WQkFvVENFWnlZVzVyTkVSRQpNUmd3RmdZRFZRUUxF
    dzlYWldKRFpYSjBJRk4xY0hCdmNuUXhHREFXQmdOVkJBTVREMFp5WVc1ck5FUkVJRmRsCllpQkRR
    VEVqTUNFR0NTcUdTSWIzRFFFSkFSWVVjM1Z3Y0c5eWRFQm1jbUZ1YXpSa1pDNWpiMjB3SGhjTk1U
    TXcKTVRFeE1EUTFNVE01V2hjTk1UZ3dNVEV3TURRMU1UTTVXakJMTVFzd0NRWURWUVFHREFKS1VE
    RVBNQTBHQTFVRQpDQXdHWEZSdmEzbHZNUkV3RHdZRFZRUUtEQWhHY21GdWF6UkVSREVZTUJZR0Ex
    VUVBd3dQZDNkM0xtVjRZVzF3CmJHVXVZMjl0TUlHYU1BMEdDU3FHU0liM0RRRUJBUVVBQTRHSUFE
    Q0JoQUo5WThFaUhmeHhNL25PbjJTbkkxWHgKRHdPdEJEVDFKRjBReTliMVlKanV2YjdjaTEwZjVN
    Vm1UQllqMUZTVWZNOU1vejJDVVFZdW4yRFljV29IcFA4ZQpqSG1BUFVrNVd5cDJRN1ArMjh1bklI
    QkphVGZlQ09PekZSUFY2MEdTWWUzNmFScG04L3dVVm16eGFLOGtCOWVaCmhPN3F1TjdtSWQxL2pW
    cTNKODhDQXdFQUFUQU5CZ2txaGtpRzl3MEJBUVVGQUFPQmdRQU1meTQzeE15OHh3QTUKVjF2T2NS
    OEtyNWNaSXdtbFhCUU8xeFEzazlxSGtyNFlUY1JxTVQ5WjVKTm1rWHYxK2VSaGcwTi9WMW5NUTRZ
    RgpnWXcxbnlESnBnOTduZUV4VzQyeXVlMFlHSDYyV1hYUUhyOVNVREgrRlowVnQvRGZsdklVTWRj
    UUFEZjM4aU9zCjlQbG1kb3YrcE0vNCs5a1h5aDhSUEkzZXZ6OS9NQT09Ci0tLS0tRU5EIENFUlRJ
    RklDQVRFLS0tLS0K    
  # In this example, the key data is not a real PEM-encoded private key
  tls.key: |
    RXhhbXBsZSBkYXRhIGZvciB0aGUgVExTIGNydCBmaWVsZA==

The TLS Secret type is provided only for convenience. You can create an Opaque type for credentials used for TLS authentication. However, using the defined and public Secret type (kubernetes.io/tls) helps ensure the consistency of Secret format in your project. The API server verifies if the required keys are set for a Secret of this type.

To create a TLS Secret using kubectl, use the tls subcommand:

kubectl create secret tls my-tls-secret \
  --cert=path/to/cert/file \
  --key=path/to/key/file

The public/private key pair must exist before hand. The public key certificate for --cert must be .PEM encoded and must match the given private key for --key.

Bootstrap token Secrets

The bootstrap.kubernetes.io/token Secret type is for tokens used during the node bootstrap process. It stores tokens used to sign well-known ConfigMaps.

A bootstrap token Secret is usually created in the kube-system namespace and named in the form bootstrap-token-<token-id> where <token-id> is a 6 character string of the token ID.

As a Kubernetes manifest, a bootstrap token Secret might look like the following:

secret/bootstrap-token-secret-base64.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: bootstrap-token-5emitj
  namespace: kube-system
type: bootstrap.kubernetes.io/token
data:
  auth-extra-groups: c3lzdGVtOmJvb3RzdHJhcHBlcnM6a3ViZWFkbTpkZWZhdWx0LW5vZGUtdG9rZW4=
  expiration: MjAyMC0wOS0xM1QwNDozOToxMFo=
  token-id: NWVtaXRq
  token-secret: a3E0Z2lodnN6emduMXAwcg==
  usage-bootstrap-authentication: dHJ1ZQ==
  usage-bootstrap-signing: dHJ1ZQ==

A bootstrap token Secret has the following keys specified under data:

  • token-id: A random 6 character string as the token identifier. Required.
  • token-secret: A random 16 character string as the actual token Secret. Required.
  • description: A human-readable string that describes what the token is used for. Optional.
  • expiration: An absolute UTC time using RFC3339 specifying when the token should be expired. Optional.
  • usage-bootstrap-<usage>: A boolean flag indicating additional usage for the bootstrap token.
  • auth-extra-groups: A comma-separated list of group names that will be authenticated as in addition to the system:bootstrappers group.

You can alternatively provide the values in the stringData field of the Secret without base64 encoding them:

secret/bootstrap-token-secret-literal.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  # Note how the Secret is named
  name: bootstrap-token-5emitj
  # A bootstrap token Secret usually resides in the kube-system namespace
  namespace: kube-system
type: bootstrap.kubernetes.io/token
stringData:
  auth-extra-groups: "system:bootstrappers:kubeadm:default-node-token"
  expiration: "2020-09-13T04:39:10Z"
  # This token ID is used in the name
  token-id: "5emitj"
  token-secret: "kq4gihvszzgn1p0r"
  # This token can be used for authentication
  usage-bootstrap-authentication: "true"
  # and it can be used for signing
  usage-bootstrap-signing: "true"

Working with Secrets

Creating a Secret

There are several options to create a Secret:

Constraints on Secret names and data

The name of a Secret object must be a valid DNS subdomain name.

You can specify the data and/or the stringData field when creating a configuration file for a Secret. The data and the stringData fields are optional. The values for all keys in the data field have to be base64-encoded strings. If the conversion to base64 string is not desirable, you can choose to specify the stringData field instead, which accepts arbitrary strings as values.

The keys of data and stringData must consist of alphanumeric characters, -, _ or .. All key-value pairs in the stringData field are internally merged into the data field. If a key appears in both the data and the stringData field, the value specified in the stringData field takes precedence.

Size limit

Individual Secrets are limited to 1MiB in size. This is to discourage creation of very large Secrets that could exhaust the API server and kubelet memory. However, creation of many smaller Secrets could also exhaust memory. You can use a resource quota to limit the number of Secrets (or other resources) in a namespace.

Editing a Secret

You can edit an existing Secret unless it is immutable. To edit a Secret, use one of the following methods:

You can also edit the data in a Secret using the Kustomize tool. However, this method creates a new Secret object with the edited data.

Depending on how you created the Secret, as well as how the Secret is used in your Pods, updates to existing Secret objects are propagated automatically to Pods that use the data. For more information, refer to Using Secrets as files from a Pod section.

Using a Secret

Secrets can be mounted as data volumes or exposed as environment variables to be used by a container in a Pod. Secrets can also be used by other parts of the system, without being directly exposed to the Pod. For example, Secrets can hold credentials that other parts of the system should use to interact with external systems on your behalf.

Secret volume sources are validated to ensure that the specified object reference actually points to an object of type Secret. Therefore, a Secret needs to be created before any Pods that depend on it.

If the Secret cannot be fetched (perhaps because it does not exist, or due to a temporary lack of connection to the API server) the kubelet periodically retries running that Pod. The kubelet also reports an Event for that Pod, including details of the problem fetching the Secret.

Optional Secrets

When you reference a Secret in a Pod, you can mark the Secret as optional, such as in the following example. If an optional Secret doesn't exist, Kubernetes ignores it.

secret/optional-secret.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: mypod
spec:
  containers:
  - name: mypod
    image: redis
    volumeMounts:
    - name: foo
      mountPath: "/etc/foo"
      readOnly: true
  volumes:
  - name: foo
    secret:
      secretName: mysecret
      optional: true

By default, Secrets are required. None of a Pod's containers will start until all non-optional Secrets are available.

If a Pod references a specific key in a non-optional Secret and that Secret does exist, but is missing the named key, the Pod fails during startup.

Using Secrets as files from a Pod

If you want to access data from a Secret in a Pod, one way to do that is to have Kubernetes make the value of that Secret be available as a file inside the filesystem of one or more of the Pod's containers.

For instructions, refer to Create a Pod that has access to the secret data through a Volume.

When a volume contains data from a Secret, and that Secret is updated, Kubernetes tracks this and updates the data in the volume, using an eventually-consistent approach.

The kubelet keeps a cache of the current keys and values for the Secrets that are used in volumes for pods on that node. You can configure the way that the kubelet detects changes from the cached values. The configMapAndSecretChangeDetectionStrategy field in the kubelet configuration controls which strategy the kubelet uses. The default strategy is Watch.

Updates to Secrets can be either propagated by an API watch mechanism (the default), based on a cache with a defined time-to-live, or polled from the cluster API server on each kubelet synchronisation loop.

As a result, the total delay from the moment when the Secret is updated to the moment when new keys are projected to the Pod can be as long as the kubelet sync period + cache propagation delay, where the cache propagation delay depends on the chosen cache type (following the same order listed in the previous paragraph, these are: watch propagation delay, the configured cache TTL, or zero for direct polling).

Using Secrets as environment variables

To use a Secret in an environment variable in a Pod:

  1. For each container in your Pod specification, add an environment variable for each Secret key that you want to use to the env[].valueFrom.secretKeyRef field.
  2. Modify your image and/or command line so that the program looks for values in the specified environment variables.

For instructions, refer to Define container environment variables using Secret data.

It's important to note that the range of characters allowed for environment variable names in pods is restricted. If any keys do not meet the rules, those keys are not made available to your container, though the Pod is allowed to start.

Container image pull Secrets

If you want to fetch container images from a private repository, you need a way for the kubelet on each node to authenticate to that repository. You can configure image pull Secrets to make this possible. These Secrets are configured at the Pod level.

Using imagePullSecrets

The imagePullSecrets field is a list of references to Secrets in the same namespace. You can use an imagePullSecrets to pass a Secret that contains a Docker (or other) image registry password to the kubelet. The kubelet uses this information to pull a private image on behalf of your Pod. See the PodSpec API for more information about the imagePullSecrets field.

Manually specifying an imagePullSecret

You can learn how to specify imagePullSecrets from the container images documentation.

Arranging for imagePullSecrets to be automatically attached

You can manually create imagePullSecrets, and reference these from a ServiceAccount. Any Pods created with that ServiceAccount or created with that ServiceAccount by default, will get their imagePullSecrets field set to that of the service account. See Add ImagePullSecrets to a service account for a detailed explanation of that process.

Using Secrets with static Pods

You cannot use ConfigMaps or Secrets with static Pods.

Immutable Secrets

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.21 [stable]

Kubernetes lets you mark specific Secrets (and ConfigMaps) as immutable. Preventing changes to the data of an existing Secret has the following benefits:

  • protects you from accidental (or unwanted) updates that could cause applications outages
  • (for clusters that extensively use Secrets - at least tens of thousands of unique Secret to Pod mounts), switching to immutable Secrets improves the performance of your cluster by significantly reducing load on kube-apiserver. The kubelet does not need to maintain a [watch] on any Secrets that are marked as immutable.

Marking a Secret as immutable

You can create an immutable Secret by setting the immutable field to true. For example,

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata: ...
data: ...
immutable: true

You can also update any existing mutable Secret to make it immutable.

Information security for Secrets

Although ConfigMap and Secret work similarly, Kubernetes applies some additional protection for Secret objects.

Secrets often hold values that span a spectrum of importance, many of which can cause escalations within Kubernetes (e.g. service account tokens) and to external systems. Even if an individual app can reason about the power of the Secrets it expects to interact with, other apps within the same namespace can render those assumptions invalid.

A Secret is only sent to a node if a Pod on that node requires it. For mounting Secrets into Pods, the kubelet stores a copy of the data into a tmpfs so that the confidential data is not written to durable storage. Once the Pod that depends on the Secret is deleted, the kubelet deletes its local copy of the confidential data from the Secret.

There may be several containers in a Pod. By default, containers you define only have access to the default ServiceAccount and its related Secret. You must explicitly define environment variables or map a volume into a container in order to provide access to any other Secret.

There may be Secrets for several Pods on the same node. However, only the Secrets that a Pod requests are potentially visible within its containers. Therefore, one Pod does not have access to the Secrets of another Pod.

Configure least-privilege access to Secrets

To enhance the security measures around Secrets, Kubernetes provides a mechanism: you can annotate a ServiceAccount as kubernetes.io/enforce-mountable-secrets: "true".

For more information, you can refer to the documentation about this annotation.

What's next

7.4 - Liveness, Readiness, and Startup Probes

Kubernetes has various types of probes:

Liveness probe

Liveness probes determine when to restart a container. For example, liveness probes could catch a deadlock when an application is running but unable to make progress.

If a container fails its liveness probe repeatedly, the kubelet restarts the container.

Liveness probes do not wait for readiness probes to succeed. If you want to wait before executing a liveness probe, you can either define initialDelaySeconds or use a startup probe.

Readiness probe

Readiness probes determine when a container is ready to start accepting traffic. This is useful when waiting for an application to perform time-consuming initial tasks, such as establishing network connections, loading files, and warming caches.

If the readiness probe returns a failed state, Kubernetes removes the pod from all matching service endpoints.

Readiness probes run on the container during its whole lifecycle.

Startup probe

A startup probe verifies whether the application within a container is started. This can be used to adopt liveness checks on slow starting containers, avoiding them getting killed by the kubelet before they are up and running.

If such a probe is configured, it disables liveness and readiness checks until it succeeds.

This type of probe is only executed at startup, unlike liveness and readiness probes, which are run periodically.

7.5 - Resource Management for Pods and Containers

When you specify a Pod, you can optionally specify how much of each resource a container needs. The most common resources to specify are CPU and memory (RAM); there are others.

When you specify the resource request for containers in a Pod, the kube-scheduler uses this information to decide which node to place the Pod on. When you specify a resource limit for a container, the kubelet enforces those limits so that the running container is not allowed to use more of that resource than the limit you set. The kubelet also reserves at least the request amount of that system resource specifically for that container to use.

Requests and limits

If the node where a Pod is running has enough of a resource available, it's possible (and allowed) for a container to use more resource than its request for that resource specifies.

For example, if you set a memory request of 256 MiB for a container, and that container is in a Pod scheduled to a Node with 8GiB of memory and no other Pods, then the container can try to use more RAM.

Limits are a different story. Both cpu and memory limits are applied by the kubelet (and container runtime), and are ultimately enforced by the kernel. On Linux nodes, the Linux kernel enforces limits with cgroups. The behavior of cpu and memory limit enforcement is slightly different.

cpu limits are enforced by CPU throttling. When a container approaches its cpu limit, the kernel will restrict access to the CPU corresponding to the container's limit. Thus, a cpu limit is a hard limit the kernel enforces. Containers may not use more CPU than is specified in their cpu limit.

memory limits are enforced by the kernel with out of memory (OOM) kills. When a container uses more than its memory limit, the kernel may terminate it. However, terminations only happen when the kernel detects memory pressure. Thus, a container that over allocates memory may not be immediately killed. This means memory limits are enforced reactively. A container may use more memory than its memory limit, but if it does, it may get killed.

Resource types

CPU and memory are each a resource type. A resource type has a base unit. CPU represents compute processing and is specified in units of Kubernetes CPUs. Memory is specified in units of bytes. For Linux workloads, you can specify huge page resources. Huge pages are a Linux-specific feature where the node kernel allocates blocks of memory that are much larger than the default page size.

For example, on a system where the default page size is 4KiB, you could specify a limit, hugepages-2Mi: 80Mi. If the container tries allocating over 40 2MiB huge pages (a total of 80 MiB), that allocation fails.

CPU and memory are collectively referred to as compute resources, or resources. Compute resources are measurable quantities that can be requested, allocated, and consumed. They are distinct from API resources. API resources, such as Pods and Services are objects that can be read and modified through the Kubernetes API server.

Resource requests and limits of Pod and container

For each container, you can specify resource limits and requests, including the following:

  • spec.containers[].resources.limits.cpu
  • spec.containers[].resources.limits.memory
  • spec.containers[].resources.limits.hugepages-<size>
  • spec.containers[].resources.requests.cpu
  • spec.containers[].resources.requests.memory
  • spec.containers[].resources.requests.hugepages-<size>

Although you can only specify requests and limits for individual containers, it is also useful to think about the overall resource requests and limits for a Pod. For a particular resource, a Pod resource request/limit is the sum of the resource requests/limits of that type for each container in the Pod.

Resource units in Kubernetes

CPU resource units

Limits and requests for CPU resources are measured in cpu units. In Kubernetes, 1 CPU unit is equivalent to 1 physical CPU core, or 1 virtual core, depending on whether the node is a physical host or a virtual machine running inside a physical machine.

Fractional requests are allowed. When you define a container with spec.containers[].resources.requests.cpu set to 0.5, you are requesting half as much CPU time compared to if you asked for 1.0 CPU. For CPU resource units, the quantity expression 0.1 is equivalent to the expression 100m, which can be read as "one hundred millicpu". Some people say "one hundred millicores", and this is understood to mean the same thing.

CPU resource is always specified as an absolute amount of resource, never as a relative amount. For example, 500m CPU represents the roughly same amount of computing power whether that container runs on a single-core, dual-core, or 48-core machine.

Memory resource units

Limits and requests for memory are measured in bytes. You can express memory as a plain integer or as a fixed-point number using one of these quantity suffixes: E, P, T, G, M, k. You can also use the power-of-two equivalents: Ei, Pi, Ti, Gi, Mi, Ki. For example, the following represent roughly the same value:

128974848, 129e6, 129M,  128974848000m, 123Mi

Pay attention to the case of the suffixes. If you request 400m of memory, this is a request for 0.4 bytes. Someone who types that probably meant to ask for 400 mebibytes (400Mi) or 400 megabytes (400M).

Container resources example

The following Pod has two containers. Both containers are defined with a request for 0.25 CPU and 64MiB (226 bytes) of memory. Each container has a limit of 0.5 CPU and 128MiB of memory. You can say the Pod has a request of 0.5 CPU and 128 MiB of memory, and a limit of 1 CPU and 256MiB of memory.

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: frontend
spec:
  containers:
  - name: app
    image: images.my-company.example/app:v4
    resources:
      requests:
        memory: "64Mi"
        cpu: "250m"
      limits:
        memory: "128Mi"
        cpu: "500m"
  - name: log-aggregator
    image: images.my-company.example/log-aggregator:v6
    resources:
      requests:
        memory: "64Mi"
        cpu: "250m"
      limits:
        memory: "128Mi"
        cpu: "500m"

How Pods with resource requests are scheduled

When you create a Pod, the Kubernetes scheduler selects a node for the Pod to run on. Each node has a maximum capacity for each of the resource types: the amount of CPU and memory it can provide for Pods. The scheduler ensures that, for each resource type, the sum of the resource requests of the scheduled containers is less than the capacity of the node. Note that although actual memory or CPU resource usage on nodes is very low, the scheduler still refuses to place a Pod on a node if the capacity check fails. This protects against a resource shortage on a node when resource usage later increases, for example, during a daily peak in request rate.

How Kubernetes applies resource requests and limits

When the kubelet starts a container as part of a Pod, the kubelet passes that container's requests and limits for memory and CPU to the container runtime.

On Linux, the container runtime typically configures kernel cgroups that apply and enforce the limits you defined.

  • The CPU limit defines a hard ceiling on how much CPU time the container can use. During each scheduling interval (time slice), the Linux kernel checks to see if this limit is exceeded; if so, the kernel waits before allowing that cgroup to resume execution.
  • The CPU request typically defines a weighting. If several different containers (cgroups) want to run on a contended system, workloads with larger CPU requests are allocated more CPU time than workloads with small requests.
  • The memory request is mainly used during (Kubernetes) Pod scheduling. On a node that uses cgroups v2, the container runtime might use the memory request as a hint to set memory.min and memory.low.
  • The memory limit defines a memory limit for that cgroup. If the container tries to allocate more memory than this limit, the Linux kernel out-of-memory subsystem activates and, typically, intervenes by stopping one of the processes in the container that tried to allocate memory. If that process is the container's PID 1, and the container is marked as restartable, Kubernetes restarts the container.
  • The memory limit for the Pod or container can also apply to pages in memory backed volumes, such as an emptyDir. The kubelet tracks tmpfs emptyDir volumes as container memory use, rather than as local ephemeral storage.　When using memory backed emptyDir, be sure to check the notes below.

If a container exceeds its memory request and the node that it runs on becomes short of memory overall, it is likely that the Pod the container belongs to will be evicted.

A container might or might not be allowed to exceed its CPU limit for extended periods of time. However, container runtimes don't terminate Pods or containers for excessive CPU usage.

To determine whether a container cannot be scheduled or is being killed due to resource limits, see the Troubleshooting section.

Monitoring compute & memory resource usage

The kubelet reports the resource usage of a Pod as part of the Pod status.

If optional tools for monitoring are available in your cluster, then Pod resource usage can be retrieved either from the Metrics API directly or from your monitoring tools.

Considerations for memory backed emptyDir volumes

From the perspective of memory management, there are some similarities between when a process uses memory as a work area and when using memory-backed emptyDir. But when using memory as a volume, like memory-backed emptyDir, there are additional points below that you should be careful of:

  • Files stored on a memory-backed volume are almost entirely managed by the user application. Unlike when used as a work area for a process, you can not rely on things like language-level garbage collection.
  • The purpose of writing files to a volume is to save data or pass it between applications. Neither Kubernetes nor the OS may automatically delete files from a volume, so memory used by those files can not be reclaimed when the system or the pod are under memory pressure.
  • A memory-backed emptyDir is useful because of its performance, but memory is generally much smaller in size and much higher in cost than other storage media, such as disks or SSDs. Using large amounts of memory for emptyDir volumes may affect the normal operation of your pod or of the whole node, so should be used carefully.

If you are administering a cluster or namespace, you can also set ResourceQuota that limits memory use; you may also want to define a LimitRange for additional enforcement. If you specify a spec.containers[].resources.limits.memory for each Pod, then the maximum size of an emptyDir volume will be the pod's memory limit.

As an alternative, a cluster administrator can enforce size limits for emptyDir volumes in new Pods using a policy mechanism such as ValidationAdmissionPolicy.

Local ephemeral storage

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable]

Nodes have local ephemeral storage, backed by locally-attached writeable devices or, sometimes, by RAM. "Ephemeral" means that there is no long-term guarantee about durability.

Pods use ephemeral local storage for scratch space, caching, and for logs. The kubelet can provide scratch space to Pods using local ephemeral storage to mount emptyDir volumes into containers.

The kubelet also uses this kind of storage to hold node-level container logs, container images, and the writable layers of running containers.

Kubernetes lets you track, reserve and limit the amount of ephemeral local storage a Pod can consume.

Configurations for local ephemeral storage

Kubernetes supports two ways to configure local ephemeral storage on a node:

In this configuration, you place all different kinds of ephemeral local data (emptyDir volumes, writeable layers, container images, logs) into one filesystem. The most effective way to configure the kubelet means dedicating this filesystem to Kubernetes (kubelet) data.

The kubelet also writes node-level container logs and treats these similarly to ephemeral local storage.

The kubelet writes logs to files inside its configured log directory (/var/log by default); and has a base directory for other locally stored data (/var/lib/kubelet by default).

Typically, both /var/lib/kubelet and /var/log are on the system root filesystem, and the kubelet is designed with that layout in mind.

Your node can have as many other filesystems, not used for Kubernetes, as you like.

You have a filesystem on the node that you're using for ephemeral data that comes from running Pods: logs, and emptyDir volumes. You can use this filesystem for other data (for example: system logs not related to Kubernetes); it can even be the root filesystem.

The kubelet also writes node-level container logs into the first filesystem, and treats these similarly to ephemeral local storage.

You also use a separate filesystem, backed by a different logical storage device. In this configuration, the directory where you tell the kubelet to place container image layers and writeable layers is on this second filesystem.

The first filesystem does not hold any image layers or writeable layers.

Your node can have as many other filesystems, not used for Kubernetes, as you like.

The kubelet can measure how much local storage it is using. It does this provided that you have set up the node using one of the supported configurations for local ephemeral storage.

If you have a different configuration, then the kubelet does not apply resource limits for ephemeral local storage.

Setting requests and limits for local ephemeral storage

You can specify ephemeral-storage for managing local ephemeral storage. Each container of a Pod can specify either or both of the following:

  • spec.containers[].resources.limits.ephemeral-storage
  • spec.containers[].resources.requests.ephemeral-storage

Limits and requests for ephemeral-storage are measured in byte quantities. You can express storage as a plain integer or as a fixed-point number using one of these suffixes: E, P, T, G, M, k. You can also use the power-of-two equivalents: Ei, Pi, Ti, Gi, Mi, Ki. For example, the following quantities all represent roughly the same value:

  • 128974848
  • 129e6
  • 129M
  • 123Mi

Pay attention to the case of the suffixes. If you request 400m of ephemeral-storage, this is a request for 0.4 bytes. Someone who types that probably meant to ask for 400 mebibytes (400Mi) or 400 megabytes (400M).

In the following example, the Pod has two containers. Each container has a request of 2GiB of local ephemeral storage. Each container has a limit of 4GiB of local ephemeral storage. Therefore, the Pod has a request of 4GiB of local ephemeral storage, and a limit of 8GiB of local ephemeral storage. 500Mi of that limit could be consumed by the emptyDir volume.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: frontend
spec:
  containers:
  - name: app
    image: images.my-company.example/app:v4
    resources:
      requests:
        ephemeral-storage: "2Gi"
      limits:
        ephemeral-storage: "4Gi"
    volumeMounts:
    - name: ephemeral
      mountPath: "/tmp"
  - name: log-aggregator
    image: images.my-company.example/log-aggregator:v6
    resources:
      requests:
        ephemeral-storage: "2Gi"
      limits:
        ephemeral-storage: "4Gi"
    volumeMounts:
    - name: ephemeral
      mountPath: "/tmp"
  volumes:
    - name: ephemeral
      emptyDir:
        sizeLimit: 500Mi

How Pods with ephemeral-storage requests are scheduled

When you create a Pod, the Kubernetes scheduler selects a node for the Pod to run on. Each node has a maximum amount of local ephemeral storage it can provide for Pods. For more information, see Node Allocatable.

The scheduler ensures that the sum of the resource requests of the scheduled containers is less than the capacity of the node.

Ephemeral storage consumption management

If the kubelet is managing local ephemeral storage as a resource, then the kubelet measures storage use in:

  • emptyDir volumes, except tmpfs emptyDir volumes
  • directories holding node-level logs
  • writeable container layers

If a Pod is using more ephemeral storage than you allow it to, the kubelet sets an eviction signal that triggers Pod eviction.

For container-level isolation, if a container's writable layer and log usage exceeds its storage limit, the kubelet marks the Pod for eviction.

For pod-level isolation the kubelet works out an overall Pod storage limit by summing the limits for the containers in that Pod. In this case, if the sum of the local ephemeral storage usage from all containers and also the Pod's emptyDir volumes exceeds the overall Pod storage limit, then the kubelet also marks the Pod for eviction.

The kubelet supports different ways to measure Pod storage use:

The kubelet performs regular, scheduled checks that scan each emptyDir volume, container log directory, and writeable container layer.

The scan measures how much space is used.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [beta] (enabled by default: false)

Project quotas are an operating-system level feature for managing storage use on filesystems. With Kubernetes, you can enable project quotas for monitoring storage use. Make sure that the filesystem backing the emptyDir volumes, on the node, provides project quota support. For example, XFS and ext4fs offer project quotas.

Kubernetes uses project IDs starting from 1048576. The IDs in use are registered in /etc/projects and /etc/projid. If project IDs in this range are used for other purposes on the system, those project IDs must be registered in /etc/projects and /etc/projid so that Kubernetes does not use them.

Quotas are faster and more accurate than directory scanning. When a directory is assigned to a project, all files created under a directory are created in that project, and the kernel merely has to keep track of how many blocks are in use by files in that project. If a file is created and deleted, but has an open file descriptor, it continues to consume space. Quota tracking records that space accurately whereas directory scans overlook the storage used by deleted files.

To use quotas to track a pod's resource usage, the pod must be in a user namespace. Within user namespaces, the kernel restricts changes to projectIDs on the filesystem, ensuring the reliability of storage metrics calculated by quotas.

If you want to use project quotas, you should:

  • Enable the LocalStorageCapacityIsolationFSQuotaMonitoring=true feature gate using the featureGates field in the kubelet configuration.

  • Ensure the UserNamespacesSupport feature gate is enabled, and that the kernel, CRI implementation and OCI runtime support user namespaces.

  • Ensure that the root filesystem (or optional runtime filesystem) has project quotas enabled. All XFS filesystems support project quotas. For ext4 filesystems, you need to enable the project quota tracking feature while the filesystem is not mounted.

    # For ext4, with /dev/block-device not mounted
sudo tune2fs -O project -Q prjquota /dev/block-device

  • Ensure that the root filesystem (or optional runtime filesystem) is mounted with project quotas enabled. For both XFS and ext4fs, the mount option is named prjquota.

If you don't want to use project quotas, you should:

Extended resources

Extended resources are fully-qualified resource names outside the kubernetes.io domain. They allow cluster operators to advertise and users to consume the non-Kubernetes-built-in resources.

There are two steps required to use Extended Resources. First, the cluster operator must advertise an Extended Resource. Second, users must request the Extended Resource in Pods.

Managing extended resources

Node-level extended resources

Node-level extended resources are tied to nodes.

Device plugin managed resources

See Device Plugin for how to advertise device plugin managed resources on each node.

Other resources

To advertise a new node-level extended resource, the cluster operator can submit a PATCH HTTP request to the API server to specify the available quantity in the status.capacity for a node in the cluster. After this operation, the node's status.capacity will include a new resource. The status.allocatable field is updated automatically with the new resource asynchronously by the kubelet.

Because the scheduler uses the node's status.allocatable value when evaluating Pod fitness, the scheduler only takes account of the new value after that asynchronous update. There may be a short delay between patching the node capacity with a new resource and the time when the first Pod that requests the resource can be scheduled on that node.

Example:

Here is an example showing how to use curl to form an HTTP request that advertises five "example.com/foo" resources on node k8s-node-1 whose master is k8s-master.

curl --header "Content-Type: application/json-patch+json" \
--request PATCH \
--data '[{"op": "add", "path": "/status/capacity/example.com~1foo", "value": "5"}]' \
http://k8s-master:8080/api/v1/nodes/k8s-node-1/status

Cluster-level extended resources

Cluster-level extended resources are not tied to nodes. They are usually managed by scheduler extenders, which handle the resource consumption and resource quota.

You can specify the extended resources that are handled by scheduler extenders in scheduler configuration

Example:

The following configuration for a scheduler policy indicates that the cluster-level extended resource "example.com/foo" is handled by the scheduler extender.

  • The scheduler sends a Pod to the scheduler extender only if the Pod requests "example.com/foo".
  • The ignoredByScheduler field specifies that the scheduler does not check the "example.com/foo" resource in its PodFitsResources predicate.
{
  "kind": "Policy",
  "apiVersion": "v1",
  "extenders": [
    {
      "urlPrefix":"<extender-endpoint>",
      "bindVerb": "bind",
      "managedResources": [
        {
          "name": "example.com/foo",
          "ignoredByScheduler": true
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Consuming extended resources

Users can consume extended resources in Pod specs like CPU and memory. The scheduler takes care of the resource accounting so that no more than the available amount is simultaneously allocated to Pods.

The API server restricts quantities of extended resources to whole numbers. Examples of valid quantities are 3, 3000m and 3Ki. Examples of invalid quantities are 0.5 and 1500m (because 1500m would result in 1.5).

To consume an extended resource in a Pod, include the resource name as a key in the spec.containers[].resources.limits map in the container spec.

A Pod is scheduled only if all of the resource requests are satisfied, including CPU, memory and any extended resources. The Pod remains in the PENDING state as long as the resource request cannot be satisfied.

Example:

The Pod below requests 2 CPUs and 1 "example.com/foo" (an extended resource).

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: my-pod
spec:
  containers:
  - name: my-container
    image: myimage
    resources:
      requests:
        cpu: 2
        example.com/foo: 1
      limits:
        example.com/foo: 1

PID limiting

Process ID (PID) limits allow for the configuration of a kubelet to limit the number of PIDs that a given Pod can consume. See PID Limiting for information.

Troubleshooting

My Pods are pending with event message FailedScheduling

If the scheduler cannot find any node where a Pod can fit, the Pod remains unscheduled until a place can be found. An Event is produced each time the scheduler fails to find a place for the Pod. You can use kubectl to view the events for a Pod; for example:

kubectl describe pod frontend | grep -A 9999999999 Events

Events:
  Type     Reason            Age   From               Message
  ----     ------            ----  ----               -------
  Warning  FailedScheduling  23s   default-scheduler  0/42 nodes available: insufficient cpu

In the preceding example, the Pod named "frontend" fails to be scheduled due to insufficient CPU resource on any node. Similar error messages can also suggest failure due to insufficient memory (PodExceedsFreeMemory). In general, if a Pod is pending with a message of this type, there are several things to try:

  • Add more nodes to the cluster.
  • Terminate unneeded Pods to make room for pending Pods.
  • Check that the Pod is not larger than all the nodes. For example, if all the nodes have a capacity of cpu: 1, then a Pod with a request of cpu: 1.1 will never be scheduled.
  • Check for node taints. If most of your nodes are tainted, and the new Pod does not tolerate that taint, the scheduler only considers placements onto the remaining nodes that don't have that taint.

You can check node capacities and amounts allocated with the kubectl describe nodes command. For example:

kubectl describe nodes e2e-test-node-pool-4lw4

Name:            e2e-test-node-pool-4lw4
[ ... lines removed for clarity ...]
Capacity:
 cpu:                               2
 memory:                            7679792Ki
 pods:                              110
Allocatable:
 cpu:                               1800m
 memory:                            7474992Ki
 pods:                              110
[ ... lines removed for clarity ...]
Non-terminated Pods:        (5 in total)
  Namespace    Name                                  CPU Requests  CPU Limits  Memory Requests  Memory Limits
  ---------    ----                                  ------------  ----------  ---------------  -------------
  kube-system  fluentd-gcp-v1.38-28bv1               100m (5%)     0 (0%)      200Mi (2%)       200Mi (2%)
  kube-system  kube-dns-3297075139-61lj3             260m (13%)    0 (0%)      100Mi (1%)       170Mi (2%)
  kube-system  kube-proxy-e2e-test-...               100m (5%)     0 (0%)      0 (0%)           0 (0%)
  kube-system  monitoring-influxdb-grafana-v4-z1m12  200m (10%)    200m (10%)  600Mi (8%)       600Mi (8%)
  kube-system  node-problem-detector-v0.1-fj7m3      20m (1%)      200m (10%)  20Mi (0%)        100Mi (1%)
Allocated resources:
  (Total limits may be over 100 percent, i.e., overcommitted.)
  CPU Requests    CPU Limits    Memory Requests    Memory Limits
  ------------    ----------    ---------------    -------------
  680m (34%)      400m (20%)    920Mi (11%)        1070Mi (13%)

In the preceding output, you can see that if a Pod requests more than 1.120 CPUs or more than 6.23Gi of memory, that Pod will not fit on the node.

By looking at the “Pods” section, you can see which Pods are taking up space on the node.

The amount of resources available to Pods is less than the node capacity because system daemons use a portion of the available resources. Within the Kubernetes API, each Node has a .status.allocatable field (see NodeStatus for details).

The .status.allocatable field describes the amount of resources that are available to Pods on that node (for example: 15 virtual CPUs and 7538 MiB of memory). For more information on node allocatable resources in Kubernetes, see Reserve Compute Resources for System Daemons.

You can configure resource quotas to limit the total amount of resources that a namespace can consume. Kubernetes enforces quotas for objects in particular namespace when there is a ResourceQuota in that namespace. For example, if you assign specific namespaces to different teams, you can add ResourceQuotas into those namespaces. Setting resource quotas helps to prevent one team from using so much of any resource that this over-use affects other teams.

You should also consider what access you grant to that namespace: full write access to a namespace allows someone with that access to remove any resource, including a configured ResourceQuota.

My container is terminated

Your container might get terminated because it is resource-starved. To check whether a container is being killed because it is hitting a resource limit, call kubectl describe pod on the Pod of interest:

kubectl describe pod simmemleak-hra99

The output is similar to:

Name:                           simmemleak-hra99
Namespace:                      default
Image(s):                       saadali/simmemleak
Node:                           kubernetes-node-tf0f/10.240.216.66
Labels:                         name=simmemleak
Status:                         Running
Reason:
Message:
IP:                             10.244.2.75
Containers:
  simmemleak:
    Image:  saadali/simmemleak:latest
    Limits:
      cpu:          100m
      memory:       50Mi
    State:          Running
      Started:      Tue, 07 Jul 2019 12:54:41 -0700
    Last State:     Terminated
      Reason:       OOMKilled
      Exit Code:    137
      Started:      Fri, 07 Jul 2019 12:54:30 -0700
      Finished:     Fri, 07 Jul 2019 12:54:33 -0700
    Ready:          False
    Restart Count:  5
Conditions:
  Type      Status
  Ready     False
Events:
  Type    Reason     Age   From               Message
  ----    ------     ----  ----               -------
  Normal  Scheduled  42s   default-scheduler  Successfully assigned simmemleak-hra99 to kubernetes-node-tf0f
  Normal  Pulled     41s   kubelet            Container image "saadali/simmemleak:latest" already present on machine
  Normal  Created    41s   kubelet            Created container simmemleak
  Normal  Started    40s   kubelet            Started container simmemleak
  Normal  Killing    32s   kubelet            Killing container with id ead3fb35-5cf5-44ed-9ae1-488115be66c6: Need to kill Pod

In the preceding example, the Restart Count: 5 indicates that the simmemleak container in the Pod was terminated and restarted five times (so far). The OOMKilled reason shows that the container tried to use more memory than its limit.

Your next step might be to check the application code for a memory leak. If you find that the application is behaving how you expect, consider setting a higher memory limit (and possibly request) for that container.

What's next

7.6 - Organizing Cluster Access Using kubeconfig Files

Use kubeconfig files to organize information about clusters, users, namespaces, and authentication mechanisms. The kubectl command-line tool uses kubeconfig files to find the information it needs to choose a cluster and communicate with the API server of a cluster.

By default, kubectl looks for a file named config in the $HOME/.kube directory. You can specify other kubeconfig files by setting the KUBECONFIG environment variable or by setting the --kubeconfig flag.

For step-by-step instructions on creating and specifying kubeconfig files, see Configure Access to Multiple Clusters.

Supporting multiple clusters, users, and authentication mechanisms

Suppose you have several clusters, and your users and components authenticate in a variety of ways. For example:

  • A running kubelet might authenticate using certificates.
  • A user might authenticate using tokens.
  • Administrators might have sets of certificates that they provide to individual users.

With kubeconfig files, you can organize your clusters, users, and namespaces. You can also define contexts to quickly and easily switch between clusters and namespaces.

Context

A context element in a kubeconfig file is used to group access parameters under a convenient name. Each context has three parameters: cluster, namespace, and user. By default, the kubectl command-line tool uses parameters from the current context to communicate with the cluster.

To choose the current context:

kubectl config use-context

The KUBECONFIG environment variable

The KUBECONFIG environment variable holds a list of kubeconfig files. For Linux and Mac, the list is colon-delimited. For Windows, the list is semicolon-delimited. The KUBECONFIG environment variable is not required. If the KUBECONFIG environment variable doesn't exist, kubectl uses the default kubeconfig file, $HOME/.kube/config.

If the KUBECONFIG environment variable does exist, kubectl uses an effective configuration that is the result of merging the files listed in the KUBECONFIG environment variable.

Merging kubeconfig files

To see your configuration, enter this command:

kubectl config view

As described previously, the output might be from a single kubeconfig file, or it might be the result of merging several kubeconfig files.

Here are the rules that kubectl uses when it merges kubeconfig files:

  1. If the --kubeconfig flag is set, use only the specified file. Do not merge. Only one instance of this flag is allowed.

    Otherwise, if the KUBECONFIG environment variable is set, use it as a list of files that should be merged. Merge the files listed in the KUBECONFIG environment variable according to these rules:

    • Ignore empty filenames.
    • Produce errors for files with content that cannot be deserialized.
    • The first file to set a particular value or map key wins.
    • Never change the value or map key. Example: Preserve the context of the first file to set current-context. Example: If two files specify a red-user, use only values from the first file's red-user. Even if the second file has non-conflicting entries under red-user, discard them.

    For an example of setting the KUBECONFIG environment variable, see Setting the KUBECONFIG environment variable.

    Otherwise, use the default kubeconfig file, $HOME/.kube/config, with no merging.

  2. Determine the context to use based on the first hit in this chain:

    1. Use the --context command-line flag if it exists.
    2. Use the current-context from the merged kubeconfig files.

    An empty context is allowed at this point.

  3. Determine the cluster and user. At this point, there might or might not be a context. Determine the cluster and user based on the first hit in this chain, which is run twice: once for user and once for cluster:

    1. Use a command-line flag if it exists: --user or --cluster.
    2. If the context is non-empty, take the user or cluster from the context.

    The user and cluster can be empty at this point.

  4. Determine the actual cluster information to use. At this point, there might or might not be cluster information. Build each piece of the cluster information based on this chain; the first hit wins:

    1. Use command line flags if they exist: --server, --certificate-authority, --insecure-skip-tls-verify.
    2. If any cluster information attributes exist from the merged kubeconfig files, use them.
    3. If there is no server location, fail.

  5. Determine the actual user information to use. Build user information using the same rules as cluster information, except allow only one authentication technique per user:

    1. Use command line flags if they exist: --client-certificate, --client-key, --username, --password, --token.
    2. Use the user fields from the merged kubeconfig files.
    3. If there are two conflicting techniques, fail.

  6. For any information still missing, use default values and potentially prompt for authentication information.

File references

File and path references in a kubeconfig file are relative to the location of the kubeconfig file. File references on the command line are relative to the current working directory. In $HOME/.kube/config, relative paths are stored relatively, and absolute paths are stored absolutely.

Proxy

You can configure kubectl to use a proxy per cluster using proxy-url in your kubeconfig file, like this:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Config

clusters:
- cluster:
    proxy-url: http://proxy.example.org:3128
    server: https://k8s.example.org/k8s/clusters/c-xxyyzz
  name: development

users:
- name: developer

contexts:
- context:
  name: development

What's next

7.7 - Resource Management for Windows nodes

This page outlines the differences in how resources are managed between Linux and Windows.

On Linux nodes, cgroups are used as a pod boundary for resource control. Containers are created within that boundary for network, process and file system isolation. The Linux cgroup APIs can be used to gather CPU, I/O, and memory use statistics.

In contrast, Windows uses a job object per container with a system namespace filter to contain all processes in a container and provide logical isolation from the host. (Job objects are a Windows process isolation mechanism and are different from what Kubernetes refers to as a Job).

There is no way to run a Windows container without the namespace filtering in place. This means that system privileges cannot be asserted in the context of the host, and thus privileged containers are not available on Windows. Containers cannot assume an identity from the host because the Security Account Manager (SAM) is separate.

Memory management

Windows does not have an out-of-memory process killer as Linux does. Windows always treats all user-mode memory allocations as virtual, and pagefiles are mandatory.

Windows nodes do not overcommit memory for processes. The net effect is that Windows won't reach out of memory conditions the same way Linux does, and processes page to disk instead of being subject to out of memory (OOM) termination. If memory is over-provisioned and all physical memory is exhausted, then paging can slow down performance.

CPU management

Windows can limit the amount of CPU time allocated for different processes but cannot guarantee a minimum amount of CPU time.

On Windows, the kubelet supports a command-line flag to set the scheduling priority of the kubelet process: --windows-priorityclass. This flag allows the kubelet process to get more CPU time slices when compared to other processes running on the Windows host. More information on the allowable values and their meaning is available at Windows Priority Classes. To ensure that running Pods do not starve the kubelet of CPU cycles, set this flag to ABOVE_NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS or above.

Resource reservation

To account for memory and CPU used by the operating system, the container runtime, and by Kubernetes host processes such as the kubelet, you can (and should) reserve memory and CPU resources with the --kube-reserved and/or --system-reserved kubelet flags. On Windows these values are only used to calculate the node's allocatable resources.

On Windows, a good practice is to reserve at least 2GiB of memory.

To determine how much CPU to reserve, identify the maximum pod density for each node and monitor the CPU usage of the system services running there, then choose a value that meets your workload needs.

8 - Security

Concepts for keeping your cloud-native workload secure.

This section of the Kubernetes documentation aims to help you learn to run workloads more securely, and about the essential aspects of keeping a Kubernetes cluster secure.

Kubernetes is based on a cloud-native architecture, and draws on advice from the CNCF about good practice for cloud native information security.

Read Cloud Native Security and Kubernetes for the broader context about how to secure your cluster and the applications that you're running on it.

Kubernetes security mechanisms

Kubernetes includes several APIs and security controls, as well as ways to define policies that can form part of how you manage information security.

Control plane protection

A key security mechanism for any Kubernetes cluster is to control access to the Kubernetes API.

Kubernetes expects you to configure and use TLS to provide data encryption in transit within the control plane, and between the control plane and its clients. You can also enable encryption at rest for the data stored within Kubernetes control plane; this is separate from using encryption at rest for your own workloads' data, which might also be a good idea.

Secrets

The Secret API provides basic protection for configuration values that require confidentiality.

Workload protection

Enforce Pod security standards to ensure that Pods and their containers are isolated appropriately. You can also use RuntimeClasses to define custom isolation if you need it.

Network policies let you control network traffic between Pods, or between Pods and the network outside your cluster.

You can deploy security controls from the wider ecosystem to implement preventative or detective controls around Pods, their containers, and the images that run in them.

Auditing

Kubernetes audit logging provides a security-relevant, chronological set of records documenting the sequence of actions in a cluster. The cluster audits the activities generated by users, by applications that use the Kubernetes API, and by the control plane itself.

Cloud provider security

If you are running a Kubernetes cluster on your own hardware or a different cloud provider, consult your documentation for security best practices. Here are links to some of the popular cloud providers' security documentation:

Cloud provider security
IaaS Provider Link
Alibaba Cloud https://www.alibabacloud.com/trust-center
Amazon Web Services https://aws.amazon.com/security
Google Cloud Platform https://cloud.google.com/security
Huawei Cloud https://www.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/securecenter/overallsafety
IBM Cloud https://www.ibm.com/cloud/security
Microsoft Azure https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/azure-security
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure https://www.oracle.com/security
VMware vSphere https://www.vmware.com/security/hardening-guides

Policies

You can define security policies using Kubernetes-native mechanisms, such as NetworkPolicy (declarative control over network packet filtering) or ValidatingAdmissionPolicy (declarative restrictions on what changes someone can make using the Kubernetes API).

However, you can also rely on policy implementations from the wider ecosystem around Kubernetes. Kubernetes provides extension mechanisms to let those ecosystem projects implement their own policy controls on source code review, container image approval, API access controls, networking, and more.

For more information about policy mechanisms and Kubernetes, read Policies.

What's next

Learn about related Kubernetes security topics:

Learn the context:

Get certified:

Read more in this section:

8.1 - Cloud Native Security and Kubernetes

Concepts for keeping your cloud-native workload secure.

Kubernetes is based on a cloud-native architecture, and draws on advice from the CNCF about good practice for cloud native information security.

Read on through this page for an overview of how Kubernetes is designed to help you deploy a secure cloud native platform.

Cloud native information security

The CNCF white paper on cloud native security defines security controls and practices that are appropriate to different lifecycle phases.

Develop lifecycle phase

  • Ensure the integrity of development environments.
  • Design applications following good practice for information security, appropriate for your context.
  • Consider end user security as part of solution design.

To achieve this, you can:

  1. Adopt an architecture, such as zero trust, that minimizes attack surfaces, even for internal threats.
  2. Define a code review process that considers security concerns.
  3. Build a threat model of your system or application that identifies trust boundaries. Use that to model to identify risks and to help find ways to treat those risks.
  4. Incorporate advanced security automation, such as fuzzing and security chaos engineering, where it's justified.

Distribute lifecycle phase

  • Ensure the security of the supply chain for container images you execute.
  • Ensure the security of the supply chain for the cluster and other components that execute your application. An example of another component might be an external database that your cloud-native application uses for persistence.

To achieve this, you can:

  1. Scan container images and other artifacts for known vulnerabilities.
  2. Ensure that software distribution uses encryption in transit, with a chain of trust for the software source.
  3. Adopt and follow processes to update dependencies when updates are available, especially in response to security announcements.
  4. Use validation mechanisms such as digital certificates for supply chain assurance.
  5. Subscribe to feeds and other mechanisms to alert you to security risks.
  6. Restrict access to artifacts. Place container images in a private registry that only allows authorized clients to pull images.

Deploy lifecycle phase

Ensure appropriate restrictions on what can be deployed, who can deploy it, and where it can be deployed to. You can enforce measures from the distribute phase, such as verifying the cryptographic identity of container image artifacts.

When you deploy Kubernetes, you also set the foundation for your applications' runtime environment: a Kubernetes cluster (or multiple clusters). That IT infrastructure must provide the security guarantees that higher layers expect.

Runtime lifecycle phase

The Runtime phase comprises three critical areas: access, compute, and storage.

Runtime protection: access

The Kubernetes API is what makes your cluster work. Protecting this API is key to providing effective cluster security.

Other pages in the Kubernetes documentation have more detail about how to set up specific aspects of access control. The security checklist has a set of suggested basic checks for your cluster.

Beyond that, securing your cluster means implementing effective authentication and authorization for API access. Use ServiceAccounts to provide and manage security identities for workloads and cluster components.

Kubernetes uses TLS to protect API traffic; make sure to deploy the cluster using TLS (including for traffic between nodes and the control plane), and protect the encryption keys. If you use Kubernetes' own API for CertificateSigningRequests, pay special attention to restricting misuse there.

Runtime protection: compute

Containers provide two things: isolation between different applications, and a mechanism to combine those isolated applications to run on the same host computer. Those two aspects, isolation and aggregation, mean that runtime security involves identifying trade-offs and finding an appropriate balance.

Kubernetes relies on a container runtime to actually set up and run containers. The Kubernetes project does not recommend a specific container runtime and you should make sure that the runtime(s) that you choose meet your information security needs.

To protect your compute at runtime, you can:

  1. Enforce Pod security standards for applications, to help ensure they run with only the necessary privileges.

  2. Run a specialized operating system on your nodes that is designed specifically for running containerized workloads. This is typically based on a read-only operating system (immutable image) that provides only the services essential for running containers.

    Container-specific operating systems help to isolate system components and present a reduced attack surface in case of a container escape.

  3. Define ResourceQuotas to fairly allocate shared resources, and use mechanisms such as LimitRanges to ensure that Pods specify their resource requirements.

  4. Partition workloads across different nodes. Use node isolation mechanisms, either from Kubernetes itself or from the ecosystem, to ensure that Pods with different trust contexts are run on separate sets of nodes.

  5. Use a container runtime that provides security restrictions.

  6. On Linux nodes, use a Linux security module such as AppArmor or seccomp.

Runtime protection: storage

To protect storage for your cluster and the applications that run there, you can:

  1. Integrate your cluster with an external storage plugin that provides encryption at rest for volumes.
  2. Enable encryption at rest for API objects.
  3. Protect data durability using backups. Verify that you can restore these, whenever you need to.
  4. Authenticate connections between cluster nodes and any network storage they rely upon.
  5. Implement data encryption within your own application.

For encryption keys, generating these within specialized hardware provides the best protection against disclosure risks. A hardware security module can let you perform cryptographic operations without allowing the security key to be copied elsewhere.

Networking and security

You should also consider network security measures, such as NetworkPolicy or a service mesh. Some network plugins for Kubernetes provide encryption for your cluster network, using technologies such as a virtual private network (VPN) overlay. By design, Kubernetes lets you use your own networking plugin for your cluster (if you use managed Kubernetes, the person or organization managing your cluster may have chosen a network plugin for you).

The network plugin you choose and the way you integrate it can have a strong impact on the security of information in transit.

Observability and runtime security

Kubernetes lets you extend your cluster with extra tooling. You can set up third party solutions to help you monitor or troubleshoot your applications and the clusters they are running. You also get some basic observability features built in to Kubernetes itself. Your code running in containers can generate logs, publish metrics or provide other observability data; at deploy time, you need to make sure your cluster provides an appropriate level of protection there.

If you set up a metrics dashboard or something similar, review the chain of components that populate data into that dashboard, as well as the dashboard itself. Make sure that the whole chain is designed with enough resilience and enough integrity protection that you can rely on it even during an incident where your cluster might be degraded.

Where appropriate, deploy security measures below the level of Kubernetes itself, such as cryptographically measured boot, or authenticated distribution of time (which helps ensure the fidelity of logs and audit records).

For a high assurance environment, deploy cryptographic protections to ensure that logs are both tamper-proof and confidential.

What's next

Cloud native security

Kubernetes and information security

8.2 - Pod Security Standards

A detailed look at the different policy levels defined in the Pod Security Standards.

The Pod Security Standards define three different policies to broadly cover the security spectrum. These policies are cumulative and range from highly-permissive to highly-restrictive. This guide outlines the requirements of each policy.

Profile Description
Privileged Unrestricted policy, providing the widest possible level of permissions. This policy allows for known privilege escalations.
Baseline Minimally restrictive policy which prevents known privilege escalations. Allows the default (minimally specified) Pod configuration.
Restricted Heavily restricted policy, following current Pod hardening best practices.

Profile Details

Privileged

The Privileged policy is purposely-open, and entirely unrestricted. This type of policy is typically aimed at system- and infrastructure-level workloads managed by privileged, trusted users.

The Privileged policy is defined by an absence of restrictions. If you define a Pod where the Privileged security policy applies, the Pod you define is able to bypass typical container isolation mechanisms. For example, you can define a Pod that has access to the node's host network.

Baseline

The Baseline policy is aimed at ease of adoption for common containerized workloads while preventing known privilege escalations. This policy is targeted at application operators and developers of non-critical applications. The following listed controls should be enforced/disallowed:

Baseline policy specification
Control Policy
HostProcess

Windows Pods offer the ability to run HostProcess containers which enables privileged access to the Windows host machine. Privileged access to the host is disallowed in the Baseline policy.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [stable]

Restricted Fields

  • spec.securityContext.windowsOptions.hostProcess
  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.windowsOptions.hostProcess
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.windowsOptions.hostProcess
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.windowsOptions.hostProcess

Allowed Values

  • Undefined/nil
  • false
Host Namespaces

Sharing the host namespaces must be disallowed.

Restricted Fields

  • spec.hostNetwork
  • spec.hostPID
  • spec.hostIPC

Allowed Values

  • Undefined/nil
  • false
Privileged Containers

Privileged Pods disable most security mechanisms and must be disallowed.

Restricted Fields

  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.privileged
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.privileged
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.privileged

Allowed Values

  • Undefined/nil
  • false
Capabilities

Adding additional capabilities beyond those listed below must be disallowed.

Restricted Fields

  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.capabilities.add
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.capabilities.add
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.capabilities.add

Allowed Values

  • Undefined/nil
  • AUDIT_WRITE
  • CHOWN
  • DAC_OVERRIDE
  • FOWNER
  • FSETID
  • KILL
  • MKNOD
  • NET_BIND_SERVICE
  • SETFCAP
  • SETGID
  • SETPCAP
  • SETUID
  • SYS_CHROOT
HostPath Volumes

HostPath volumes must be forbidden.

Restricted Fields

  • spec.volumes[*].hostPath

Allowed Values

  • Undefined/nil
Host Ports

HostPorts should be disallowed entirely (recommended) or restricted to a known list

Restricted Fields

  • spec.containers[*].ports[*].hostPort
  • spec.initContainers[*].ports[*].hostPort
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].ports[*].hostPort

Allowed Values
AppArmor

On supported hosts, the RuntimeDefault AppArmor profile is applied by default. The baseline policy should prevent overriding or disabling the default AppArmor profile, or restrict overrides to an allowed set of profiles.

Restricted Fields

  • spec.securityContext.appArmorProfile.type
  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.appArmorProfile.type
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.appArmorProfile.type
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.appArmorProfile.type

Allowed Values

  • Undefined/nil
  • RuntimeDefault
  • Localhost
  • metadata.annotations["container.apparmor.security.beta.kubernetes.io/*"]

Allowed Values

  • Undefined/nil
  • runtime/default
  • localhost/*
SELinux

Setting the SELinux type is restricted, and setting a custom SELinux user or role option is forbidden.

Restricted Fields

  • spec.securityContext.seLinuxOptions.type
  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.seLinuxOptions.type
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.seLinuxOptions.type
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.seLinuxOptions.type

Allowed Values

  • Undefined/""
  • container_t
  • container_init_t
  • container_kvm_t
  • container_engine_t (since Kubernetes 1.31)

Restricted Fields

  • spec.securityContext.seLinuxOptions.user
  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.seLinuxOptions.user
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.seLinuxOptions.user
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.seLinuxOptions.user
  • spec.securityContext.seLinuxOptions.role
  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.seLinuxOptions.role
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.seLinuxOptions.role
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.seLinuxOptions.role

Allowed Values

  • Undefined/""
/proc Mount Type

The default /proc masks are set up to reduce attack surface, and should be required.

Restricted Fields

  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.procMount
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.procMount
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.procMount

Allowed Values

  • Undefined/nil
  • Default
Seccomp

Seccomp profile must not be explicitly set to Unconfined.

Restricted Fields

  • spec.securityContext.seccompProfile.type
  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.seccompProfile.type
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.seccompProfile.type
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.seccompProfile.type

Allowed Values

  • Undefined/nil
  • RuntimeDefault
  • Localhost
Sysctls

Sysctls can disable security mechanisms or affect all containers on a host, and should be disallowed except for an allowed "safe" subset. A sysctl is considered safe if it is namespaced in the container or the Pod, and it is isolated from other Pods or processes on the same Node.

Restricted Fields

  • spec.securityContext.sysctls[*].name

Allowed Values

  • Undefined/nil
  • kernel.shm_rmid_forced
  • net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range
  • net.ipv4.ip_unprivileged_port_start
  • net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies
  • net.ipv4.ping_group_range
  • net.ipv4.ip_local_reserved_ports (since Kubernetes 1.27)
  • net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time (since Kubernetes 1.29)
  • net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout (since Kubernetes 1.29)
  • net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_intvl (since Kubernetes 1.29)
  • net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_probes (since Kubernetes 1.29)

Restricted

The Restricted policy is aimed at enforcing current Pod hardening best practices, at the expense of some compatibility. It is targeted at operators and developers of security-critical applications, as well as lower-trust users. The following listed controls should be enforced/disallowed:

Restricted policy specification
Control Policy
Everything from the Baseline policy
Volume Types

The Restricted policy only permits the following volume types.

Restricted Fields

  • spec.volumes[*]

Allowed Values

Every item in the spec.volumes[*] list must set one of the following fields to a non-null value:
  • spec.volumes[*].configMap
  • spec.volumes[*].csi
  • spec.volumes[*].downwardAPI
  • spec.volumes[*].emptyDir
  • spec.volumes[*].ephemeral
  • spec.volumes[*].persistentVolumeClaim
  • spec.volumes[*].projected
  • spec.volumes[*].secret
Privilege Escalation (v1.8+)

Privilege escalation (such as via set-user-ID or set-group-ID file mode) should not be allowed. This is Linux only policy in v1.25+ (spec.os.name != windows)

Restricted Fields

  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.allowPrivilegeEscalation
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.allowPrivilegeEscalation
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.allowPrivilegeEscalation

Allowed Values

  • false
Running as Non-root

Containers must be required to run as non-root users.

Restricted Fields

  • spec.securityContext.runAsNonRoot
  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.runAsNonRoot
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.runAsNonRoot
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.runAsNonRoot

Allowed Values

  • true
The container fields may be undefined/nil if the pod-level spec.securityContext.runAsNonRoot is set to true.
Running as Non-root user (v1.23+)

Containers must not set runAsUser to 0

Restricted Fields

  • spec.securityContext.runAsUser
  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.runAsUser
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.runAsUser
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.runAsUser

Allowed Values

  • any non-zero value
  • undefined/null
Seccomp (v1.19+)

Seccomp profile must be explicitly set to one of the allowed values. Both the Unconfined profile and the absence of a profile are prohibited. This is Linux only policy in v1.25+ (spec.os.name != windows)

Restricted Fields

  • spec.securityContext.seccompProfile.type
  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.seccompProfile.type
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.seccompProfile.type
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.seccompProfile.type

Allowed Values

  • RuntimeDefault
  • Localhost
The container fields may be undefined/nil if the pod-level spec.securityContext.seccompProfile.type field is set appropriately. Conversely, the pod-level field may be undefined/nil if _all_ container- level fields are set.
Capabilities (v1.22+)

Containers must drop ALL capabilities, and are only permitted to add back the NET_BIND_SERVICE capability. This is Linux only policy in v1.25+ (.spec.os.name != "windows")

Restricted Fields

  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.capabilities.drop
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.capabilities.drop
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.capabilities.drop

Allowed Values

  • Any list of capabilities that includes ALL

Restricted Fields

  • spec.containers[*].securityContext.capabilities.add
  • spec.initContainers[*].securityContext.capabilities.add
  • spec.ephemeralContainers[*].securityContext.capabilities.add

Allowed Values

  • Undefined/nil
  • NET_BIND_SERVICE

Policy Instantiation

Decoupling policy definition from policy instantiation allows for a common understanding and consistent language of policies across clusters, independent of the underlying enforcement mechanism.

As mechanisms mature, they will be defined below on a per-policy basis. The methods of enforcement of individual policies are not defined here.

Pod Security Admission Controller

Alternatives

Other alternatives for enforcing policies are being developed in the Kubernetes ecosystem, such as:

Pod OS field

Kubernetes lets you use nodes that run either Linux or Windows. You can mix both kinds of node in one cluster. Windows in Kubernetes has some limitations and differentiators from Linux-based workloads. Specifically, many of the Pod securityContext fields have no effect on Windows.

Restricted Pod Security Standard changes

Another important change, made in Kubernetes v1.25 is that the Restricted policy has been updated to use the pod.spec.os.name field. Based on the OS name, certain policies that are specific to a particular OS can be relaxed for the other OS.

OS-specific policy controls

Restrictions on the following controls are only required if .spec.os.name is not windows:

  • Privilege Escalation
  • Seccomp
  • Linux Capabilities

User namespaces

User Namespaces are a Linux-only feature to run workloads with increased isolation. How they work together with Pod Security Standards is described in the documentation for Pods that use user namespaces.

FAQ

Why isn't there a profile between Privileged and Baseline?

The three profiles defined here have a clear linear progression from most secure (Restricted) to least secure (Privileged), and cover a broad set of workloads. Privileges required above the Baseline policy are typically very application specific, so we do not offer a standard profile in this niche. This is not to say that the privileged profile should always be used in this case, but that policies in this space need to be defined on a case-by-case basis.

SIG Auth may reconsider this position in the future, should a clear need for other profiles arise.

What's the difference between a security profile and a security context?

Security Contexts configure Pods and Containers at runtime. Security contexts are defined as part of the Pod and container specifications in the Pod manifest, and represent parameters to the container runtime.

Security profiles are control plane mechanisms to enforce specific settings in the Security Context, as well as other related parameters outside the Security Context. As of July 2021, Pod Security Policies are deprecated in favor of the built-in Pod Security Admission Controller.

What about sandboxed Pods?

There is not currently an API standard that controls whether a Pod is considered sandboxed or not. Sandbox Pods may be identified by the use of a sandboxed runtime (such as gVisor or Kata Containers), but there is no standard definition of what a sandboxed runtime is.

The protections necessary for sandboxed workloads can differ from others. For example, the need to restrict privileged permissions is lessened when the workload is isolated from the underlying kernel. This allows for workloads requiring heightened permissions to still be isolated.

Additionally, the protection of sandboxed workloads is highly dependent on the method of sandboxing. As such, no single recommended profile is recommended for all sandboxed workloads.

8.3 - Pod Security Admission

An overview of the Pod Security Admission Controller, which can enforce the Pod Security Standards.
FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable]

The Kubernetes Pod Security Standards define different isolation levels for Pods. These standards let you define how you want to restrict the behavior of pods in a clear, consistent fashion.

Kubernetes offers a built-in Pod Security admission controller to enforce the Pod Security Standards. Pod security restrictions are applied at the namespace level when pods are created.

Built-in Pod Security admission enforcement

This page is part of the documentation for Kubernetes v1.32. If you are running a different version of Kubernetes, consult the documentation for that release.

Pod Security levels

Pod Security admission places requirements on a Pod's Security Context and other related fields according to the three levels defined by the Pod Security Standards: privileged, baseline, and restricted. Refer to the Pod Security Standards page for an in-depth look at those requirements.

Pod Security Admission labels for namespaces

Once the feature is enabled or the webhook is installed, you can configure namespaces to define the admission control mode you want to use for pod security in each namespace. Kubernetes defines a set of labels that you can set to define which of the predefined Pod Security Standard levels you want to use for a namespace. The label you select defines what action the control plane takes if a potential violation is detected:

Pod Security Admission modes
Mode Description
enforce Policy violations will cause the pod to be rejected.
audit Policy violations will trigger the addition of an audit annotation to the event recorded in the audit log, but are otherwise allowed.
warn Policy violations will trigger a user-facing warning, but are otherwise allowed.

A namespace can configure any or all modes, or even set a different level for different modes.

For each mode, there are two labels that determine the policy used:

# The per-mode level label indicates which policy level to apply for the mode.
#
# MODE must be one of `enforce`, `audit`, or `warn`.
# LEVEL must be one of `privileged`, `baseline`, or `restricted`.
pod-security.kubernetes.io/<MODE>: <LEVEL>

# Optional: per-mode version label that can be used to pin the policy to the
# version that shipped with a given Kubernetes minor version (for example v1.32).
#
# MODE must be one of `enforce`, `audit`, or `warn`.
# VERSION must be a valid Kubernetes minor version, or `latest`.
pod-security.kubernetes.io/<MODE>-version: <VERSION>

Check out Enforce Pod Security Standards with Namespace Labels to see example usage.

Workload resources and Pod templates

Pods are often created indirectly, by creating a workload object such as a Deployment or Job. The workload object defines a Pod template and a controller for the workload resource creates Pods based on that template. To help catch violations early, both the audit and warning modes are applied to the workload resources. However, enforce mode is not applied to workload resources, only to the resulting pod objects.

Exemptions

You can define exemptions from pod security enforcement in order to allow the creation of pods that would have otherwise been prohibited due to the policy associated with a given namespace. Exemptions can be statically configured in the Admission Controller configuration.

Exemptions must be explicitly enumerated. Requests meeting exemption criteria are ignored by the Admission Controller (all enforce, audit and warn behaviors are skipped). Exemption dimensions include:

  • Usernames: requests from users with an exempt authenticated (or impersonated) username are ignored.
  • RuntimeClassNames: pods and workload resources specifying an exempt runtime class name are ignored.
  • Namespaces: pods and workload resources in an exempt namespace are ignored.

Updates to the following pod fields are exempt from policy checks, meaning that if a pod update request only changes these fields, it will not be denied even if the pod is in violation of the current policy level:

  • Any metadata updates except changes to the seccomp or AppArmor annotations:
    • seccomp.security.alpha.kubernetes.io/pod (deprecated)
    • container.seccomp.security.alpha.kubernetes.io/* (deprecated)
    • container.apparmor.security.beta.kubernetes.io/* (deprecated)
  • Valid updates to .spec.activeDeadlineSeconds
  • Valid updates to .spec.tolerations

Metrics

Here are the Prometheus metrics exposed by kube-apiserver:

  • pod_security_errors_total: This metric indicates the number of errors preventing normal evaluation. Non-fatal errors may result in the latest restricted profile being used for enforcement.
  • pod_security_evaluations_total: This metric indicates the number of policy evaluations that have occurred, not counting ignored or exempt requests during exporting.
  • pod_security_exemptions_total: This metric indicates the number of exempt requests, not counting ignored or out of scope requests.

What's next

If you are running an older version of Kubernetes and want to upgrade to a version of Kubernetes that does not include PodSecurityPolicies, read migrate from PodSecurityPolicy to the Built-In PodSecurity Admission Controller.

8.4 - Service Accounts

Learn about ServiceAccount objects in Kubernetes.

This page introduces the ServiceAccount object in Kubernetes, providing information about how service accounts work, use cases, limitations, alternatives, and links to resources for additional guidance.

What are service accounts?

A service account is a type of non-human account that, in Kubernetes, provides a distinct identity in a Kubernetes cluster. Application Pods, system components, and entities inside and outside the cluster can use a specific ServiceAccount's credentials to identify as that ServiceAccount. This identity is useful in various situations, including authenticating to the API server or implementing identity-based security policies.

Service accounts exist as ServiceAccount objects in the API server. Service accounts have the following properties:

  • Namespaced: Each service account is bound to a Kubernetes namespace. Every namespace gets a default ServiceAccount upon creation.

  • Lightweight: Service accounts exist in the cluster and are defined in the Kubernetes API. You can quickly create service accounts to enable specific tasks.

  • Portable: A configuration bundle for a complex containerized workload might include service account definitions for the system's components. The lightweight nature of service accounts and the namespaced identities make the configurations portable.

Service accounts are different from user accounts, which are authenticated human users in the cluster. By default, user accounts don't exist in the Kubernetes API server; instead, the API server treats user identities as opaque data. You can authenticate as a user account using multiple methods. Some Kubernetes distributions might add custom extension APIs to represent user accounts in the API server.

Comparison between service accounts and users
Description ServiceAccount User or group
Location Kubernetes API (ServiceAccount object) External
Access control Kubernetes RBAC or other authorization mechanisms Kubernetes RBAC or other identity and access management mechanisms
Intended use Workloads, automation People

Default service accounts

When you create a cluster, Kubernetes automatically creates a ServiceAccount object named default for every namespace in your cluster. The default service accounts in each namespace get no permissions by default other than the default API discovery permissions that Kubernetes grants to all authenticated principals if role-based access control (RBAC) is enabled. If you delete the default ServiceAccount object in a namespace, the control plane replaces it with a new one.

If you deploy a Pod in a namespace, and you don't manually assign a ServiceAccount to the Pod, Kubernetes assigns the default ServiceAccount for that namespace to the Pod.

Use cases for Kubernetes service accounts

As a general guideline, you can use service accounts to provide identities in the following scenarios:

  • Your Pods need to communicate with the Kubernetes API server, for example in situations such as the following:
    • Providing read-only access to sensitive information stored in Secrets.
    • Granting cross-namespace access, such as allowing a Pod in namespace example to read, list, and watch for Lease objects in the kube-node-lease namespace.
  • Your Pods need to communicate with an external service. For example, a workload Pod requires an identity for a commercially available cloud API, and the commercial provider allows configuring a suitable trust relationship.
  • Authenticating to a private image registry using an imagePullSecret.
  • An external service needs to communicate with the Kubernetes API server. For example, authenticating to the cluster as part of a CI/CD pipeline.
  • You use third-party security software in your cluster that relies on the ServiceAccount identity of different Pods to group those Pods into different contexts.

How to use service accounts

To use a Kubernetes service account, you do the following:

  1. Create a ServiceAccount object using a Kubernetes client like kubectl or a manifest that defines the object.

  2. Grant permissions to the ServiceAccount object using an authorization mechanism such as RBAC.

  3. Assign the ServiceAccount object to Pods during Pod creation.

    If you're using the identity from an external service, retrieve the ServiceAccount token and use it from that service instead.

For instructions, refer to Configure Service Accounts for Pods.

Grant permissions to a ServiceAccount

You can use the built-in Kubernetes role-based access control (RBAC) mechanism to grant the minimum permissions required by each service account. You create a role, which grants access, and then bind the role to your ServiceAccount. RBAC lets you define a minimum set of permissions so that the service account permissions follow the principle of least privilege. Pods that use that service account don't get more permissions than are required to function correctly.

For instructions, refer to ServiceAccount permissions.

Cross-namespace access using a ServiceAccount

You can use RBAC to allow service accounts in one namespace to perform actions on resources in a different namespace in the cluster. For example, consider a scenario where you have a service account and Pod in the dev namespace and you want your Pod to see Jobs running in the maintenance namespace. You could create a Role object that grants permissions to list Job objects. Then, you'd create a RoleBinding object in the maintenance namespace to bind the Role to the ServiceAccount object. Now, Pods in the dev namespace can list Job objects in the maintenance namespace using that service account.

Assign a ServiceAccount to a Pod

To assign a ServiceAccount to a Pod, you set the spec.serviceAccountName field in the Pod specification. Kubernetes then automatically provides the credentials for that ServiceAccount to the Pod. In v1.22 and later, Kubernetes gets a short-lived, automatically rotating token using the TokenRequest API and mounts the token as a projected volume.

By default, Kubernetes provides the Pod with the credentials for an assigned ServiceAccount, whether that is the default ServiceAccount or a custom ServiceAccount that you specify.

To prevent Kubernetes from automatically injecting credentials for a specified ServiceAccount or the default ServiceAccount, set the automountServiceAccountToken field in your Pod specification to false.

In versions earlier than 1.22, Kubernetes provides a long-lived, static token to the Pod as a Secret.

Manually retrieve ServiceAccount credentials

If you need the credentials for a ServiceAccount to mount in a non-standard location, or for an audience that isn't the API server, use one of the following methods:

  • TokenRequest API (recommended): Request a short-lived service account token from within your own application code. The token expires automatically and can rotate upon expiration. If you have a legacy application that is not aware of Kubernetes, you could use a sidecar container within the same pod to fetch these tokens and make them available to the application workload.
  • Token Volume Projection (also recommended): In Kubernetes v1.20 and later, use the Pod specification to tell the kubelet to add the service account token to the Pod as a projected volume. Projected tokens expire automatically, and the kubelet rotates the token before it expires.
  • Service Account Token Secrets (not recommended): You can mount service account tokens as Kubernetes Secrets in Pods. These tokens don't expire and don't rotate. In versions prior to v1.24, a permanent token was automatically created for each service account. This method is not recommended anymore, especially at scale, because of the risks associated with static, long-lived credentials. The LegacyServiceAccountTokenNoAutoGeneration feature gate (which was enabled by default from Kubernetes v1.24 to v1.26), prevented Kubernetes from automatically creating these tokens for ServiceAccounts. The feature gate is removed in v1.27, because it was elevated to GA status; you can still create indefinite service account tokens manually, but should take into account the security implications.

Restricting access to Secrets

Kubernetes provides an annotation called kubernetes.io/enforce-mountable-secrets that you can add to your ServiceAccounts. When this annotation is applied, the ServiceAccount's secrets can only be mounted on specified types of resources, enhancing the security posture of your cluster.

You can add the annotation to a ServiceAccount using a manifest:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/enforce-mountable-secrets: "true"
  name: my-serviceaccount
  namespace: my-namespace

When this annotation is set to "true", the Kubernetes control plane ensures that the Secrets from this ServiceAccount are subject to certain mounting restrictions.

  1. The name of each Secret that is mounted as a volume in a Pod must appear in the secrets field of the Pod's ServiceAccount.
  2. The name of each Secret referenced using envFrom in a Pod must also appear in the secrets field of the Pod's ServiceAccount.
  3. The name of each Secret referenced using imagePullSecrets in a Pod must also appear in the secrets field of the Pod's ServiceAccount.

By understanding and enforcing these restrictions, cluster administrators can maintain a tighter security profile and ensure that secrets are accessed only by the appropriate resources.

Authenticating service account credentials

ServiceAccounts use signed JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) to authenticate to the Kubernetes API server, and to any other system where a trust relationship exists. Depending on how the token was issued (either time-limited using a TokenRequest or using a legacy mechanism with a Secret), a ServiceAccount token might also have an expiry time, an audience, and a time after which the token starts being valid. When a client that is acting as a ServiceAccount tries to communicate with the Kubernetes API server, the client includes an Authorization: Bearer <token> header with the HTTP request. The API server checks the validity of that bearer token as follows:

  1. Checks the token signature.
  2. Checks whether the token has expired.
  3. Checks whether object references in the token claims are currently valid.
  4. Checks whether the token is currently valid.
  5. Checks the audience claims.

The TokenRequest API produces bound tokens for a ServiceAccount. This binding is linked to the lifetime of the client, such as a Pod, that is acting as that ServiceAccount. See Token Volume Projection for an example of a bound pod service account token's JWT schema and payload.

For tokens issued using the TokenRequest API, the API server also checks that the specific object reference that is using the ServiceAccount still exists, matching by the unique ID of that object. For legacy tokens that are mounted as Secrets in Pods, the API server checks the token against the Secret.

For more information about the authentication process, refer to Authentication.

Authenticating service account credentials in your own code

If you have services of your own that need to validate Kubernetes service account credentials, you can use the following methods:

The Kubernetes project recommends that you use the TokenReview API, because this method invalidates tokens that are bound to API objects such as Secrets, ServiceAccounts, Pods or Nodes when those objects are deleted. For example, if you delete the Pod that contains a projected ServiceAccount token, the cluster invalidates that token immediately and a TokenReview immediately fails. If you use OIDC validation instead, your clients continue to treat the token as valid until the token reaches its expiration timestamp.

Your application should always define the audience that it accepts, and should check that the token's audiences match the audiences that the application expects. This helps to minimize the scope of the token so that it can only be used in your application and nowhere else.

Alternatives

What's next

8.5 - Pod Security Policies

Instead of using PodSecurityPolicy, you can enforce similar restrictions on Pods using either or both:

For a migration guide, see Migrate from PodSecurityPolicy to the Built-In PodSecurity Admission Controller. For more information on the removal of this API, see PodSecurityPolicy Deprecation: Past, Present, and Future.

If you are not running Kubernetes v1.32, check the documentation for your version of Kubernetes.

8.6 - Security For Windows Nodes

This page describes security considerations and best practices specific to the Windows operating system.

Protection for Secret data on nodes

On Windows, data from Secrets are written out in clear text onto the node's local storage (as compared to using tmpfs / in-memory filesystems on Linux). As a cluster operator, you should take both of the following additional measures:

  1. Use file ACLs to secure the Secrets' file location.
  2. Apply volume-level encryption using BitLocker.

Container users

RunAsUsername can be specified for Windows Pods or containers to execute the container processes as specific user. This is roughly equivalent to RunAsUser.

Windows containers offer two default user accounts, ContainerUser and ContainerAdministrator. The differences between these two user accounts are covered in When to use ContainerAdmin and ContainerUser user accounts within Microsoft's Secure Windows containers documentation.

Local users can be added to container images during the container build process.

Windows containers can also run as Active Directory identities by utilizing Group Managed Service Accounts

Pod-level security isolation

Linux-specific pod security context mechanisms (such as SELinux, AppArmor, Seccomp, or custom POSIX capabilities) are not supported on Windows nodes.

Privileged containers are not supported on Windows. Instead HostProcess containers can be used on Windows to perform many of the tasks performed by privileged containers on Linux.

8.7 - Controlling Access to the Kubernetes API

This page provides an overview of controlling access to the Kubernetes API.

Users access the Kubernetes API using kubectl, client libraries, or by making REST requests. Both human users and Kubernetes service accounts can be authorized for API access. When a request reaches the API, it goes through several stages, illustrated in the following diagram:

Diagram of request handling steps for Kubernetes API request

Transport security

By default, the Kubernetes API server listens on port 6443 on the first non-localhost network interface, protected by TLS. In a typical production Kubernetes cluster, the API serves on port 443. The port can be changed with the --secure-port, and the listening IP address with the --bind-address flag.

The API server presents a certificate. This certificate may be signed using a private certificate authority (CA), or based on a public key infrastructure linked to a generally recognized CA. The certificate and corresponding private key can be set by using the --tls-cert-file and --tls-private-key-file flags.

If your cluster uses a private certificate authority, you need a copy of that CA certificate configured into your ~/.kube/config on the client, so that you can trust the connection and be confident it was not intercepted.

Your client can present a TLS client certificate at this stage.

Authentication

Once TLS is established, the HTTP request moves to the Authentication step. This is shown as step 1 in the diagram. The cluster creation script or cluster admin configures the API server to run one or more Authenticator modules. Authenticators are described in more detail in Authentication.

The input to the authentication step is the entire HTTP request; however, it typically examines the headers and/or client certificate.

Authentication modules include client certificates, password, and plain tokens, bootstrap tokens, and JSON Web Tokens (used for service accounts).

Multiple authentication modules can be specified, in which case each one is tried in sequence, until one of them succeeds.

If the request cannot be authenticated, it is rejected with HTTP status code 401. Otherwise, the user is authenticated as a specific username, and the user name is available to subsequent steps to use in their decisions. Some authenticators also provide the group memberships of the user, while other authenticators do not.

While Kubernetes uses usernames for access control decisions and in request logging, it does not have a User object nor does it store usernames or other information about users in its API.

Authorization

After the request is authenticated as coming from a specific user, the request must be authorized. This is shown as step 2 in the diagram.

A request must include the username of the requester, the requested action, and the object affected by the action. The request is authorized if an existing policy declares that the user has permissions to complete the requested action.

For example, if Bob has the policy below, then he can read pods only in the namespace projectCaribou:

{
    "apiVersion": "abac.authorization.kubernetes.io/v1beta1",
    "kind": "Policy",
    "spec": {
        "user": "bob",
        "namespace": "projectCaribou",
        "resource": "pods",
        "readonly": true
    }
}

If Bob makes the following request, the request is authorized because he is allowed to read objects in the projectCaribou namespace:

{
  "apiVersion": "authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1",
  "kind": "SubjectAccessReview",
  "spec": {
    "resourceAttributes": {
      "namespace": "projectCaribou",
      "verb": "get",
      "group": "unicorn.example.org",
      "resource": "pods"
    }
  }
}

If Bob makes a request to write (create or update) to the objects in the projectCaribou namespace, his authorization is denied. If Bob makes a request to read (get) objects in a different namespace such as projectFish, then his authorization is denied.

Kubernetes authorization requires that you use common REST attributes to interact with existing organization-wide or cloud-provider-wide access control systems. It is important to use REST formatting because these control systems might interact with other APIs besides the Kubernetes API.

Kubernetes supports multiple authorization modules, such as ABAC mode, RBAC Mode, and Webhook mode. When an administrator creates a cluster, they configure the authorization modules that should be used in the API server. If more than one authorization modules are configured, Kubernetes checks each module, and if any module authorizes the request, then the request can proceed. If all of the modules deny the request, then the request is denied (HTTP status code 403).

To learn more about Kubernetes authorization, including details about creating policies using the supported authorization modules, see Authorization.

Admission control

Admission Control modules are software modules that can modify or reject requests. In addition to the attributes available to Authorization modules, Admission Control modules can access the contents of the object that is being created or modified.

Admission controllers act on requests that create, modify, delete, or connect to (proxy) an object. Admission controllers do not act on requests that merely read objects. When multiple admission controllers are configured, they are called in order.

This is shown as step 3 in the diagram.

Unlike Authentication and Authorization modules, if any admission controller module rejects, then the request is immediately rejected.

In addition to rejecting objects, admission controllers can also set complex defaults for fields.

The available Admission Control modules are described in Admission Controllers.

Once a request passes all admission controllers, it is validated using the validation routines for the corresponding API object, and then written to the object store (shown as step 4).

Auditing

Kubernetes auditing provides a security-relevant, chronological set of records documenting the sequence of actions in a cluster. The cluster audits the activities generated by users, by applications that use the Kubernetes API, and by the control plane itself.

For more information, see Auditing.

What's next

Read more documentation on authentication, authorization and API access control:

You can learn about:

  • how Pods can use Secrets to obtain API credentials.

8.8 - Role Based Access Control Good Practices

Principles and practices for good RBAC design for cluster operators.

Kubernetes RBAC is a key security control to ensure that cluster users and workloads have only the access to resources required to execute their roles. It is important to ensure that, when designing permissions for cluster users, the cluster administrator understands the areas where privilege escalation could occur, to reduce the risk of excessive access leading to security incidents.

The good practices laid out here should be read in conjunction with the general RBAC documentation.

General good practice

Least privilege

Ideally, minimal RBAC rights should be assigned to users and service accounts. Only permissions explicitly required for their operation should be used. While each cluster will be different, some general rules that can be applied are :

  • Assign permissions at the namespace level where possible. Use RoleBindings as opposed to ClusterRoleBindings to give users rights only within a specific namespace.
  • Avoid providing wildcard permissions when possible, especially to all resources. As Kubernetes is an extensible system, providing wildcard access gives rights not just to all object types that currently exist in the cluster, but also to all object types which are created in the future.
  • Administrators should not use cluster-admin accounts except where specifically needed. Providing a low privileged account with impersonation rights can avoid accidental modification of cluster resources.
  • Avoid adding users to the system:masters group. Any user who is a member of this group bypasses all RBAC rights checks and will always have unrestricted superuser access, which cannot be revoked by removing RoleBindings or ClusterRoleBindings. As an aside, if a cluster is using an authorization webhook, membership of this group also bypasses that webhook (requests from users who are members of that group are never sent to the webhook)

Minimize distribution of privileged tokens

Ideally, pods shouldn't be assigned service accounts that have been granted powerful permissions (for example, any of the rights listed under privilege escalation risks). In cases where a workload requires powerful permissions, consider the following practices:

  • Limit the number of nodes running powerful pods. Ensure that any DaemonSets you run are necessary and are run with least privilege to limit the blast radius of container escapes.
  • Avoid running powerful pods alongside untrusted or publicly-exposed ones. Consider using Taints and Toleration, NodeAffinity, or PodAntiAffinity to ensure pods don't run alongside untrusted or less-trusted Pods. Pay special attention to situations where less-trustworthy Pods are not meeting the Restricted Pod Security Standard.

Hardening

Kubernetes defaults to providing access which may not be required in every cluster. Reviewing the RBAC rights provided by default can provide opportunities for security hardening. In general, changes should not be made to rights provided to system: accounts some options to harden cluster rights exist:

  • Review bindings for the system:unauthenticated group and remove them where possible, as this gives access to anyone who can contact the API server at a network level.
  • Avoid the default auto-mounting of service account tokens by setting automountServiceAccountToken: false. For more details, see using default service account token. Setting this value for a Pod will overwrite the service account setting, workloads which require service account tokens can still mount them.

Periodic review

It is vital to periodically review the Kubernetes RBAC settings for redundant entries and possible privilege escalations. If an attacker is able to create a user account with the same name as a deleted user, they can automatically inherit all the rights of the deleted user, especially the rights assigned to that user.

Kubernetes RBAC - privilege escalation risks

Within Kubernetes RBAC there are a number of privileges which, if granted, can allow a user or a service account to escalate their privileges in the cluster or affect systems outside the cluster.

This section is intended to provide visibility of the areas where cluster operators should take care, to ensure that they do not inadvertently allow for more access to clusters than intended.

Listing secrets

It is generally clear that allowing get access on Secrets will allow a user to read their contents. It is also important to note that list and watch access also effectively allow for users to reveal the Secret contents. For example, when a List response is returned (for example, via kubectl get secrets -A -o yaml), the response includes the contents of all Secrets.

Workload creation

Permission to create workloads (either Pods, or workload resources that manage Pods) in a namespace implicitly grants access to many other resources in that namespace, such as Secrets, ConfigMaps, and PersistentVolumes that can be mounted in Pods. Additionally, since Pods can run as any ServiceAccount, granting permission to create workloads also implicitly grants the API access levels of any service account in that namespace.

Users who can run privileged Pods can use that access to gain node access and potentially to further elevate their privileges. Where you do not fully trust a user or other principal with the ability to create suitably secure and isolated Pods, you should enforce either the Baseline or Restricted Pod Security Standard. You can use Pod Security admission or other (third party) mechanisms to implement that enforcement.

For these reasons, namespaces should be used to separate resources requiring different levels of trust or tenancy. It is still considered best practice to follow least privilege principles and assign the minimum set of permissions, but boundaries within a namespace should be considered weak.

Persistent volume creation

If someone - or some application - is allowed to create arbitrary PersistentVolumes, that access includes the creation of hostPath volumes, which then means that a Pod would get access to the underlying host filesystem(s) on the associated node. Granting that ability is a security risk.

There are many ways a container with unrestricted access to the host filesystem can escalate privileges, including reading data from other containers, and abusing the credentials of system services, such as Kubelet.

You should only allow access to create PersistentVolume objects for:

  • Users (cluster operators) that need this access for their work, and who you trust.
  • The Kubernetes control plane components which creates PersistentVolumes based on PersistentVolumeClaims that are configured for automatic provisioning. This is usually setup by the Kubernetes provider or by the operator when installing a CSI driver.

Where access to persistent storage is required trusted administrators should create PersistentVolumes, and constrained users should use PersistentVolumeClaims to access that storage.

Access to proxy subresource of Nodes

Users with access to the proxy sub-resource of node objects have rights to the Kubelet API, which allows for command execution on every pod on the node(s) to which they have rights. This access bypasses audit logging and admission control, so care should be taken before granting rights to this resource.

Escalate verb

Generally, the RBAC system prevents users from creating clusterroles with more rights than the user possesses. The exception to this is the escalate verb. As noted in the RBAC documentation, users with this right can effectively escalate their privileges.

Bind verb

Similar to the escalate verb, granting users this right allows for the bypass of Kubernetes in-built protections against privilege escalation, allowing users to create bindings to roles with rights they do not already have.

Impersonate verb

This verb allows users to impersonate and gain the rights of other users in the cluster. Care should be taken when granting it, to ensure that excessive permissions cannot be gained via one of the impersonated accounts.

CSRs and certificate issuing

The CSR API allows for users with create rights to CSRs and update rights on certificatesigningrequests/approval where the signer is kubernetes.io/kube-apiserver-client to create new client certificates which allow users to authenticate to the cluster. Those client certificates can have arbitrary names including duplicates of Kubernetes system components. This will effectively allow for privilege escalation.

Token request

Users with create rights on serviceaccounts/token can create TokenRequests to issue tokens for existing service accounts.

Control admission webhooks

Users with control over validatingwebhookconfigurations or mutatingwebhookconfigurations can control webhooks that can read any object admitted to the cluster, and in the case of mutating webhooks, also mutate admitted objects.

Namespace modification

Users who can perform patch operations on Namespace objects (through a namespaced RoleBinding to a Role with that access) can modify labels on that namespace. In clusters where Pod Security Admission is used, this may allow a user to configure the namespace for a more permissive policy than intended by the administrators. For clusters where NetworkPolicy is used, users may be set labels that indirectly allow access to services that an administrator did not intend to allow.

Kubernetes RBAC - denial of service risks

Object creation denial-of-service

Users who have rights to create objects in a cluster may be able to create sufficient large objects to create a denial of service condition either based on the size or number of objects, as discussed in etcd used by Kubernetes is vulnerable to OOM attack. This may be specifically relevant in multi-tenant clusters if semi-trusted or untrusted users are allowed limited access to a system.

One option for mitigation of this issue would be to use resource quotas to limit the quantity of objects which can be created.

What's next

8.9 - Good practices for Kubernetes Secrets

Principles and practices for good Secret management for cluster administrators and application developers.

In Kubernetes, a Secret is an object that stores sensitive information, such as passwords, OAuth tokens, and SSH keys.

Secrets give you more control over how sensitive information is used and reduces the risk of accidental exposure. Secret values are encoded as base64 strings and are stored unencrypted by default, but can be configured to be encrypted at rest.

A Pod can reference the Secret in a variety of ways, such as in a volume mount or as an environment variable. Secrets are designed for confidential data and ConfigMaps are designed for non-confidential data.

The following good practices are intended for both cluster administrators and application developers. Use these guidelines to improve the security of your sensitive information in Secret objects, as well as to more effectively manage your Secrets.

Cluster administrators

This section provides good practices that cluster administrators can use to improve the security of confidential information in the cluster.

Configure encryption at rest

By default, Secret objects are stored unencrypted in etcd. You should configure encryption of your Secret data in etcd. For instructions, refer to Encrypt Secret Data at Rest.

Configure least-privilege access to Secrets

When planning your access control mechanism, such as Kubernetes Role-based Access Control (RBAC), consider the following guidelines for access to Secret objects. You should also follow the other guidelines in RBAC good practices.

  • Components: Restrict watch or list access to only the most privileged, system-level components. Only grant get access for Secrets if the component's normal behavior requires it.
  • Humans: Restrict get, watch, or list access to Secrets. Only allow cluster administrators to access etcd. This includes read-only access. For more complex access control, such as restricting access to Secrets with specific annotations, consider using third-party authorization mechanisms.

A user who can create a Pod that uses a Secret can also see the value of that Secret. Even if cluster policies do not allow a user to read the Secret directly, the same user could have access to run a Pod that then exposes the Secret. You can detect or limit the impact caused by Secret data being exposed, either intentionally or unintentionally, by a user with this access. Some recommendations include:

  • Use short-lived Secrets
  • Implement audit rules that alert on specific events, such as concurrent reading of multiple Secrets by a single user

Additional ServiceAccount annotations for Secret management

You can also use the kubernetes.io/enforce-mountable-secrets annotation on a ServiceAccount to enforce specific rules on how Secrets are used in a Pod. For more details, see the documentation on this annotation.

Improve etcd management policies

Consider wiping or shredding the durable storage used by etcd once it is no longer in use.

If there are multiple etcd instances, configure encrypted SSL/TLS communication between the instances to protect the Secret data in transit.

Configure access to external Secrets

You can use third-party Secrets store providers to keep your confidential data outside your cluster and then configure Pods to access that information. The Kubernetes Secrets Store CSI Driver is a DaemonSet that lets the kubelet retrieve Secrets from external stores, and mount the Secrets as a volume into specific Pods that you authorize to access the data.

For a list of supported providers, refer to Providers for the Secret Store CSI Driver.

Developers

This section provides good practices for developers to use to improve the security of confidential data when building and deploying Kubernetes resources.

Restrict Secret access to specific containers

If you are defining multiple containers in a Pod, and only one of those containers needs access to a Secret, define the volume mount or environment variable configuration so that the other containers do not have access to that Secret.

Protect Secret data after reading

Applications still need to protect the value of confidential information after reading it from an environment variable or volume. For example, your application must avoid logging the secret data in the clear or transmitting it to an untrusted party.

Avoid sharing Secret manifests

If you configure a Secret through a manifest, with the secret data encoded as base64, sharing this file or checking it in to a source repository means the secret is available to everyone who can read the manifest.

8.10 - Multi-tenancy

This page provides an overview of available configuration options and best practices for cluster multi-tenancy.

Sharing clusters saves costs and simplifies administration. However, sharing clusters also presents challenges such as security, fairness, and managing noisy neighbors.

Clusters can be shared in many ways. In some cases, different applications may run in the same cluster. In other cases, multiple instances of the same application may run in the same cluster, one for each end user. All these types of sharing are frequently described using the umbrella term multi-tenancy.

While Kubernetes does not have first-class concepts of end users or tenants, it provides several features to help manage different tenancy requirements. These are discussed below.

Use cases

The first step to determining how to share your cluster is understanding your use case, so you can evaluate the patterns and tools available. In general, multi-tenancy in Kubernetes clusters falls into two broad categories, though many variations and hybrids are also possible.

Multiple teams

A common form of multi-tenancy is to share a cluster between multiple teams within an organization, each of whom may operate one or more workloads. These workloads frequently need to communicate with each other, and with other workloads located on the same or different clusters.

In this scenario, members of the teams often have direct access to Kubernetes resources via tools such as kubectl, or indirect access through GitOps controllers or other types of release automation tools. There is often some level of trust between members of different teams, but Kubernetes policies such as RBAC, quotas, and network policies are essential to safely and fairly share clusters.

Multiple customers

The other major form of multi-tenancy frequently involves a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor running multiple instances of a workload for customers. This business model is so strongly associated with this deployment style that many people call it "SaaS tenancy." However, a better term might be "multi-customer tenancy," since SaaS vendors may also use other deployment models, and this deployment model can also be used outside of SaaS.

In this scenario, the customers do not have access to the cluster; Kubernetes is invisible from their perspective and is only used by the vendor to manage the workloads. Cost optimization is frequently a critical concern, and Kubernetes policies are used to ensure that the workloads are strongly isolated from each other.

Terminology

Tenants

When discussing multi-tenancy in Kubernetes, there is no single definition for a "tenant". Rather, the definition of a tenant will vary depending on whether multi-team or multi-customer tenancy is being discussed.

In multi-team usage, a tenant is typically a team, where each team typically deploys a small number of workloads that scales with the complexity of the service. However, the definition of "team" may itself be fuzzy, as teams may be organized into higher-level divisions or subdivided into smaller teams.

By contrast, if each team deploys dedicated workloads for each new client, they are using a multi-customer model of tenancy. In this case, a "tenant" is simply a group of users who share a single workload. This may be as large as an entire company, or as small as a single team at that company.

In many cases, the same organization may use both definitions of "tenants" in different contexts. For example, a platform team may offer shared services such as security tools and databases to multiple internal “customers” and a SaaS vendor may also have multiple teams sharing a development cluster. Finally, hybrid architectures are also possible, such as a SaaS provider using a combination of per-customer workloads for sensitive data, combined with multi-tenant shared services.

A cluster showing coexisting tenancy models

Isolation

There are several ways to design and build multi-tenant solutions with Kubernetes. Each of these methods comes with its own set of tradeoffs that impact the isolation level, implementation effort, operational complexity, and cost of service.

A Kubernetes cluster consists of a control plane which runs Kubernetes software, and a data plane consisting of worker nodes where tenant workloads are executed as pods. Tenant isolation can be applied in both the control plane and the data plane based on organizational requirements.

The level of isolation offered is sometimes described using terms like “hard” multi-tenancy, which implies strong isolation, and “soft” multi-tenancy, which implies weaker isolation. In particular, "hard" multi-tenancy is often used to describe cases where the tenants do not trust each other, often from security and resource sharing perspectives (e.g. guarding against attacks such as data exfiltration or DoS). Since data planes typically have much larger attack surfaces, "hard" multi-tenancy often requires extra attention to isolating the data-plane, though control plane isolation also remains critical.

However, the terms "hard" and "soft" can often be confusing, as there is no single definition that will apply to all users. Rather, "hardness" or "softness" is better understood as a broad spectrum, with many different techniques that can be used to maintain different types of isolation in your clusters, based on your requirements.

In more extreme cases, it may be easier or necessary to forgo any cluster-level sharing at all and assign each tenant their dedicated cluster, possibly even running on dedicated hardware if VMs are not considered an adequate security boundary. This may be easier with managed Kubernetes clusters, where the overhead of creating and operating clusters is at least somewhat taken on by a cloud provider. The benefit of stronger tenant isolation must be evaluated against the cost and complexity of managing multiple clusters. The Multi-cluster SIG is responsible for addressing these types of use cases.

The remainder of this page focuses on isolation techniques used for shared Kubernetes clusters. However, even if you are considering dedicated clusters, it may be valuable to review these recommendations, as it will give you the flexibility to shift to shared clusters in the future if your needs or capabilities change.

Control plane isolation

Control plane isolation ensures that different tenants cannot access or affect each others' Kubernetes API resources.

Namespaces

In Kubernetes, a Namespace provides a mechanism for isolating groups of API resources within a single cluster. This isolation has two key dimensions:

  1. Object names within a namespace can overlap with names in other namespaces, similar to files in folders. This allows tenants to name their resources without having to consider what other tenants are doing.

  2. Many Kubernetes security policies are scoped to namespaces. For example, RBAC Roles and Network Policies are namespace-scoped resources. Using RBAC, Users and Service Accounts can be restricted to a namespace.

In a multi-tenant environment, a Namespace helps segment a tenant's workload into a logical and distinct management unit. In fact, a common practice is to isolate every workload in its own namespace, even if multiple workloads are operated by the same tenant. This ensures that each workload has its own identity and can be configured with an appropriate security policy.

The namespace isolation model requires configuration of several other Kubernetes resources, networking plugins, and adherence to security best practices to properly isolate tenant workloads. These considerations are discussed below.

Access controls

The most important type of isolation for the control plane is authorization. If teams or their workloads can access or modify each others' API resources, they can change or disable all other types of policies thereby negating any protection those policies may offer. As a result, it is critical to ensure that each tenant has the appropriate access to only the namespaces they need, and no more. This is known as the "Principle of Least Privilege."

Role-based access control (RBAC) is commonly used to enforce authorization in the Kubernetes control plane, for both users and workloads (service accounts). Roles and RoleBindings are Kubernetes objects that are used at a namespace level to enforce access control in your application; similar objects exist for authorizing access to cluster-level objects, though these are less useful for multi-tenant clusters.

In a multi-team environment, RBAC must be used to restrict tenants' access to the appropriate namespaces, and ensure that cluster-wide resources can only be accessed or modified by privileged users such as cluster administrators.

If a policy ends up granting a user more permissions than they need, this is likely a signal that the namespace containing the affected resources should be refactored into finer-grained namespaces. Namespace management tools may simplify the management of these finer-grained namespaces by applying common RBAC policies to different namespaces, while still allowing fine-grained policies where necessary.

Quotas

Kubernetes workloads consume node resources, like CPU and memory. In a multi-tenant environment, you can use Resource Quotas to manage resource usage of tenant workloads. For the multiple teams use case, where tenants have access to the Kubernetes API, you can use resource quotas to limit the number of API resources (for example: the number of Pods, or the number of ConfigMaps) that a tenant can create. Limits on object count ensure fairness and aim to avoid noisy neighbor issues from affecting other tenants that share a control plane.

Resource quotas are namespaced objects. By mapping tenants to namespaces, cluster admins can use quotas to ensure that a tenant cannot monopolize a cluster's resources or overwhelm its control plane. Namespace management tools simplify the administration of quotas. In addition, while Kubernetes quotas only apply within a single namespace, some namespace management tools allow groups of namespaces to share quotas, giving administrators far more flexibility with less effort than built-in quotas.

Quotas prevent a single tenant from consuming greater than their allocated share of resources hence minimizing the “noisy neighbor” issue, where one tenant negatively impacts the performance of other tenants' workloads.

When you apply a quota to namespace, Kubernetes requires you to also specify resource requests and limits for each container. Limits are the upper bound for the amount of resources that a container can consume. Containers that attempt to consume resources that exceed the configured limits will either be throttled or killed, based on the resource type. When resource requests are set lower than limits, each container is guaranteed the requested amount but there may still be some potential for impact across workloads.

Quotas cannot protect against all kinds of resource sharing, such as network traffic. Node isolation (described below) may be a better solution for this problem.

Data Plane Isolation

Data plane isolation ensures that pods and workloads for different tenants are sufficiently isolated.

Network isolation

By default, all pods in a Kubernetes cluster are allowed to communicate with each other, and all network traffic is unencrypted. This can lead to security vulnerabilities where traffic is accidentally or maliciously sent to an unintended destination, or is intercepted by a workload on a compromised node.

Pod-to-pod communication can be controlled using Network Policies, which restrict communication between pods using namespace labels or IP address ranges. In a multi-tenant environment where strict network isolation between tenants is required, starting with a default policy that denies communication between pods is recommended with another rule that allows all pods to query the DNS server for name resolution. With such a default policy in place, you can begin adding more permissive rules that allow for communication within a namespace. It is also recommended not to use empty label selector '{}' for namespaceSelector field in network policy definition, in case traffic need to be allowed between namespaces. This scheme can be further refined as required. Note that this only applies to pods within a single control plane; pods that belong to different virtual control planes cannot talk to each other via Kubernetes networking.

Namespace management tools may simplify the creation of default or common network policies. In addition, some of these tools allow you to enforce a consistent set of namespace labels across your cluster, ensuring that they are a trusted basis for your policies.

More advanced network isolation may be provided by service meshes, which provide OSI Layer 7 policies based on workload identity, in addition to namespaces. These higher-level policies can make it easier to manage namespace-based multi-tenancy, especially when multiple namespaces are dedicated to a single tenant. They frequently also offer encryption using mutual TLS, protecting your data even in the presence of a compromised node, and work across dedicated or virtual clusters. However, they can be significantly more complex to manage and may not be appropriate for all users.

Storage isolation

Kubernetes offers several types of volumes that can be used as persistent storage for workloads. For security and data-isolation, dynamic volume provisioning is recommended and volume types that use node resources should be avoided.

StorageClasses allow you to describe custom "classes" of storage offered by your cluster, based on quality-of-service levels, backup policies, or custom policies determined by the cluster administrators.

Pods can request storage using a PersistentVolumeClaim. A PersistentVolumeClaim is a namespaced resource, which enables isolating portions of the storage system and dedicating it to tenants within the shared Kubernetes cluster. However, it is important to note that a PersistentVolume is a cluster-wide resource and has a lifecycle independent of workloads and namespaces.

For example, you can configure a separate StorageClass for each tenant and use this to strengthen isolation. If a StorageClass is shared, you should set a reclaim policy of Delete to ensure that a PersistentVolume cannot be reused across different namespaces.

Sandboxing containers

Kubernetes pods are composed of one or more containers that execute on worker nodes. Containers utilize OS-level virtualization and hence offer a weaker isolation boundary than virtual machines that utilize hardware-based virtualization.

In a shared environment, unpatched vulnerabilities in the application and system layers can be exploited by attackers for container breakouts and remote code execution that allow access to host resources. In some applications, like a Content Management System (CMS), customers may be allowed the ability to upload and execute untrusted scripts or code. In either case, mechanisms to further isolate and protect workloads using strong isolation are desirable.

Sandboxing provides a way to isolate workloads running in a shared cluster. It typically involves running each pod in a separate execution environment such as a virtual machine or a userspace kernel. Sandboxing is often recommended when you are running untrusted code, where workloads are assumed to be malicious. Part of the reason this type of isolation is necessary is because containers are processes running on a shared kernel; they mount file systems like /sys and /proc from the underlying host, making them less secure than an application that runs on a virtual machine which has its own kernel. While controls such as seccomp, AppArmor, and SELinux can be used to strengthen the security of containers, it is hard to apply a universal set of rules to all workloads running in a shared cluster. Running workloads in a sandbox environment helps to insulate the host from container escapes, where an attacker exploits a vulnerability to gain access to the host system and all the processes/files running on that host.

Virtual machines and userspace kernels are two popular approaches to sandboxing. The following sandboxing implementations are available:

  • gVisor intercepts syscalls from containers and runs them through a userspace kernel, written in Go, with limited access to the underlying host.
  • Kata Containers provide a secure container runtime that allows you to run containers in a VM. The hardware virtualization available in Kata offers an added layer of security for containers running untrusted code.

Node Isolation

Node isolation is another technique that you can use to isolate tenant workloads from each other. With node isolation, a set of nodes is dedicated to running pods from a particular tenant and co-mingling of tenant pods is prohibited. This configuration reduces the noisy tenant issue, as all pods running on a node will belong to a single tenant. The risk of information disclosure is slightly lower with node isolation because an attacker that manages to escape from a container will only have access to the containers and volumes mounted to that node.

Although workloads from different tenants are running on different nodes, it is important to be aware that the kubelet and (unless using virtual control planes) the API service are still shared services. A skilled attacker could use the permissions assigned to the kubelet or other pods running on the node to move laterally within the cluster and gain access to tenant workloads running on other nodes. If this is a major concern, consider implementing compensating controls such as seccomp, AppArmor or SELinux or explore using sandboxed containers or creating separate clusters for each tenant.

Node isolation is a little easier to reason about from a billing standpoint than sandboxing containers since you can charge back per node rather than per pod. It also has fewer compatibility and performance issues and may be easier to implement than sandboxing containers. For example, nodes for each tenant can be configured with taints so that only pods with the corresponding toleration can run on them. A mutating webhook could then be used to automatically add tolerations and node affinities to pods deployed into tenant namespaces so that they run on a specific set of nodes designated for that tenant.

Node isolation can be implemented using an pod node selectors or a Virtual Kubelet.

Additional Considerations

This section discusses other Kubernetes constructs and patterns that are relevant for multi-tenancy.

API Priority and Fairness

API priority and fairness is a Kubernetes feature that allows you to assign a priority to certain pods running within the cluster. When an application calls the Kubernetes API, the API server evaluates the priority assigned to pod. Calls from pods with higher priority are fulfilled before those with a lower priority. When contention is high, lower priority calls can be queued until the server is less busy or you can reject the requests.

Using API priority and fairness will not be very common in SaaS environments unless you are allowing customers to run applications that interface with the Kubernetes API, for example, a controller.

Quality-of-Service (QoS)

When you’re running a SaaS application, you may want the ability to offer different Quality-of-Service (QoS) tiers of service to different tenants. For example, you may have freemium service that comes with fewer performance guarantees and features and a for-fee service tier with specific performance guarantees. Fortunately, there are several Kubernetes constructs that can help you accomplish this within a shared cluster, including network QoS, storage classes, and pod priority and preemption. The idea with each of these is to provide tenants with the quality of service that they paid for. Let’s start by looking at networking QoS.

Typically, all pods on a node share a network interface. Without network QoS, some pods may consume an unfair share of the available bandwidth at the expense of other pods. The Kubernetes bandwidth plugin creates an extended resource for networking that allows you to use Kubernetes resources constructs, i.e. requests/limits, to apply rate limits to pods by using Linux tc queues. Be aware that the plugin is considered experimental as per the Network Plugins documentation and should be thoroughly tested before use in production environments.

For storage QoS, you will likely want to create different storage classes or profiles with different performance characteristics. Each storage profile can be associated with a different tier of service that is optimized for different workloads such IO, redundancy, or throughput. Additional logic might be necessary to allow the tenant to associate the appropriate storage profile with their workload.

Finally, there’s pod priority and preemption where you can assign priority values to pods. When scheduling pods, the scheduler will try evicting pods with lower priority when there are insufficient resources to schedule pods that are assigned a higher priority. If you have a use case where tenants have different service tiers in a shared cluster e.g. free and paid, you may want to give higher priority to certain tiers using this feature.

DNS

Kubernetes clusters include a Domain Name System (DNS) service to provide translations from names to IP addresses, for all Services and Pods. By default, the Kubernetes DNS service allows lookups across all namespaces in the cluster.

In multi-tenant environments where tenants can access pods and other Kubernetes resources, or where stronger isolation is required, it may be necessary to prevent pods from looking up services in other Namespaces. You can restrict cross-namespace DNS lookups by configuring security rules for the DNS service. For example, CoreDNS (the default DNS service for Kubernetes) can leverage Kubernetes metadata to restrict queries to Pods and Services within a namespace. For more information, read an example of configuring this within the CoreDNS documentation.

When a Virtual Control Plane per tenant model is used, a DNS service must be configured per tenant or a multi-tenant DNS service must be used. Here is an example of a customized version of CoreDNS that supports multiple tenants.

Operators

Operators are Kubernetes controllers that manage applications. Operators can simplify the management of multiple instances of an application, like a database service, which makes them a common building block in the multi-consumer (SaaS) multi-tenancy use case.

Operators used in a multi-tenant environment should follow a stricter set of guidelines. Specifically, the Operator should:

  • Support creating resources within different tenant namespaces, rather than just in the namespace in which the Operator is deployed.
  • Ensure that the Pods are configured with resource requests and limits, to ensure scheduling and fairness.
  • Support configuration of Pods for data-plane isolation techniques such as node isolation and sandboxed containers.

Implementations

There are two primary ways to share a Kubernetes cluster for multi-tenancy: using Namespaces (that is, a Namespace per tenant) or by virtualizing the control plane (that is, virtual control plane per tenant).

In both cases, data plane isolation, and management of additional considerations such as API Priority and Fairness, is also recommended.

Namespace isolation is well-supported by Kubernetes, has a negligible resource cost, and provides mechanisms to allow tenants to interact appropriately, such as by allowing service-to-service communication. However, it can be difficult to configure, and doesn't apply to Kubernetes resources that can't be namespaced, such as Custom Resource Definitions, Storage Classes, and Webhooks.

Control plane virtualization allows for isolation of non-namespaced resources at the cost of somewhat higher resource usage and more difficult cross-tenant sharing. It is a good option when namespace isolation is insufficient but dedicated clusters are undesirable, due to the high cost of maintaining them (especially on-prem) or due to their higher overhead and lack of resource sharing. However, even within a virtualized control plane, you will likely see benefits by using namespaces as well.

The two options are discussed in more detail in the following sections.

Namespace per tenant

As previously mentioned, you should consider isolating each workload in its own namespace, even if you are using dedicated clusters or virtualized control planes. This ensures that each workload only has access to its own resources, such as ConfigMaps and Secrets, and allows you to tailor dedicated security policies for each workload. In addition, it is a best practice to give each namespace names that are unique across your entire fleet (that is, even if they are in separate clusters), as this gives you the flexibility to switch between dedicated and shared clusters in the future, or to use multi-cluster tooling such as service meshes.

Conversely, there are also advantages to assigning namespaces at the tenant level, not just the workload level, since there are often policies that apply to all workloads owned by a single tenant. However, this raises its own problems. Firstly, this makes it difficult or impossible to customize policies to individual workloads, and secondly, it may be challenging to come up with a single level of "tenancy" that should be given a namespace. For example, an organization may have divisions, teams, and subteams - which should be assigned a namespace?

To solve this, Kubernetes provides the Hierarchical Namespace Controller (HNC), which allows you to organize your namespaces into hierarchies, and share certain policies and resources between them. It also helps you manage namespace labels, namespace lifecycles, and delegated management, and share resource quotas across related namespaces. These capabilities can be useful in both multi-team and multi-customer scenarios.

Other projects that provide similar capabilities and aid in managing namespaced resources are listed below.

Multi-team tenancy

Multi-customer tenancy

Policy engines

Policy engines provide features to validate and generate tenant configurations:

Virtual control plane per tenant

Another form of control-plane isolation is to use Kubernetes extensions to provide each tenant a virtual control-plane that enables segmentation of cluster-wide API resources. Data plane isolation techniques can be used with this model to securely manage worker nodes across tenants.

The virtual control plane based multi-tenancy model extends namespace-based multi-tenancy by providing each tenant with dedicated control plane components, and hence complete control over cluster-wide resources and add-on services. Worker nodes are shared across all tenants, and are managed by a Kubernetes cluster that is normally inaccessible to tenants. This cluster is often referred to as a super-cluster (or sometimes as a host-cluster). Since a tenant’s control-plane is not directly associated with underlying compute resources it is referred to as a virtual control plane.

A virtual control plane typically consists of the Kubernetes API server, the controller manager, and the etcd data store. It interacts with the super cluster via a metadata synchronization controller which coordinates changes across tenant control planes and the control plane of the super-cluster.

By using per-tenant dedicated control planes, most of the isolation problems due to sharing one API server among all tenants are solved. Examples include noisy neighbors in the control plane, uncontrollable blast radius of policy misconfigurations, and conflicts between cluster scope objects such as webhooks and CRDs. Hence, the virtual control plane model is particularly suitable for cases where each tenant requires access to a Kubernetes API server and expects the full cluster manageability.

The improved isolation comes at the cost of running and maintaining an individual virtual control plane per tenant. In addition, per-tenant control planes do not solve isolation problems in the data plane, such as node-level noisy neighbors or security threats. These must still be addressed separately.

The Kubernetes Cluster API - Nested (CAPN) project provides an implementation of virtual control planes.

Other implementations

8.11 - Hardening Guide - Authentication Mechanisms

Information on authentication options in Kubernetes and their security properties.

Selecting the appropriate authentication mechanism(s) is a crucial aspect of securing your cluster. Kubernetes provides several built-in mechanisms, each with its own strengths and weaknesses that should be carefully considered when choosing the best authentication mechanism for your cluster.

In general, it is recommended to enable as few authentication mechanisms as possible to simplify user management and prevent cases where users retain access to a cluster that is no longer required.

It is important to note that Kubernetes does not have an in-built user database within the cluster. Instead, it takes user information from the configured authentication system and uses that to make authorization decisions. Therefore, to audit user access, you need to review credentials from every configured authentication source.

For production clusters with multiple users directly accessing the Kubernetes API, it is recommended to use external authentication sources such as OIDC. The internal authentication mechanisms, such as client certificates and service account tokens, described below, are not suitable for this use case.

X.509 client certificate authentication

Kubernetes leverages X.509 client certificate authentication for system components, such as when the kubelet authenticates to the API Server. While this mechanism can also be used for user authentication, it might not be suitable for production use due to several restrictions:

  • Client certificates cannot be individually revoked. Once compromised, a certificate can be used by an attacker until it expires. To mitigate this risk, it is recommended to configure short lifetimes for user authentication credentials created using client certificates.
  • If a certificate needs to be invalidated, the certificate authority must be re-keyed, which can introduce availability risks to the cluster.
  • There is no permanent record of client certificates created in the cluster. Therefore, all issued certificates must be recorded if you need to keep track of them.
  • Private keys used for client certificate authentication cannot be password-protected. Anyone who can read the file containing the key will be able to make use of it.
  • Using client certificate authentication requires a direct connection from the client to the API server without any intervening TLS termination points, which can complicate network architectures.
  • Group data is embedded in the O value of the client certificate, which means the user's group memberships cannot be changed for the lifetime of the certificate.

Static token file

Although Kubernetes allows you to load credentials from a static token file located on the control plane node disks, this approach is not recommended for production servers due to several reasons:

  • Credentials are stored in clear text on control plane node disks, which can be a security risk.
  • Changing any credential requires a restart of the API server process to take effect, which can impact availability.
  • There is no mechanism available to allow users to rotate their credentials. To rotate a credential, a cluster administrator must modify the token on disk and distribute it to the users.
  • There is no lockout mechanism available to prevent brute-force attacks.

Bootstrap tokens

Bootstrap tokens are used for joining nodes to clusters and are not recommended for user authentication due to several reasons:

  • They have hard-coded group memberships that are not suitable for general use, making them unsuitable for authentication purposes.
  • Manually generating bootstrap tokens can lead to weak tokens that can be guessed by an attacker, which can be a security risk.
  • There is no lockout mechanism available to prevent brute-force attacks, making it easier for attackers to guess or crack the token.

ServiceAccount secret tokens

Service account secrets are available as an option to allow workloads running in the cluster to authenticate to the API server. In Kubernetes < 1.23, these were the default option, however, they are being replaced with TokenRequest API tokens. While these secrets could be used for user authentication, they are generally unsuitable for a number of reasons:

  • They cannot be set with an expiry and will remain valid until the associated service account is deleted.
  • The authentication tokens are visible to any cluster user who can read secrets in the namespace that they are defined in.
  • Service accounts cannot be added to arbitrary groups complicating RBAC management where they are used.

TokenRequest API tokens

The TokenRequest API is a useful tool for generating short-lived credentials for service authentication to the API server or third-party systems. However, it is not generally recommended for user authentication as there is no revocation method available, and distributing credentials to users in a secure manner can be challenging.

When using TokenRequest tokens for service authentication, it is recommended to implement a short lifespan to reduce the impact of compromised tokens.

OpenID Connect token authentication

Kubernetes supports integrating external authentication services with the Kubernetes API using OpenID Connect (OIDC). There is a wide variety of software that can be used to integrate Kubernetes with an identity provider. However, when using OIDC authentication in Kubernetes, it is important to consider the following hardening measures:

  • The software installed in the cluster to support OIDC authentication should be isolated from general workloads as it will run with high privileges.
  • Some Kubernetes managed services are limited in the OIDC providers that can be used.
  • As with TokenRequest tokens, OIDC tokens should have a short lifespan to reduce the impact of compromised tokens.

Webhook token authentication

Webhook token authentication is another option for integrating external authentication providers into Kubernetes. This mechanism allows for an authentication service, either running inside the cluster or externally, to be contacted for an authentication decision over a webhook. It is important to note that the suitability of this mechanism will likely depend on the software used for the authentication service, and there are some Kubernetes-specific considerations to take into account.

To configure Webhook authentication, access to control plane server filesystems is required. This means that it will not be possible with Managed Kubernetes unless the provider specifically makes it available. Additionally, any software installed in the cluster to support this access should be isolated from general workloads, as it will run with high privileges.

Authenticating proxy

Another option for integrating external authentication systems into Kubernetes is to use an authenticating proxy. With this mechanism, Kubernetes expects to receive requests from the proxy with specific header values set, indicating the username and group memberships to assign for authorization purposes. It is important to note that there are specific considerations to take into account when using this mechanism.

Firstly, securely configured TLS must be used between the proxy and Kubernetes API server to mitigate the risk of traffic interception or sniffing attacks. This ensures that the communication between the proxy and Kubernetes API server is secure.

Secondly, it is important to be aware that an attacker who is able to modify the headers of the request may be able to gain unauthorized access to Kubernetes resources. As such, it is important to ensure that the headers are properly secured and cannot be tampered with.

What's next

8.12 - Kubernetes API Server Bypass Risks

Security architecture information relating to the API server and other components

The Kubernetes API server is the main point of entry to a cluster for external parties (users and services) interacting with it.

As part of this role, the API server has several key built-in security controls, such as audit logging and admission controllers. However, there are ways to modify the configuration or content of the cluster that bypass these controls.

This page describes the ways in which the security controls built into the Kubernetes API server can be bypassed, so that cluster operators and security architects can ensure that these bypasses are appropriately restricted.

Static Pods

The kubelet on each node loads and directly manages any manifests that are stored in a named directory or fetched from a specific URL as static Pods in your cluster. The API server doesn't manage these static Pods. An attacker with write access to this location could modify the configuration of static pods loaded from that source, or could introduce new static Pods.

Static Pods are restricted from accessing other objects in the Kubernetes API. For example, you can't configure a static Pod to mount a Secret from the cluster. However, these Pods can take other security sensitive actions, such as using hostPath mounts from the underlying node.

By default, the kubelet creates a mirror pod so that the static Pods are visible in the Kubernetes API. However, if the attacker uses an invalid namespace name when creating the Pod, it will not be visible in the Kubernetes API and can only be discovered by tooling that has access to the affected host(s).

If a static Pod fails admission control, the kubelet won't register the Pod with the API server. However, the Pod still runs on the node. For more information, refer to kubeadm issue #1541.

Mitigations

  • Only enable the kubelet static Pod manifest functionality if required by the node.
  • If a node uses the static Pod functionality, restrict filesystem access to the static Pod manifest directory or URL to users who need the access.
  • Restrict access to kubelet configuration parameters and files to prevent an attacker setting a static Pod path or URL.
  • Regularly audit and centrally report all access to directories or web storage locations that host static Pod manifests and kubelet configuration files.

The kubelet API

The kubelet provides an HTTP API that is typically exposed on TCP port 10250 on cluster worker nodes. The API might also be exposed on control plane nodes depending on the Kubernetes distribution in use. Direct access to the API allows for disclosure of information about the pods running on a node, the logs from those pods, and execution of commands in every container running on the node.

When Kubernetes cluster users have RBAC access to Node object sub-resources, that access serves as authorization to interact with the kubelet API. The exact access depends on which sub-resource access has been granted, as detailed in kubelet authorization.

Direct access to the kubelet API is not subject to admission control and is not logged by Kubernetes audit logging. An attacker with direct access to this API may be able to bypass controls that detect or prevent certain actions.

The kubelet API can be configured to authenticate requests in a number of ways. By default, the kubelet configuration allows anonymous access. Most Kubernetes providers change the default to use webhook and certificate authentication. This lets the control plane ensure that the caller is authorized to access the nodes API resource or sub-resources. The default anonymous access doesn't make this assertion with the control plane.

Mitigations

  • Restrict access to sub-resources of the nodes API object using mechanisms such as RBAC. Only grant this access when required, such as by monitoring services.
  • Restrict access to the kubelet port. Only allow specified and trusted IP address ranges to access the port.
  • Ensure that kubelet authentication. is set to webhook or certificate mode.
  • Ensure that the unauthenticated "read-only" Kubelet port is not enabled on the cluster.

The etcd API

Kubernetes clusters use etcd as a datastore. The etcd service listens on TCP port 2379. The only clients that need access are the Kubernetes API server and any backup tooling that you use. Direct access to this API allows for disclosure or modification of any data held in the cluster.

Access to the etcd API is typically managed by client certificate authentication. Any certificate issued by a certificate authority that etcd trusts allows full access to the data stored inside etcd.

Direct access to etcd is not subject to Kubernetes admission control and is not logged by Kubernetes audit logging. An attacker who has read access to the API server's etcd client certificate private key (or can create a new trusted client certificate) can gain cluster admin rights by accessing cluster secrets or modifying access rules. Even without elevating their Kubernetes RBAC privileges, an attacker who can modify etcd can retrieve any API object or create new workloads inside the cluster.

Many Kubernetes providers configure etcd to use mutual TLS (both client and server verify each other's certificate for authentication). There is no widely accepted implementation of authorization for the etcd API, although the feature exists. Since there is no authorization model, any certificate with client access to etcd can be used to gain full access to etcd. Typically, etcd client certificates that are only used for health checking can also grant full read and write access.

Mitigations

  • Ensure that the certificate authority trusted by etcd is used only for the purposes of authentication to that service.
  • Control access to the private key for the etcd server certificate, and to the API server's client certificate and key.
  • Consider restricting access to the etcd port at a network level, to only allow access from specified and trusted IP address ranges.

Container runtime socket

On each node in a Kubernetes cluster, access to interact with containers is controlled by the container runtime (or runtimes, if you have configured more than one). Typically, the container runtime exposes a Unix socket that the kubelet can access. An attacker with access to this socket can launch new containers or interact with running containers.

At the cluster level, the impact of this access depends on whether the containers that run on the compromised node have access to Secrets or other confidential data that an attacker could use to escalate privileges to other worker nodes or to control plane components.

Mitigations

  • Ensure that you tightly control filesystem access to container runtime sockets. When possible, restrict this access to the root user.
  • Isolate the kubelet from other components running on the node, using mechanisms such as Linux kernel namespaces.
  • Ensure that you restrict or forbid the use of hostPath mounts that include the container runtime socket, either directly or by mounting a parent directory. Also hostPath mounts must be set as read-only to mitigate risks of attackers bypassing directory restrictions.
  • Restrict user access to nodes, and especially restrict superuser access to nodes.

8.13 - Linux kernel security constraints for Pods and containers

Overview of Linux kernel security modules and constraints that you can use to harden your Pods and containers.

This page describes some of the security features that are built into the Linux kernel that you can use in your Kubernetes workloads. To learn how to apply these features to your Pods and containers, refer to Configure a SecurityContext for a Pod or Container. You should already be familiar with Linux and with the basics of Kubernetes workloads.

Run workloads without root privileges

When you deploy a workload in Kubernetes, use the Pod specification to restrict that workload from running as the root user on the node. You can use the Pod securityContext to define the specific Linux user and group for the processes in the Pod, and explicitly restrict containers from running as root users. Setting these values in the Pod manifest takes precedence over similar values in the container image, which is especially useful if you're running images that you don't own.

Configuring the kernel security features on this page provides fine-grained control over the actions that processes in your cluster can take, but managing these configurations can be challenging at scale. Running containers as non-root, or in user namespaces if you need root privileges, helps to reduce the chance that you'll need to enforce your configured kernel security capabilities.

Security features in the Linux kernel

Kubernetes lets you configure and use Linux kernel features to improve isolation and harden your containerized workloads. Common features include the following:

  • Secure computing mode (seccomp): Filter which system calls a process can make
  • AppArmor: Restrict the access privileges of individual programs
  • Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux): Assign security labels to objects for more manageable security policy enforcement

To configure settings for one of these features, the operating system that you choose for your nodes must enable the feature in the kernel. For example, Ubuntu 7.10 and later enable AppArmor by default. To learn whether your OS enables a specific feature, consult the OS documentation.

You use the securityContext field in your Pod specification to define the constraints that apply to those processes. The securityContext field also supports other security settings, such as specific Linux capabilities or file access permissions using UIDs and GIDs. To learn more, refer to Configure a SecurityContext for a Pod or Container.

seccomp

Some of your workloads might need privileges to perform specific actions as the root user on your node's host machine. Linux uses capabilities to divide the available privileges into categories, so that processes can get the privileges required to perform specific actions without being granted all privileges. Each capability has a set of system calls (syscalls) that a process can make. seccomp lets you restrict these individual syscalls. It can be used to sandbox the privileges of a process, restricting the calls it is able to make from userspace into the kernel.

In Kubernetes, you use a container runtime on each node to run your containers. Example runtimes include CRI-O, Docker, or containerd. Each runtime allows only a subset of Linux capabilities by default. You can further limit the allowed syscalls individually by using a seccomp profile. Container runtimes usually include a default seccomp profile. Kubernetes lets you automatically apply seccomp profiles loaded onto a node to your Pods and containers.

To learn how to implement seccomp in Kubernetes, refer to Restrict a Container's Syscalls with seccomp or the Seccomp node reference

To learn more about seccomp, see Seccomp BPF in the Linux kernel documentation.

Considerations for seccomp

seccomp is a low-level security configuration that you should only configure yourself if you require fine-grained control over Linux syscalls. Using seccomp, especially at scale, has the following risks:

  • Configurations might break during application updates
  • Attackers can still use allowed syscalls to exploit vulnerabilities
  • Profile management for individual applications becomes challenging at scale

Recommendation: Use the default seccomp profile that's bundled with your container runtime. If you need a more isolated environment, consider using a sandbox, such as gVisor. Sandboxes solve the preceding risks with custom seccomp profiles, but require more compute resources on your nodes and might have compatibility issues with GPUs and other specialized hardware.

AppArmor and SELinux: policy-based mandatory access control

You can use Linux policy-based mandatory access control (MAC) mechanisms, such as AppArmor and SELinux, to harden your Kubernetes workloads.

AppArmor

AppArmor is a Linux kernel security module that supplements the standard Linux user and group based permissions to confine programs to a limited set of resources. AppArmor can be configured for any application to reduce its potential attack surface and provide greater in-depth defense. It is configured through profiles tuned to allow the access needed by a specific program or container, such as Linux capabilities, network access, and file permissions. Each profile can be run in either enforcing mode, which blocks access to disallowed resources, or complain mode, which only reports violations.

AppArmor can help you to run a more secure deployment by restricting what containers are allowed to do, and/or provide better auditing through system logs. The container runtime that you use might ship with a default AppArmor profile, or you can use a custom profile.

To learn how to use AppArmor in Kubernetes, refer to Restrict a Container's Access to Resources with AppArmor.

SELinux

SELinux is a Linux kernel security module that lets you restrict the access that a specific subject, such as a process, has to the files on your system. You define security policies that apply to subjects that have specific SELinux labels. When a process that has an SELinux label attempts to access a file, the SELinux server checks whether that process' security policy allows the access and makes an authorization decision.

In Kubernetes, you can set an SELinux label in the securityContext field of your manifest. The specified labels are assigned to those processes. If you have configured security policies that affect those labels, the host OS kernel enforces these policies.

To learn how to use SELinux in Kubernetes, refer to Assign SELinux labels to a container.

Differences between AppArmor and SELinux

The operating system on your Linux nodes usually includes one of either AppArmor or SELinux. Both mechanisms provide similar types of protection, but have differences such as the following:

  • Configuration: AppArmor uses profiles to define access to resources. SELinux uses policies that apply to specific labels.
  • Policy application: In AppArmor, you define resources using file paths. SELinux uses the index node (inode) of a resource to identify the resource.

Summary of features

The following table describes the use cases and scope of each security control. You can use all of these controls together to build a more hardened system.

Summary of Linux kernel security features
Security feature Description How to use Example
seccomp Restrict individual kernel calls in the userspace. Reduces the likelihood that a vulnerability that uses a restricted syscall would compromise the system. Specify a loaded seccomp profile in the Pod or container specification to apply its constraints to the processes in the Pod. Reject the unshare syscall, which was used in CVE-2022-0185.
AppArmor Restrict program access to specific resources. Reduces the attack surface of the program. Improves audit logging. Specify a loaded AppArmor profile in the container specification. Restrict a read-only program from writing to any file path in the system.
SELinux Restrict access to resources such as files, applications, ports, and processes using labels and security policies. Specify access restrictions for specific labels. Tag processes with those labels to enforce the access restrictions related to the label. Restrict a container from accessing files outside its own filesystem.

Considerations for managing custom configurations

seccomp, AppArmor, and SELinux usually have a default configuration that offers basic protections. You can also create custom profiles and policies that meet the requirements of your workloads. Managing and distributing these custom configurations at scale might be challenging, especially if you use all three features together. To help you to manage these configurations at scale, use a tool like the Kubernetes Security Profiles Operator.

Kernel-level security features and privileged containers

Kubernetes lets you specify that some trusted containers can run in privileged mode. Any container in a Pod can run in privileged mode to use operating system administrative capabilities that would otherwise be inaccessible. This is available for both Windows and Linux.

Privileged containers explicitly override some of the Linux kernel constraints that you might use in your workloads, as follows:

  • seccomp: Privileged containers run as the Unconfined seccomp profile, overriding any seccomp profile that you specified in your manifest.
  • AppArmor: Privileged containers ignore any applied AppArmor profiles.
  • SELinux: Privileged containers run as the unconfined_t domain.

Privileged containers

Any container in a Pod can enable Privileged mode if you set the privileged: true field in the securityContext field for the container. Privileged containers override or undo many other hardening settings such as the applied seccomp profile, AppArmor profile, or SELinux constraints. Privileged containers are given all Linux capabilities, including capabilities that they don't require. For example, a root user in a privileged container might be able to use the CAP_SYS_ADMIN and CAP_NET_ADMIN capabilities on the node, bypassing the runtime seccomp configuration and other restrictions.

In most cases, you should avoid using privileged containers, and instead grant the specific capabilities required by your container using the capabilities field in the securityContext field. Only use privileged mode if you have a capability that you can't grant with the securityContext. This is useful for containers that want to use operating system administrative capabilities such as manipulating the network stack or accessing hardware devices.

In Kubernetes version 1.26 and later, you can also run Windows containers in a similarly privileged mode by setting the windowsOptions.hostProcess flag on the security context of the Pod spec. For details and instructions, see Create a Windows HostProcess Pod.

Recommendations and best practices

  • Before configuring kernel-level security capabilities, you should consider implementing network-level isolation. For more information, read the Security Checklist.
  • Unless necessary, run Linux workloads as non-root by setting specific user and group IDs in your Pod manifest and by specifying runAsNonRoot: true.

Additionally, you can run workloads in user namespaces by setting hostUsers: false in your Pod manifest. This lets you run containers as root users in the user namespace, but as non-root users in the host namespace on the node. This is still in early stages of development and might not have the level of support that you need. For instructions, refer to Use a User Namespace With a Pod.

What's next

8.14 - Security Checklist

Baseline checklist for ensuring security in Kubernetes clusters.

This checklist aims at providing a basic list of guidance with links to more comprehensive documentation on each topic. It does not claim to be exhaustive and is meant to evolve.

On how to read and use this document:

  • The order of topics does not reflect an order of priority.
  • Some checklist items are detailed in the paragraph below the list of each section.

Authentication & Authorization

  • system:masters group is not used for user or component authentication after bootstrapping.
  • The kube-controller-manager is running with --use-service-account-credentials enabled.
  • The root certificate is protected (either an offline CA, or a managed online CA with effective access controls).
  • Intermediate and leaf certificates have an expiry date no more than 3 years in the future.
  • A process exists for periodic access review, and reviews occur no more than 24 months apart.
  • The Role Based Access Control Good Practices are followed for guidance related to authentication and authorization.

After bootstrapping, neither users nor components should authenticate to the Kubernetes API as system:masters. Similarly, running all of kube-controller-manager as system:masters should be avoided. In fact, system:masters should only be used as a break-glass mechanism, as opposed to an admin user.

Network security

  • CNI plugins in-use supports network policies.
  • Ingress and egress network policies are applied to all workloads in the cluster.
  • Default network policies within each namespace, selecting all pods, denying everything, are in place.
  • If appropriate, a service mesh is used to encrypt all communications inside of the cluster.
  • The Kubernetes API, kubelet API and etcd are not exposed publicly on Internet.
  • Access from the workloads to the cloud metadata API is filtered.
  • Use of LoadBalancer and ExternalIPs is restricted.

A number of Container Network Interface (CNI) plugins plugins provide the functionality to restrict network resources that pods may communicate with. This is most commonly done through Network Policies which provide a namespaced resource to define rules. Default network policies blocking everything egress and ingress, in each namespace, selecting all the pods, can be useful to adopt an allow list approach, ensuring that no workloads is missed.

Not all CNI plugins provide encryption in transit. If the chosen plugin lacks this feature, an alternative solution could be to use a service mesh to provide that functionality.

The etcd datastore of the control plane should have controls to limit access and not be publicly exposed on the Internet. Furthermore, mutual TLS (mTLS) should be used to communicate securely with it. The certificate authority for this should be unique to etcd.

External Internet access to the Kubernetes API server should be restricted to not expose the API publicly. Be careful as many managed Kubernetes distribution are publicly exposing the API server by default. You can then use a bastion host to access the server.

The kubelet API access should be restricted and not publicly exposed, the defaults authentication and authorization settings, when no configuration file specified with the --config flag, are overly permissive.

If a cloud provider is used for hosting Kubernetes, the access from pods to the cloud metadata API 169.254.169.254 should also be restricted or blocked if not needed because it may leak information.

For restricted LoadBalancer and ExternalIPs use, see CVE-2020-8554: Man in the middle using LoadBalancer or ExternalIPs and the DenyServiceExternalIPs admission controller for further information.

Pod security

  • RBAC rights to create, update, patch, delete workloads is only granted if necessary.
  • Appropriate Pod Security Standards policy is applied for all namespaces and enforced.
  • Memory limit is set for the workloads with a limit equal or inferior to the request.
  • CPU limit might be set on sensitive workloads.
  • For nodes that support it, Seccomp is enabled with appropriate syscalls profile for programs.
  • For nodes that support it, AppArmor or SELinux is enabled with appropriate profile for programs.

RBAC authorization is crucial but cannot be granular enough to have authorization on the Pods' resources (or on any resource that manages Pods). The only granularity is the API verbs on the resource itself, for example, create on Pods. Without additional admission, the authorization to create these resources allows direct unrestricted access to the schedulable nodes of a cluster.

The Pod Security Standards define three different policies, privileged, baseline and restricted that limit how fields can be set in the PodSpec regarding security. These standards can be enforced at the namespace level with the new Pod Security admission, enabled by default, or by third-party admission webhook. Please note that, contrary to the removed PodSecurityPolicy admission it replaces, Pod Security admission can be easily combined with admission webhooks and external services.

Pod Security admission restricted policy, the most restrictive policy of the Pod Security Standards set, can operate in several modes, warn, audit or enforce to gradually apply the most appropriate security context according to security best practices. Nevertheless, pods' security context should be separately investigated to limit the privileges and access pods may have on top of the predefined security standards, for specific use cases.

For a hands-on tutorial on Pod Security, see the blog post Kubernetes 1.23: Pod Security Graduates to Beta.

Memory and CPU limits should be set in order to restrict the memory and CPU resources a pod can consume on a node, and therefore prevent potential DoS attacks from malicious or breached workloads. Such policy can be enforced by an admission controller. Please note that CPU limits will throttle usage and thus can have unintended effects on auto-scaling features or efficiency i.e. running the process in best effort with the CPU resource available.

Enabling Seccomp

Seccomp stands for secure computing mode and has been a feature of the Linux kernel since version 2.6.12. It can be used to sandbox the privileges of a process, restricting the calls it is able to make from userspace into the kernel. Kubernetes lets you automatically apply seccomp profiles loaded onto a node to your Pods and containers.

Seccomp can improve the security of your workloads by reducing the Linux kernel syscall attack surface available inside containers. The seccomp filter mode leverages BPF to create an allow or deny list of specific syscalls, named profiles.

Since Kubernetes 1.27, you can enable the use of RuntimeDefault as the default seccomp profile for all workloads. A security tutorial is available on this topic. In addition, the Kubernetes Security Profiles Operator is a project that facilitates the management and use of seccomp in clusters.

Enabling AppArmor or SELinux

AppArmor

AppArmor is a Linux kernel security module that can provide an easy way to implement Mandatory Access Control (MAC) and better auditing through system logs. A default AppArmor profile is enforced on nodes that support it, or a custom profile can be configured. Like seccomp, AppArmor is also configured through profiles, where each profile is either running in enforcing mode, which blocks access to disallowed resources or complain mode, which only reports violations. AppArmor profiles are enforced on a per-container basis, with an annotation, allowing for processes to gain just the right privileges.

SELinux

SELinux is also a Linux kernel security module that can provide a mechanism for supporting access control security policies, including Mandatory Access Controls (MAC). SELinux labels can be assigned to containers or pods via their securityContext section.

Logs and auditing

  • Audit logs, if enabled, are protected from general access.

Pod placement

  • Pod placement is done in accordance with the tiers of sensitivity of the application.
  • Sensitive applications are running isolated on nodes or with specific sandboxed runtimes.

Pods that are on different tiers of sensitivity, for example, an application pod and the Kubernetes API server, should be deployed onto separate nodes. The purpose of node isolation is to prevent an application container breakout to directly providing access to applications with higher level of sensitivity to easily pivot within the cluster. This separation should be enforced to prevent pods accidentally being deployed onto the same node. This could be enforced with the following features:

Node Selectors
Key-value pairs, as part of the pod specification, that specify which nodes to deploy onto. These can be enforced at the namespace and cluster level with the PodNodeSelector admission controller.
PodTolerationRestriction
An admission controller that allows administrators to restrict permitted tolerations within a namespace. Pods within a namespace may only utilize the tolerations specified on the namespace object annotation keys that provide a set of default and allowed tolerations.
RuntimeClass
RuntimeClass is a feature for selecting the container runtime configuration. The container runtime configuration is used to run a Pod's containers and can provide more or less isolation from the host at the cost of performance overhead.

Secrets

  • ConfigMaps are not used to hold confidential data.
  • Encryption at rest is configured for the Secret API.
  • If appropriate, a mechanism to inject secrets stored in third-party storage is deployed and available.
  • Service account tokens are not mounted in pods that don't require them.
  • Bound service account token volume is in-use instead of non-expiring tokens.

Secrets required for pods should be stored within Kubernetes Secrets as opposed to alternatives such as ConfigMap. Secret resources stored within etcd should be encrypted at rest.

Pods needing secrets should have these automatically mounted through volumes, preferably stored in memory like with the emptyDir.medium option. Mechanism can be used to also inject secrets from third-party storages as volume, like the Secrets Store CSI Driver. This should be done preferentially as compared to providing the pods service account RBAC access to secrets. This would allow adding secrets into the pod as environment variables or files. Please note that the environment variable method might be more prone to leakage due to crash dumps in logs and the non-confidential nature of environment variable in Linux, as opposed to the permission mechanism on files.

Service account tokens should not be mounted into pods that do not require them. This can be configured by setting automountServiceAccountToken to false either within the service account to apply throughout the namespace or specifically for a pod. For Kubernetes v1.22 and above, use Bound Service Accounts for time-bound service account credentials.

Images

  • Minimize unnecessary content in container images.
  • Container images are configured to be run as unprivileged user.
  • References to container images are made by sha256 digests (rather than tags) or the provenance of the image is validated by verifying the image's digital signature at deploy time via admission control.
  • Container images are regularly scanned during creation and in deployment, and known vulnerable software is patched.

Container image should contain the bare minimum to run the program they package. Preferably, only the program and its dependencies, building the image from the minimal possible base. In particular, image used in production should not contain shells or debugging utilities, as an ephemeral debug container can be used for troubleshooting.

Build images to directly start with an unprivileged user by using the USER instruction in Dockerfile. The Security Context allows a container image to be started with a specific user and group with runAsUser and runAsGroup, even if not specified in the image manifest. However, the file permissions in the image layers might make it impossible to just start the process with a new unprivileged user without image modification.

Avoid using image tags to reference an image, especially the latest tag, the image behind a tag can be easily modified in a registry. Prefer using the complete sha256 digest which is unique to the image manifest. This policy can be enforced via an ImagePolicyWebhook. Image signatures can also be automatically verified with an admission controller at deploy time to validate their authenticity and integrity.

Scanning a container image can prevent critical vulnerabilities from being deployed to the cluster alongside the container image. Image scanning should be completed before deploying a container image to a cluster and is usually done as part of the deployment process in a CI/CD pipeline. The purpose of an image scan is to obtain information about possible vulnerabilities and their prevention in the container image, such as a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score. If the result of the image scans is combined with the pipeline compliance rules, only properly patched container images will end up in Production.

Admission controllers

  • An appropriate selection of admission controllers is enabled.
  • A pod security policy is enforced by the Pod Security Admission or/and a webhook admission controller.
  • The admission chain plugins and webhooks are securely configured.

Admission controllers can help to improve the security of the cluster. However, they can present risks themselves as they extend the API server and should be properly secured.

The following lists present a number of admission controllers that could be considered to enhance the security posture of your cluster and application. It includes controllers that may be referenced in other parts of this document.

This first group of admission controllers includes plugins enabled by default, consider to leave them enabled unless you know what you are doing:

CertificateApproval
Performs additional authorization checks to ensure the approving user has permission to approve certificate request.
CertificateSigning
Performs additional authorization checks to ensure the signing user has permission to sign certificate requests.
CertificateSubjectRestriction
Rejects any certificate request that specifies a 'group' (or 'organization attribute') of system:masters.
LimitRanger
Enforce the LimitRange API constraints.
MutatingAdmissionWebhook
Allows the use of custom controllers through webhooks, these controllers may mutate requests that it reviews.
PodSecurity
Replacement for Pod Security Policy, restricts security contexts of deployed Pods.
ResourceQuota
Enforces resource quotas to prevent over-usage of resources.
ValidatingAdmissionWebhook
Allows the use of custom controllers through webhooks, these controllers do not mutate requests that it reviews.

The second group includes plugin that are not enabled by default but in general availability state and recommended to improve your security posture:

DenyServiceExternalIPs
Rejects all net-new usage of the Service.spec.externalIPs field. This is a mitigation for CVE-2020-8554: Man in the middle using LoadBalancer or ExternalIPs.
NodeRestriction
Restricts kubelet's permissions to only modify the pods API resources they own or the node API resource that represent themselves. It also prevents kubelet from using the node-restriction.kubernetes.io/ annotation, which can be used by an attacker with access to the kubelet's credentials to influence pod placement to the controlled node.

The third group includes plugins that are not enabled by default but could be considered for certain use cases:

AlwaysPullImages
Enforces the usage of the latest version of a tagged image and ensures that the deployer has permissions to use the image.
ImagePolicyWebhook
Allows enforcing additional controls for images through webhooks.

What's next

8.15 - Application Security Checklist

Baseline guidelines around ensuring application security on Kubernetes, aimed at application developers

This checklist aims to provide basic guidelines on securing applications running in Kubernetes from a developer's perspective. This list is not meant to be exhaustive and is intended to evolve over time.

On how to read and use this document:

  • The order of topics does not reflect an order of priority.
  • Some checklist items are detailed in the paragraph below the list of each section.
  • This checklist assumes that a developer is a Kubernetes cluster user who interacts with namespaced scope objects.

Base security hardening

The following checklist provides base security hardening recommendations that would apply to most applications deploying to Kubernetes.

Application design

  • Follow the right security principles when designing applications.
  • Application configured with appropriate QoS class through resource request and limits.
    • Memory limit is set for the workloads with a limit equal to or greater than the request.
    • CPU limit might be set on sensitive workloads.

Service account

  • Avoid using the default ServiceAccount. Instead, create ServiceAccounts for each workload or microservice.
  • automountServiceAccountToken should be set to false unless the pod specifically requires access to the Kubernetes API to operate.

Pod-level securityContext recommendations

  • Set runAsNonRoot: true.
  • Configure the container to execute as a less privileged user (for example, using runAsUser and runAsGroup), and configure appropriate permissions on files or directories inside the container image.
  • Optionally add a supplementary group with fsGroup to access persistent volumes.
  • The application deploys into a namespace that enforces an appropriate Pod security standard. If you cannot control this enforcement for the cluster(s) where the application is deployed, take this into account either through documentation or additional defense in depth.

Container-level securityContext recommendations

  • Disable privilege escalations using allowPrivilegeEscalation: false.
  • Configure the root filesystem to be read-only with readOnlyRootFilesystem: true.
  • Avoid running privileged containers (set privileged: false).
  • Drop all capabilities from the containers and add back only specific ones that are needed for operation of the container.

Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

  • Permissions such as create, patch, update and delete should be only granted if necessary.
  • Avoid creating RBAC permissions to create or update roles which can lead to privilege escalation.
  • Review bindings for the system:unauthenticated group and remove them where possible, as this gives access to anyone who can contact the API server at a network level.

The create, update and delete verbs should be permitted judiciously. The patch verb if allowed on a Namespace can allow users to update labels on the namespace or deployments which can increase the attack surface.

For sensitive workloads, consider providing a recommended ValidatingAdmissionPolicy that further restricts the permitted write actions.

Image security

  • Using an image scanning tool to scan an image before deploying containers in the Kubernetes cluster.
  • Use container signing to validate the container image signature before deploying to the Kubernetes cluster.

Network policies

  • Configure NetworkPolicies to only allow expected ingress and egress traffic from the pods.

Make sure that your cluster provides and enforces NetworkPolicy. If you are writing an application that users will deploy to different clusters, consider whether you can assume that NetworkPolicy is available and enforced.

Advanced security hardening

This section of this guide covers some advanced security hardening points which might be valuable based on different Kubernetes environment setup.

Linux container security

Configure Security Context for the pod-container.

Runtime classes

  • Configure appropriate runtime classes for containers.

Some containers may require a different isolation level from what is provided by the default runtime of the cluster. runtimeClassName can be used in a podspec to define a different runtime class.

For sensitive workloads consider using kernel emulation tools like gVisor, or virtualized isolation using a mechanism such as kata-containers.

In high trust environments, consider using confidential virtual machines to improve cluster security even further.

9 - Policies

Manage security and best-practices with policies.

Kubernetes policies are configurations that manage other configurations or runtime behaviors. Kubernetes offers various forms of policies, described below:

Apply policies using API objects

Some API objects act as policies. Here are some examples:

Apply policies using admission controllers

An admission controller runs in the API server and can validate or mutate API requests. Some admission controllers act to apply policies. For example, the AlwaysPullImages admission controller modifies a new Pod to set the image pull policy to Always.

Kubernetes has several built-in admission controllers that are configurable via the API server --enable-admission-plugins flag.

Details on admission controllers, with the complete list of available admission controllers, are documented in a dedicated section:

Apply policies using ValidatingAdmissionPolicy

Validating admission policies allow configurable validation checks to be executed in the API server using the Common Expression Language (CEL). For example, a ValidatingAdmissionPolicy can be used to disallow use of the latest image tag.

A ValidatingAdmissionPolicy operates on an API request and can be used to block, audit, and warn users about non-compliant configurations.

Details on the ValidatingAdmissionPolicy API, with examples, are documented in a dedicated section:

Apply policies using dynamic admission control

Dynamic admission controllers (or admission webhooks) run outside the API server as separate applications that register to receive webhooks requests to perform validation or mutation of API requests.

Dynamic admission controllers can be used to apply policies on API requests and trigger other policy-based workflows. A dynamic admission controller can perform complex checks including those that require retrieval of other cluster resources and external data. For example, an image verification check can lookup data from OCI registries to validate the container image signatures and attestations.

Details on dynamic admission control are documented in a dedicated section:

Implementations

Dynamic Admission Controllers that act as flexible policy engines are being developed in the Kubernetes ecosystem, such as:

Apply policies using Kubelet configurations

Kubernetes allows configuring the Kubelet on each worker node. Some Kubelet configurations act as policies:

9.1 - Limit Ranges

By default, containers run with unbounded compute resources on a Kubernetes cluster. Using Kubernetes resource quotas, administrators (also termed cluster operators) can restrict consumption and creation of cluster resources (such as CPU time, memory, and persistent storage) within a specified namespace. Within a namespace, a Pod can consume as much CPU and memory as is allowed by the ResourceQuotas that apply to that namespace. As a cluster operator, or as a namespace-level administrator, you might also be concerned about making sure that a single object cannot monopolize all available resources within a namespace.

A LimitRange is a policy to constrain the resource allocations (limits and requests) that you can specify for each applicable object kind (such as Pod or PersistentVolumeClaim) in a namespace.

A LimitRange provides constraints that can:

  • Enforce minimum and maximum compute resources usage per Pod or Container in a namespace.
  • Enforce minimum and maximum storage request per PersistentVolumeClaim in a namespace.
  • Enforce a ratio between request and limit for a resource in a namespace.
  • Set default request/limit for compute resources in a namespace and automatically inject them to Containers at runtime.

A LimitRange is enforced in a particular namespace when there is a LimitRange object in that namespace.

The name of a LimitRange object must be a valid DNS subdomain name.

Constraints on resource limits and requests

  • The administrator creates a LimitRange in a namespace.
  • Users create (or try to create) objects in that namespace, such as Pods or PersistentVolumeClaims.
  • First, the LimitRange admission controller applies default request and limit values for all Pods (and their containers) that do not set compute resource requirements.
  • Second, the LimitRange tracks usage to ensure it does not exceed resource minimum, maximum and ratio defined in any LimitRange present in the namespace.
  • If you attempt to create or update an object (Pod or PersistentVolumeClaim) that violates a LimitRange constraint, your request to the API server will fail with an HTTP status code 403 Forbidden and a message explaining the constraint that has been violated.
  • If you add a LimitRange in a namespace that applies to compute-related resources such as cpu and memory, you must specify requests or limits for those values. Otherwise, the system may reject Pod creation.
  • LimitRange validations occur only at Pod admission stage, not on running Pods. If you add or modify a LimitRange, the Pods that already exist in that namespace continue unchanged.
  • If two or more LimitRange objects exist in the namespace, it is not deterministic which default value will be applied.

LimitRange and admission checks for Pods

A LimitRange does not check the consistency of the default values it applies. This means that a default value for the limit that is set by LimitRange may be less than the request value specified for the container in the spec that a client submits to the API server. If that happens, the final Pod will not be schedulable.

For example, you define a LimitRange with this manifest:

concepts/policy/limit-range/problematic-limit-range.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: LimitRange
metadata:
  name: cpu-resource-constraint
spec:
  limits:
  - default: # this section defines default limits
      cpu: 500m
    defaultRequest: # this section defines default requests
      cpu: 500m
    max: # max and min define the limit range
      cpu: "1"
    min:
      cpu: 100m
    type: Container

along with a Pod that declares a CPU resource request of 700m, but not a limit:

concepts/policy/limit-range/example-conflict-with-limitrange-cpu.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: example-conflict-with-limitrange-cpu
spec:
  containers:
  - name: demo
    image: registry.k8s.io/pause:2.0
    resources:
      requests:
        cpu: 700m

then that Pod will not be scheduled, failing with an error similar to:

Pod "example-conflict-with-limitrange-cpu" is invalid: spec.containers[0].resources.requests: Invalid value: "700m": must be less than or equal to cpu limit

If you set both request and limit, then that new Pod will be scheduled successfully even with the same LimitRange in place:

concepts/policy/limit-range/example-no-conflict-with-limitrange-cpu.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: example-no-conflict-with-limitrange-cpu
spec:
  containers:
  - name: demo
    image: registry.k8s.io/pause:2.0
    resources:
      requests:
        cpu: 700m
      limits:
        cpu: 700m

Example resource constraints

Examples of policies that could be created using LimitRange are:

  • In a 2 node cluster with a capacity of 8 GiB RAM and 16 cores, constrain Pods in a namespace to request 100m of CPU with a max limit of 500m for CPU and request 200Mi for Memory with a max limit of 600Mi for Memory.
  • Define default CPU limit and request to 150m and memory default request to 300Mi for Containers started with no cpu and memory requests in their specs.

In the case where the total limits of the namespace is less than the sum of the limits of the Pods/Containers, there may be contention for resources. In this case, the Containers or Pods will not be created.

Neither contention nor changes to a LimitRange will affect already created resources.

What's next

For examples on using limits, see:

Refer to the LimitRanger design document for context and historical information.

9.2 - Resource Quotas

When several users or teams share a cluster with a fixed number of nodes, there is a concern that one team could use more than its fair share of resources.

Resource quotas are a tool for administrators to address this concern.

A resource quota, defined by a ResourceQuota object, provides constraints that limit aggregate resource consumption per namespace. It can limit the quantity of objects that can be created in a namespace by type, as well as the total amount of compute resources that may be consumed by resources in that namespace.

Resource quotas work like this:

  • Different teams work in different namespaces. This can be enforced with RBAC.

  • The administrator creates one ResourceQuota for each namespace.

  • Users create resources (pods, services, etc.) in the namespace, and the quota system tracks usage to ensure it does not exceed hard resource limits defined in a ResourceQuota.

  • If creating or updating a resource violates a quota constraint, the request will fail with HTTP status code 403 FORBIDDEN with a message explaining the constraint that would have been violated.

  • If quota is enabled in a namespace for compute resources like cpu and memory, users must specify requests or limits for those values; otherwise, the quota system may reject pod creation. Hint: Use the LimitRanger admission controller to force defaults for pods that make no compute resource requirements.

    See the walkthrough for an example of how to avoid this problem.

The name of a ResourceQuota object must be a valid DNS subdomain name.

Examples of policies that could be created using namespaces and quotas are:

  • In a cluster with a capacity of 32 GiB RAM, and 16 cores, let team A use 20 GiB and 10 cores, let B use 10GiB and 4 cores, and hold 2GiB and 2 cores in reserve for future allocation.
  • Limit the "testing" namespace to using 1 core and 1GiB RAM. Let the "production" namespace use any amount.

In the case where the total capacity of the cluster is less than the sum of the quotas of the namespaces, there may be contention for resources. This is handled on a first-come-first-served basis.

Neither contention nor changes to quota will affect already created resources.

Enabling Resource Quota

Resource Quota support is enabled by default for many Kubernetes distributions. It is enabled when the API server --enable-admission-plugins= flag has ResourceQuota as one of its arguments.

A resource quota is enforced in a particular namespace when there is a ResourceQuota in that namespace.

Compute Resource Quota

You can limit the total sum of compute resources that can be requested in a given namespace.

The following resource types are supported:

Resource Name Description
limits.cpu Across all pods in a non-terminal state, the sum of CPU limits cannot exceed this value.
limits.memory Across all pods in a non-terminal state, the sum of memory limits cannot exceed this value.
requests.cpu Across all pods in a non-terminal state, the sum of CPU requests cannot exceed this value.
requests.memory Across all pods in a non-terminal state, the sum of memory requests cannot exceed this value.
hugepages-<size> Across all pods in a non-terminal state, the number of huge page requests of the specified size cannot exceed this value.
cpu Same as requests.cpu
memory Same as requests.memory

Resource Quota For Extended Resources

In addition to the resources mentioned above, in release 1.10, quota support for extended resources is added.

As overcommit is not allowed for extended resources, it makes no sense to specify both requests and limits for the same extended resource in a quota. So for extended resources, only quota items with prefix requests. is allowed for now.

Take the GPU resource as an example, if the resource name is nvidia.com/gpu, and you want to limit the total number of GPUs requested in a namespace to 4, you can define a quota as follows:

  • requests.nvidia.com/gpu: 4

See Viewing and Setting Quotas for more detail information.

Storage Resource Quota

You can limit the total sum of storage resources that can be requested in a given namespace.

In addition, you can limit consumption of storage resources based on associated storage-class.

Resource Name Description
requests.storage Across all persistent volume claims, the sum of storage requests cannot exceed this value.
persistentvolumeclaims The total number of PersistentVolumeClaims that can exist in the namespace.
<storage-class-name>.storageclass.storage.k8s.io/requests.storage Across all persistent volume claims associated with the <storage-class-name>, the sum of storage requests cannot exceed this value.
<storage-class-name>.storageclass.storage.k8s.io/persistentvolumeclaims Across all persistent volume claims associated with the <storage-class-name>, the total number of persistent volume claims that can exist in the namespace.

For example, if an operator wants to quota storage with gold storage class separate from bronze storage class, the operator can define a quota as follows:

  • gold.storageclass.storage.k8s.io/requests.storage: 500Gi
  • bronze.storageclass.storage.k8s.io/requests.storage: 100Gi

In release 1.8, quota support for local ephemeral storage is added as an alpha feature:

Resource Name Description
requests.ephemeral-storage Across all pods in the namespace, the sum of local ephemeral storage requests cannot exceed this value.
limits.ephemeral-storage Across all pods in the namespace, the sum of local ephemeral storage limits cannot exceed this value.
ephemeral-storage Same as requests.ephemeral-storage.

Object Count Quota

You can set quota for the total number of one particular resource kind in the Kubernetes API, using the following syntax:

  • count/<resource>.<group> for resources from non-core groups
  • count/<resource> for resources from the core group

Here is an example set of resources users may want to put under object count quota:

  • count/persistentvolumeclaims
  • count/services
  • count/secrets
  • count/configmaps
  • count/replicationcontrollers
  • count/deployments.apps
  • count/replicasets.apps
  • count/statefulsets.apps
  • count/jobs.batch
  • count/cronjobs.batch

If you define a quota this way, it applies to Kubernetes' APIs that are part of the API server, and to any custom resources backed by a CustomResourceDefinition. If you use API aggregation to add additional, custom APIs that are not defined as CustomResourceDefinitions, the core Kubernetes control plane does not enforce quota for the aggregated API. The extension API server is expected to provide quota enforcement if that's appropriate for the custom API. For example, to create a quota on a widgets custom resource in the example.com API group, use count/widgets.example.com.

When using such a resource quota (nearly for all object kinds), an object is charged against the quota if the object kind exists (is defined) in the control plane. These types of quotas are useful to protect against exhaustion of storage resources. For example, you may want to limit the number of Secrets in a server given their large size. Too many Secrets in a cluster can actually prevent servers and controllers from starting. You can set a quota for Jobs to protect against a poorly configured CronJob. CronJobs that create too many Jobs in a namespace can lead to a denial of service.

There is another syntax only to set the same type of quota for certain resources. The following types are supported:

Resource Name Description
configmaps The total number of ConfigMaps that can exist in the namespace.
persistentvolumeclaims The total number of PersistentVolumeClaims that can exist in the namespace.
pods The total number of Pods in a non-terminal state that can exist in the namespace. A pod is in a terminal state if .status.phase in (Failed, Succeeded) is true.
replicationcontrollers The total number of ReplicationControllers that can exist in the namespace.
resourcequotas The total number of ResourceQuotas that can exist in the namespace.
services The total number of Services that can exist in the namespace.
services.loadbalancers The total number of Services of type LoadBalancer that can exist in the namespace.
services.nodeports The total number of NodePorts allocated to Services of type NodePort or LoadBalancer that can exist in the namespace.
secrets The total number of Secrets that can exist in the namespace.

For example, pods quota counts and enforces a maximum on the number of pods created in a single namespace that are not terminal. You might want to set a pods quota on a namespace to avoid the case where a user creates many small pods and exhausts the cluster's supply of Pod IPs.

You can find more examples on Viewing and Setting Quotas.

Quota Scopes

Each quota can have an associated set of scopes. A quota will only measure usage for a resource if it matches the intersection of enumerated scopes.

When a scope is added to the quota, it limits the number of resources it supports to those that pertain to the scope. Resources specified on the quota outside of the allowed set results in a validation error.

Scope Description
Terminating Match pods where .spec.activeDeadlineSeconds >= 0
NotTerminating Match pods where .spec.activeDeadlineSeconds is nil
BestEffort Match pods that have best effort quality of service.
NotBestEffort Match pods that do not have best effort quality of service.
PriorityClass Match pods that references the specified priority class.
CrossNamespacePodAffinity Match pods that have cross-namespace pod (anti)affinity terms.

The BestEffort scope restricts a quota to tracking the following resource:

  • pods

The Terminating, NotTerminating, NotBestEffort and PriorityClass scopes restrict a quota to tracking the following resources:

  • pods
  • cpu
  • memory
  • requests.cpu
  • requests.memory
  • limits.cpu
  • limits.memory

Note that you cannot specify both the Terminating and the NotTerminating scopes in the same quota, and you cannot specify both the BestEffort and NotBestEffort scopes in the same quota either.

The scopeSelector supports the following values in the operator field:

  • In
  • NotIn
  • Exists
  • DoesNotExist

When using one of the following values as the scopeName when defining the scopeSelector, the operator must be Exists.

  • Terminating
  • NotTerminating
  • BestEffort
  • NotBestEffort

If the operator is In or NotIn, the values field must have at least one value. For example:

  scopeSelector:
    matchExpressions:
      - scopeName: PriorityClass
        operator: In
        values:
          - middle

If the operator is Exists or DoesNotExist, the values field must NOT be specified.

Resource Quota Per PriorityClass

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.17 [stable]

Pods can be created at a specific priority. You can control a pod's consumption of system resources based on a pod's priority, by using the scopeSelector field in the quota spec.

A quota is matched and consumed only if scopeSelector in the quota spec selects the pod.

When quota is scoped for priority class using scopeSelector field, quota object is restricted to track only following resources:

  • pods
  • cpu
  • memory
  • ephemeral-storage
  • limits.cpu
  • limits.memory
  • limits.ephemeral-storage
  • requests.cpu
  • requests.memory
  • requests.ephemeral-storage

This example creates a quota object and matches it with pods at specific priorities. The example works as follows:

  • Pods in the cluster have one of the three priority classes, "low", "medium", "high".
  • One quota object is created for each priority.

Save the following YAML to a file quota.yml.

apiVersion: v1
kind: List
items:
- apiVersion: v1
  kind: ResourceQuota
  metadata:
    name: pods-high
  spec:
    hard:
      cpu: "1000"
      memory: 200Gi
      pods: "10"
    scopeSelector:
      matchExpressions:
      - operator : In
        scopeName: PriorityClass
        values: ["high"]
- apiVersion: v1
  kind: ResourceQuota
  metadata:
    name: pods-medium
  spec:
    hard:
      cpu: "10"
      memory: 20Gi
      pods: "10"
    scopeSelector:
      matchExpressions:
      - operator : In
        scopeName: PriorityClass
        values: ["medium"]
- apiVersion: v1
  kind: ResourceQuota
  metadata:
    name: pods-low
  spec:
    hard:
      cpu: "5"
      memory: 10Gi
      pods: "10"
    scopeSelector:
      matchExpressions:
      - operator : In
        scopeName: PriorityClass
        values: ["low"]

Apply the YAML using kubectl create.

kubectl create -f ./quota.yml

resourcequota/pods-high created
resourcequota/pods-medium created
resourcequota/pods-low created

Verify that Used quota is 0 using kubectl describe quota.

kubectl describe quota

Name:       pods-high
Namespace:  default
Resource    Used  Hard
--------    ----  ----
cpu         0     1k
memory      0     200Gi
pods        0     10


Name:       pods-low
Namespace:  default
Resource    Used  Hard
--------    ----  ----
cpu         0     5
memory      0     10Gi
pods        0     10


Name:       pods-medium
Namespace:  default
Resource    Used  Hard
--------    ----  ----
cpu         0     10
memory      0     20Gi
pods        0     10

Create a pod with priority "high". Save the following YAML to a file high-priority-pod.yml.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: high-priority
spec:
  containers:
  - name: high-priority
    image: ubuntu
    command: ["/bin/sh"]
    args: ["-c", "while true; do echo hello; sleep 10;done"]
    resources:
      requests:
        memory: "10Gi"
        cpu: "500m"
      limits:
        memory: "10Gi"
        cpu: "500m"
  priorityClassName: high

Apply it with kubectl create.

kubectl create -f ./high-priority-pod.yml

Verify that "Used" stats for "high" priority quota, pods-high, has changed and that the other two quotas are unchanged.

kubectl describe quota

Name:       pods-high
Namespace:  default
Resource    Used  Hard
--------    ----  ----
cpu         500m  1k
memory      10Gi  200Gi
pods        1     10


Name:       pods-low
Namespace:  default
Resource    Used  Hard
--------    ----  ----
cpu         0     5
memory      0     10Gi
pods        0     10


Name:       pods-medium
Namespace:  default
Resource    Used  Hard
--------    ----  ----
cpu         0     10
memory      0     20Gi
pods        0     10

Cross-namespace Pod Affinity Quota

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

Operators can use CrossNamespacePodAffinity quota scope to limit which namespaces are allowed to have pods with affinity terms that cross namespaces. Specifically, it controls which pods are allowed to set namespaces or namespaceSelector fields in pod affinity terms.

Preventing users from using cross-namespace affinity terms might be desired since a pod with anti-affinity constraints can block pods from all other namespaces from getting scheduled in a failure domain.

Using this scope operators can prevent certain namespaces (foo-ns in the example below) from having pods that use cross-namespace pod affinity by creating a resource quota object in that namespace with CrossNamespacePodAffinity scope and hard limit of 0:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ResourceQuota
metadata:
  name: disable-cross-namespace-affinity
  namespace: foo-ns
spec:
  hard:
    pods: "0"
  scopeSelector:
    matchExpressions:
    - scopeName: CrossNamespacePodAffinity
      operator: Exists

If operators want to disallow using namespaces and namespaceSelector by default, and only allow it for specific namespaces, they could configure CrossNamespacePodAffinity as a limited resource by setting the kube-apiserver flag --admission-control-config-file to the path of the following configuration file:

apiVersion: apiserver.config.k8s.io/v1
kind: AdmissionConfiguration
plugins:
- name: "ResourceQuota"
  configuration:
    apiVersion: apiserver.config.k8s.io/v1
    kind: ResourceQuotaConfiguration
    limitedResources:
    - resource: pods
      matchScopes:
      - scopeName: CrossNamespacePodAffinity
        operator: Exists

With the above configuration, pods can use namespaces and namespaceSelector in pod affinity only if the namespace where they are created have a resource quota object with CrossNamespacePodAffinity scope and a hard limit greater than or equal to the number of pods using those fields.

Requests compared to Limits

When allocating compute resources, each container may specify a request and a limit value for either CPU or memory. The quota can be configured to quota either value.

If the quota has a value specified for requests.cpu or requests.memory, then it requires that every incoming container makes an explicit request for those resources. If the quota has a value specified for limits.cpu or limits.memory, then it requires that every incoming container specifies an explicit limit for those resources.

Viewing and Setting Quotas

Kubectl supports creating, updating, and viewing quotas:

kubectl create namespace myspace

cat <<EOF > compute-resources.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: ResourceQuota
metadata:
  name: compute-resources
spec:
  hard:
    requests.cpu: "1"
    requests.memory: 1Gi
    limits.cpu: "2"
    limits.memory: 2Gi
    requests.nvidia.com/gpu: 4
EOF

kubectl create -f ./compute-resources.yaml --namespace=myspace

cat <<EOF > object-counts.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: ResourceQuota
metadata:
  name: object-counts
spec:
  hard:
    configmaps: "10"
    persistentvolumeclaims: "4"
    pods: "4"
    replicationcontrollers: "20"
    secrets: "10"
    services: "10"
    services.loadbalancers: "2"
EOF

kubectl create -f ./object-counts.yaml --namespace=myspace

kubectl get quota --namespace=myspace

NAME                    AGE
compute-resources       30s
object-counts           32s

kubectl describe quota compute-resources --namespace=myspace

Name:                    compute-resources
Namespace:               myspace
Resource                 Used  Hard
--------                 ----  ----
limits.cpu               0     2
limits.memory            0     2Gi
requests.cpu             0     1
requests.memory          0     1Gi
requests.nvidia.com/gpu  0     4

kubectl describe quota object-counts --namespace=myspace

Name:                   object-counts
Namespace:              myspace
Resource                Used    Hard
--------                ----    ----
configmaps              0       10
persistentvolumeclaims  0       4
pods                    0       4
replicationcontrollers  0       20
secrets                 1       10
services                0       10
services.loadbalancers  0       2

Kubectl also supports object count quota for all standard namespaced resources using the syntax count/<resource>.<group>:

kubectl create namespace myspace

kubectl create quota test --hard=count/deployments.apps=2,count/replicasets.apps=4,count/pods=3,count/secrets=4 --namespace=myspace

kubectl create deployment nginx --image=nginx --namespace=myspace --replicas=2

kubectl describe quota --namespace=myspace

Name:                         test
Namespace:                    myspace
Resource                      Used  Hard
--------                      ----  ----
count/deployments.apps        1     2
count/pods                    2     3
count/replicasets.apps        1     4
count/secrets                 1     4

Quota and Cluster Capacity

ResourceQuotas are independent of the cluster capacity. They are expressed in absolute units. So, if you add nodes to your cluster, this does not automatically give each namespace the ability to consume more resources.

Sometimes more complex policies may be desired, such as:

  • Proportionally divide total cluster resources among several teams.
  • Allow each tenant to grow resource usage as needed, but have a generous limit to prevent accidental resource exhaustion.
  • Detect demand from one namespace, add nodes, and increase quota.

Such policies could be implemented using ResourceQuotas as building blocks, by writing a "controller" that watches the quota usage and adjusts the quota hard limits of each namespace according to other signals.

Note that resource quota divides up aggregate cluster resources, but it creates no restrictions around nodes: pods from several namespaces may run on the same node.

Limit Priority Class consumption by default

It may be desired that pods at a particular priority, eg. "cluster-services", should be allowed in a namespace, if and only if, a matching quota object exists.

With this mechanism, operators are able to restrict usage of certain high priority classes to a limited number of namespaces and not every namespace will be able to consume these priority classes by default.

To enforce this, kube-apiserver flag --admission-control-config-file should be used to pass path to the following configuration file:

apiVersion: apiserver.config.k8s.io/v1
kind: AdmissionConfiguration
plugins:
- name: "ResourceQuota"
  configuration:
    apiVersion: apiserver.config.k8s.io/v1
    kind: ResourceQuotaConfiguration
    limitedResources:
    - resource: pods
      matchScopes:
      - scopeName: PriorityClass
        operator: In
        values: ["cluster-services"]

Then, create a resource quota object in the kube-system namespace:

policy/priority-class-resourcequota.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: ResourceQuota
metadata:
  name: pods-cluster-services
spec:
  scopeSelector:
    matchExpressions:
      - operator : In
        scopeName: PriorityClass
        values: ["cluster-services"]
kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/policy/priority-class-resourcequota.yaml -n kube-system

resourcequota/pods-cluster-services created

In this case, a pod creation will be allowed if:

  1. the Pod's priorityClassName is not specified.
  2. the Pod's priorityClassName is specified to a value other than cluster-services.
  3. the Pod's priorityClassName is set to cluster-services, it is to be created in the kube-system namespace, and it has passed the resource quota check.

A Pod creation request is rejected if its priorityClassName is set to cluster-services and it is to be created in a namespace other than kube-system.

What's next

9.3 - Process ID Limits And Reservations

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.20 [stable]

Kubernetes allow you to limit the number of process IDs (PIDs) that a Pod can use. You can also reserve a number of allocatable PIDs for each node for use by the operating system and daemons (rather than by Pods).

Process IDs (PIDs) are a fundamental resource on nodes. It is trivial to hit the task limit without hitting any other resource limits, which can then cause instability to a host machine.

Cluster administrators require mechanisms to ensure that Pods running in the cluster cannot induce PID exhaustion that prevents host daemons (such as the kubelet or kube-proxy, and potentially also the container runtime) from running. In addition, it is important to ensure that PIDs are limited among Pods in order to ensure they have limited impact on other workloads on the same node.

You can configure a kubelet to limit the number of PIDs a given Pod can consume. For example, if your node's host OS is set to use a maximum of 262144 PIDs and expect to host less than 250 Pods, one can give each Pod a budget of 1000 PIDs to prevent using up that node's overall number of available PIDs. If the admin wants to overcommit PIDs similar to CPU or memory, they may do so as well with some additional risks. Either way, a single Pod will not be able to bring the whole machine down. This kind of resource limiting helps to prevent simple fork bombs from affecting operation of an entire cluster.

Per-Pod PID limiting allows administrators to protect one Pod from another, but does not ensure that all Pods scheduled onto that host are unable to impact the node overall. Per-Pod limiting also does not protect the node agents themselves from PID exhaustion.

You can also reserve an amount of PIDs for node overhead, separate from the allocation to Pods. This is similar to how you can reserve CPU, memory, or other resources for use by the operating system and other facilities outside of Pods and their containers.

PID limiting is a an important sibling to compute resource requests and limits. However, you specify it in a different way: rather than defining a Pod's resource limit in the .spec for a Pod, you configure the limit as a setting on the kubelet. Pod-defined PID limits are not currently supported.

Node PID limits

Kubernetes allows you to reserve a number of process IDs for the system use. To configure the reservation, use the parameter pid=<number> in the --system-reserved and --kube-reserved command line options to the kubelet. The value you specified declares that the specified number of process IDs will be reserved for the system as a whole and for Kubernetes system daemons respectively.

Pod PID limits

Kubernetes allows you to limit the number of processes running in a Pod. You specify this limit at the node level, rather than configuring it as a resource limit for a particular Pod. Each Node can have a different PID limit.
To configure the limit, you can specify the command line parameter --pod-max-pids to the kubelet, or set PodPidsLimit in the kubelet configuration file.

PID based eviction

You can configure kubelet to start terminating a Pod when it is misbehaving and consuming abnormal amount of resources. This feature is called eviction. You can Configure Out of Resource Handling for various eviction signals. Use pid.available eviction signal to configure the threshold for number of PIDs used by Pod. You can set soft and hard eviction policies. However, even with the hard eviction policy, if the number of PIDs growing very fast, node can still get into unstable state by hitting the node PIDs limit. Eviction signal value is calculated periodically and does NOT enforce the limit.

PID limiting - per Pod and per Node sets the hard limit. Once the limit is hit, workload will start experiencing failures when trying to get a new PID. It may or may not lead to rescheduling of a Pod, depending on how workload reacts on these failures and how liveness and readiness probes are configured for the Pod. However, if limits were set correctly, you can guarantee that other Pods workload and system processes will not run out of PIDs when one Pod is misbehaving.

What's next

9.4 - Node Resource Managers

In order to support latency-critical and high-throughput workloads, Kubernetes offers a suite of Resource Managers. The managers aim to co-ordinate and optimise node's resources alignment for pods configured with a specific requirement for CPUs, devices, and memory (hugepages) resources.

The main manager, the Topology Manager, is a Kubelet component that co-ordinates the overall resource management process through its policy.

The configuration of individual managers is elaborated in dedicated documents:

10 - Scheduling, Preemption and Eviction

In Kubernetes, scheduling refers to making sure that Pods are matched to Nodes so that the kubelet can run them. Preemption is the process of terminating Pods with lower Priority so that Pods with higher Priority can schedule on Nodes. Eviction is the process of terminating one or more Pods on Nodes.

Scheduling

Pod Disruption

Pod disruption is the process by which Pods on Nodes are terminated either voluntarily or involuntarily.

Voluntary disruptions are started intentionally by application owners or cluster administrators. Involuntary disruptions are unintentional and can be triggered by unavoidable issues like Nodes running out of resources, or by accidental deletions.

10.1 - Kubernetes Scheduler

In Kubernetes, scheduling refers to making sure that Pods are matched to Nodes so that Kubelet can run them.

Scheduling overview

A scheduler watches for newly created Pods that have no Node assigned. For every Pod that the scheduler discovers, the scheduler becomes responsible for finding the best Node for that Pod to run on. The scheduler reaches this placement decision taking into account the scheduling principles described below.

If you want to understand why Pods are placed onto a particular Node, or if you're planning to implement a custom scheduler yourself, this page will help you learn about scheduling.

kube-scheduler

kube-scheduler is the default scheduler for Kubernetes and runs as part of the control plane. kube-scheduler is designed so that, if you want and need to, you can write your own scheduling component and use that instead.

Kube-scheduler selects an optimal node to run newly created or not yet scheduled (unscheduled) pods. Since containers in pods - and pods themselves - can have different requirements, the scheduler filters out any nodes that don't meet a Pod's specific scheduling needs. Alternatively, the API lets you specify a node for a Pod when you create it, but this is unusual and is only done in special cases.

In a cluster, Nodes that meet the scheduling requirements for a Pod are called feasible nodes. If none of the nodes are suitable, the pod remains unscheduled until the scheduler is able to place it.

The scheduler finds feasible Nodes for a Pod and then runs a set of functions to score the feasible Nodes and picks a Node with the highest score among the feasible ones to run the Pod. The scheduler then notifies the API server about this decision in a process called binding.

Factors that need to be taken into account for scheduling decisions include individual and collective resource requirements, hardware / software / policy constraints, affinity and anti-affinity specifications, data locality, inter-workload interference, and so on.

Node selection in kube-scheduler

kube-scheduler selects a node for the pod in a 2-step operation:

  1. Filtering
  2. Scoring

The filtering step finds the set of Nodes where it's feasible to schedule the Pod. For example, the PodFitsResources filter checks whether a candidate Node has enough available resources to meet a Pod's specific resource requests. After this step, the node list contains any suitable Nodes; often, there will be more than one. If the list is empty, that Pod isn't (yet) schedulable.

In the scoring step, the scheduler ranks the remaining nodes to choose the most suitable Pod placement. The scheduler assigns a score to each Node that survived filtering, basing this score on the active scoring rules.

Finally, kube-scheduler assigns the Pod to the Node with the highest ranking. If there is more than one node with equal scores, kube-scheduler selects one of these at random.

There are two supported ways to configure the filtering and scoring behavior of the scheduler:

  1. Scheduling Policies allow you to configure Predicates for filtering and Priorities for scoring.
  2. Scheduling Profiles allow you to configure Plugins that implement different scheduling stages, including: QueueSort, Filter, Score, Bind, Reserve, Permit, and others. You can also configure the kube-scheduler to run different profiles.

What's next

10.2 - Assigning Pods to Nodes

You can constrain a Pod so that it is restricted to run on particular node(s), or to prefer to run on particular nodes. There are several ways to do this and the recommended approaches all use label selectors to facilitate the selection. Often, you do not need to set any such constraints; the scheduler will automatically do a reasonable placement (for example, spreading your Pods across nodes so as not place Pods on a node with insufficient free resources). However, there are some circumstances where you may want to control which node the Pod deploys to, for example, to ensure that a Pod ends up on a node with an SSD attached to it, or to co-locate Pods from two different services that communicate a lot into the same availability zone.

You can use any of the following methods to choose where Kubernetes schedules specific Pods:

Node labels

Like many other Kubernetes objects, nodes have labels. You can attach labels manually. Kubernetes also populates a standard set of labels on all nodes in a cluster.

Node isolation/restriction

Adding labels to nodes allows you to target Pods for scheduling on specific nodes or groups of nodes. You can use this functionality to ensure that specific Pods only run on nodes with certain isolation, security, or regulatory properties.

If you use labels for node isolation, choose label keys that the kubelet cannot modify. This prevents a compromised node from setting those labels on itself so that the scheduler schedules workloads onto the compromised node.

The NodeRestriction admission plugin prevents the kubelet from setting or modifying labels with a node-restriction.kubernetes.io/ prefix.

To make use of that label prefix for node isolation:

  1. Ensure you are using the Node authorizer and have enabled the NodeRestriction admission plugin.
  2. Add labels with the node-restriction.kubernetes.io/ prefix to your nodes, and use those labels in your node selectors. For example, example.com.node-restriction.kubernetes.io/fips=true or example.com.node-restriction.kubernetes.io/pci-dss=true.

nodeSelector

nodeSelector is the simplest recommended form of node selection constraint. You can add the nodeSelector field to your Pod specification and specify the node labels you want the target node to have. Kubernetes only schedules the Pod onto nodes that have each of the labels you specify.

See Assign Pods to Nodes for more information.

Affinity and anti-affinity

nodeSelector is the simplest way to constrain Pods to nodes with specific labels. Affinity and anti-affinity expands the types of constraints you can define. Some of the benefits of affinity and anti-affinity include:

  • The affinity/anti-affinity language is more expressive. nodeSelector only selects nodes with all the specified labels. Affinity/anti-affinity gives you more control over the selection logic.
  • You can indicate that a rule is soft or preferred, so that the scheduler still schedules the Pod even if it can't find a matching node.
  • You can constrain a Pod using labels on other Pods running on the node (or other topological domain), instead of just node labels, which allows you to define rules for which Pods can be co-located on a node.

The affinity feature consists of two types of affinity:

  • Node affinity functions like the nodeSelector field but is more expressive and allows you to specify soft rules.
  • Inter-pod affinity/anti-affinity allows you to constrain Pods against labels on other Pods.

Node affinity

Node affinity is conceptually similar to nodeSelector, allowing you to constrain which nodes your Pod can be scheduled on based on node labels. There are two types of node affinity:

  • requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution: The scheduler can't schedule the Pod unless the rule is met. This functions like nodeSelector, but with a more expressive syntax.
  • preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution: The scheduler tries to find a node that meets the rule. If a matching node is not available, the scheduler still schedules the Pod.

You can specify node affinities using the .spec.affinity.nodeAffinity field in your Pod spec.

For example, consider the following Pod spec:

pods/pod-with-node-affinity.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: with-node-affinity
spec:
  affinity:
    nodeAffinity:
      requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
        nodeSelectorTerms:
        - matchExpressions:
          - key: topology.kubernetes.io/zone
            operator: In
            values:
            - antarctica-east1
            - antarctica-west1
      preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
      - weight: 1
        preference:
          matchExpressions:
          - key: another-node-label-key
            operator: In
            values:
            - another-node-label-value
  containers:
  - name: with-node-affinity
    image: registry.k8s.io/pause:2.0

In this example, the following rules apply:

  • The node must have a label with the key topology.kubernetes.io/zone and the value of that label must be either antarctica-east1 or antarctica-west1.
  • The node preferably has a label with the key another-node-label-key and the value another-node-label-value.

You can use the operator field to specify a logical operator for Kubernetes to use when interpreting the rules. You can use In, NotIn, Exists, DoesNotExist, Gt and Lt.

Read Operators to learn more about how these work.

NotIn and DoesNotExist allow you to define node anti-affinity behavior. Alternatively, you can use node taints to repel Pods from specific nodes.

See Assign Pods to Nodes using Node Affinity for more information.

Node affinity weight

You can specify a weight between 1 and 100 for each instance of the preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution affinity type. When the scheduler finds nodes that meet all the other scheduling requirements of the Pod, the scheduler iterates through every preferred rule that the node satisfies and adds the value of the weight for that expression to a sum.

The final sum is added to the score of other priority functions for the node. Nodes with the highest total score are prioritized when the scheduler makes a scheduling decision for the Pod.

For example, consider the following Pod spec:

pods/pod-with-affinity-preferred-weight.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: with-affinity-preferred-weight
spec:
  affinity:
    nodeAffinity:
      requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
        nodeSelectorTerms:
        - matchExpressions:
          - key: kubernetes.io/os
            operator: In
            values:
            - linux
      preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
      - weight: 1
        preference:
          matchExpressions:
          - key: label-1
            operator: In
            values:
            - key-1
      - weight: 50
        preference:
          matchExpressions:
          - key: label-2
            operator: In
            values:
            - key-2
  containers:
  - name: with-node-affinity
    image: registry.k8s.io/pause:2.0

If there are two possible nodes that match the preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution rule, one with the label-1:key-1 label and another with the label-2:key-2 label, the scheduler considers the weight of each node and adds the weight to the other scores for that node, and schedules the Pod onto the node with the highest final score.

Node affinity per scheduling profile

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.20 [beta]

When configuring multiple scheduling profiles, you can associate a profile with a node affinity, which is useful if a profile only applies to a specific set of nodes. To do so, add an addedAffinity to the args field of the NodeAffinity plugin in the scheduler configuration. For example:

apiVersion: kubescheduler.config.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: KubeSchedulerConfiguration

profiles:
  - schedulerName: default-scheduler
  - schedulerName: foo-scheduler
    pluginConfig:
      - name: NodeAffinity
        args:
          addedAffinity:
            requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
              nodeSelectorTerms:
              - matchExpressions:
                - key: scheduler-profile
                  operator: In
                  values:
                  - foo

The addedAffinity is applied to all Pods that set .spec.schedulerName to foo-scheduler, in addition to the NodeAffinity specified in the PodSpec. That is, in order to match the Pod, nodes need to satisfy addedAffinity and the Pod's .spec.NodeAffinity.

Since the addedAffinity is not visible to end users, its behavior might be unexpected to them. Use node labels that have a clear correlation to the scheduler profile name.

Inter-pod affinity and anti-affinity

Inter-pod affinity and anti-affinity allow you to constrain which nodes your Pods can be scheduled on based on the labels of Pods already running on that node, instead of the node labels.

Inter-pod affinity and anti-affinity rules take the form "this Pod should (or, in the case of anti-affinity, should not) run in an X if that X is already running one or more Pods that meet rule Y", where X is a topology domain like node, rack, cloud provider zone or region, or similar and Y is the rule Kubernetes tries to satisfy.

You express these rules (Y) as label selectors with an optional associated list of namespaces. Pods are namespaced objects in Kubernetes, so Pod labels also implicitly have namespaces. Any label selectors for Pod labels should specify the namespaces in which Kubernetes should look for those labels.

You express the topology domain (X) using a topologyKey, which is the key for the node label that the system uses to denote the domain. For examples, see Well-Known Labels, Annotations and Taints.

Types of inter-pod affinity and anti-affinity

Similar to node affinity are two types of Pod affinity and anti-affinity as follows:

  • requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution
  • preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution

For example, you could use requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution affinity to tell the scheduler to co-locate Pods of two services in the same cloud provider zone because they communicate with each other a lot. Similarly, you could use preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution anti-affinity to spread Pods from a service across multiple cloud provider zones.

To use inter-pod affinity, use the affinity.podAffinity field in the Pod spec. For inter-pod anti-affinity, use the affinity.podAntiAffinity field in the Pod spec.

Scheduling a group of pods with inter-pod affinity to themselves

If the current Pod being scheduled is the first in a series that have affinity to themselves, it is allowed to be scheduled if it passes all other affinity checks. This is determined by verifying that no other pod in the cluster matches the namespace and selector of this pod, that the pod matches its own terms, and the chosen node matches all requested topologies. This ensures that there will not be a deadlock even if all the pods have inter-pod affinity specified.

Pod affinity example

Consider the following Pod spec:

pods/pod-with-pod-affinity.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: with-pod-affinity
spec:
  affinity:
    podAffinity:
      requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
      - labelSelector:
          matchExpressions:
          - key: security
            operator: In
            values:
            - S1
        topologyKey: topology.kubernetes.io/zone
    podAntiAffinity:
      preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
      - weight: 100
        podAffinityTerm:
          labelSelector:
            matchExpressions:
            - key: security
              operator: In
              values:
              - S2
          topologyKey: topology.kubernetes.io/zone
  containers:
  - name: with-pod-affinity
    image: registry.k8s.io/pause:2.0

This example defines one Pod affinity rule and one Pod anti-affinity rule. The Pod affinity rule uses the "hard" requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution, while the anti-affinity rule uses the "soft" preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution.

The affinity rule specifies that the scheduler is allowed to place the example Pod on a node only if that node belongs to a specific zone where other Pods have been labeled with security=S1. For instance, if we have a cluster with a designated zone, let's call it "Zone V," consisting of nodes labeled with topology.kubernetes.io/zone=V, the scheduler can assign the Pod to any node within Zone V, as long as there is at least one Pod within Zone V already labeled with security=S1. Conversely, if there are no Pods with security=S1 labels in Zone V, the scheduler will not assign the example Pod to any node in that zone.

The anti-affinity rule specifies that the scheduler should try to avoid scheduling the Pod on a node if that node belongs to a specific zone where other Pods have been labeled with security=S2. For instance, if we have a cluster with a designated zone, let's call it "Zone R," consisting of nodes labeled with topology.kubernetes.io/zone=R, the scheduler should avoid assigning the Pod to any node within Zone R, as long as there is at least one Pod within Zone R already labeled with security=S2. Conversely, the anti-affinity rule does not impact scheduling into Zone R if there are no Pods with security=S2 labels.

To get yourself more familiar with the examples of Pod affinity and anti-affinity, refer to the design proposal.

You can use the In, NotIn, Exists and DoesNotExist values in the operator field for Pod affinity and anti-affinity.

Read Operators to learn more about how these work.

In principle, the topologyKey can be any allowed label key with the following exceptions for performance and security reasons:

  • For Pod affinity and anti-affinity, an empty topologyKey field is not allowed in both requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution and preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution.
  • For requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution Pod anti-affinity rules, the admission controller LimitPodHardAntiAffinityTopology limits topologyKey to kubernetes.io/hostname. You can modify or disable the admission controller if you want to allow custom topologies.

In addition to labelSelector and topologyKey, you can optionally specify a list of namespaces which the labelSelector should match against using the namespaces field at the same level as labelSelector and topologyKey. If omitted or empty, namespaces defaults to the namespace of the Pod where the affinity/anti-affinity definition appears.

Namespace selector

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

You can also select matching namespaces using namespaceSelector, which is a label query over the set of namespaces. The affinity term is applied to namespaces selected by both namespaceSelector and the namespaces field. Note that an empty namespaceSelector ({}) matches all namespaces, while a null or empty namespaces list and null namespaceSelector matches the namespace of the Pod where the rule is defined.

matchLabelKeys

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [beta] (enabled by default: true)

Kubernetes includes an optional matchLabelKeys field for Pod affinity or anti-affinity. The field specifies keys for the labels that should match with the incoming Pod's labels, when satisfying the Pod (anti)affinity.

The keys are used to look up values from the pod labels; those key-value labels are combined (using AND) with the match restrictions defined using the labelSelector field. The combined filtering selects the set of existing pods that will be taken into Pod (anti)affinity calculation.

A common use case is to use matchLabelKeys with pod-template-hash (set on Pods managed as part of a Deployment, where the value is unique for each revision). Using pod-template-hash in matchLabelKeys allows you to target the Pods that belong to the same revision as the incoming Pod, so that a rolling upgrade won't break affinity.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: application-server
...
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      affinity:
        podAffinity:
          requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
              - key: app
                operator: In
                values:
                - database
            topologyKey: topology.kubernetes.io/zone
            # Only Pods from a given rollout are taken into consideration when calculating pod affinity.
            # If you update the Deployment, the replacement Pods follow their own affinity rules
            # (if there are any defined in the new Pod template)
            matchLabelKeys:
            - pod-template-hash

mismatchLabelKeys

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [beta] (enabled by default: true)

Kubernetes includes an optional mismatchLabelKeys field for Pod affinity or anti-affinity. The field specifies keys for the labels that should not match with the incoming Pod's labels, when satisfying the Pod (anti)affinity.

One example use case is to ensure Pods go to the topology domain (node, zone, etc) where only Pods from the same tenant or team are scheduled in. In other words, you want to avoid running Pods from two different tenants on the same topology domain at the same time.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  labels:
    # Assume that all relevant Pods have a "tenant" label set
    tenant: tenant-a
...
spec:
  affinity:
    podAffinity:
      requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
      # ensure that pods associated with this tenant land on the correct node pool
      - matchLabelKeys:
          - tenant
        topologyKey: node-pool
    podAntiAffinity:
      requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
      # ensure that pods associated with this tenant can't schedule to nodes used for another tenant
      - mismatchLabelKeys:
        - tenant # whatever the value of the "tenant" label for this Pod, prevent
                 # scheduling to nodes in any pool where any Pod from a different
                 # tenant is running.
        labelSelector:
          # We have to have the labelSelector which selects only Pods with the tenant label,
          # otherwise this Pod would hate Pods from daemonsets as well, for example,
          # which aren't supposed to have the tenant label.
          matchExpressions:
          - key: tenant
            operator: Exists
        topologyKey: node-pool

More practical use-cases

Inter-pod affinity and anti-affinity can be even more useful when they are used with higher level collections such as ReplicaSets, StatefulSets, Deployments, etc. These rules allow you to configure that a set of workloads should be co-located in the same defined topology; for example, preferring to place two related Pods onto the same node.

For example: imagine a three-node cluster. You use the cluster to run a web application and also an in-memory cache (such as Redis). For this example, also assume that latency between the web application and the memory cache should be as low as is practical. You could use inter-pod affinity and anti-affinity to co-locate the web servers with the cache as much as possible.

In the following example Deployment for the Redis cache, the replicas get the label app=store. The podAntiAffinity rule tells the scheduler to avoid placing multiple replicas with the app=store label on a single node. This creates each cache in a separate node.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: redis-cache
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: store
  replicas: 3
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: store
    spec:
      affinity:
        podAntiAffinity:
          requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
              - key: app
                operator: In
                values:
                - store
            topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"
      containers:
      - name: redis-server
        image: redis:3.2-alpine

The following example Deployment for the web servers creates replicas with the label app=web-store. The Pod affinity rule tells the scheduler to place each replica on a node that has a Pod with the label app=store. The Pod anti-affinity rule tells the scheduler never to place multiple app=web-store servers on a single node.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: web-server
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: web-store
  replicas: 3
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: web-store
    spec:
      affinity:
        podAntiAffinity:
          requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
              - key: app
                operator: In
                values:
                - web-store
            topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"
        podAffinity:
          requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
              - key: app
                operator: In
                values:
                - store
            topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"
      containers:
      - name: web-app
        image: nginx:1.16-alpine

Creating the two preceding Deployments results in the following cluster layout, where each web server is co-located with a cache, on three separate nodes.

node-1 node-2 node-3
webserver-1 webserver-2 webserver-3
cache-1 cache-2 cache-3

The overall effect is that each cache instance is likely to be accessed by a single client that is running on the same node. This approach aims to minimize both skew (imbalanced load) and latency.

You might have other reasons to use Pod anti-affinity. See the ZooKeeper tutorial for an example of a StatefulSet configured with anti-affinity for high availability, using the same technique as this example.

nodeName

nodeName is a more direct form of node selection than affinity or nodeSelector. nodeName is a field in the Pod spec. If the nodeName field is not empty, the scheduler ignores the Pod and the kubelet on the named node tries to place the Pod on that node. Using nodeName overrules using nodeSelector or affinity and anti-affinity rules.

Some of the limitations of using nodeName to select nodes are:

  • If the named node does not exist, the Pod will not run, and in some cases may be automatically deleted.
  • If the named node does not have the resources to accommodate the Pod, the Pod will fail and its reason will indicate why, for example OutOfmemory or OutOfcpu.
  • Node names in cloud environments are not always predictable or stable.

Here is an example of a Pod spec using the nodeName field:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: nginx
spec:
  containers:
  - name: nginx
    image: nginx
  nodeName: kube-01

The above Pod will only run on the node kube-01.

Pod topology spread constraints

You can use topology spread constraints to control how Pods are spread across your cluster among failure-domains such as regions, zones, nodes, or among any other topology domains that you define. You might do this to improve performance, expected availability, or overall utilization.

Read Pod topology spread constraints to learn more about how these work.

Operators

The following are all the logical operators that you can use in the operator field for nodeAffinity and podAffinity mentioned above.

Operator Behavior
In The label value is present in the supplied set of strings
NotIn The label value is not contained in the supplied set of strings
Exists A label with this key exists on the object
DoesNotExist No label with this key exists on the object

The following operators can only be used with nodeAffinity.

Operator Behavior
Gt The field value will be parsed as an integer, and that integer is less than the integer that results from parsing the value of a label named by this selector
Lt The field value will be parsed as an integer, and that integer is greater than the integer that results from parsing the value of a label named by this selector

What's next

10.3 - Pod Overhead

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

When you run a Pod on a Node, the Pod itself takes an amount of system resources. These resources are additional to the resources needed to run the container(s) inside the Pod. In Kubernetes, Pod Overhead is a way to account for the resources consumed by the Pod infrastructure on top of the container requests & limits.

In Kubernetes, the Pod's overhead is set at admission time according to the overhead associated with the Pod's RuntimeClass.

A pod's overhead is considered in addition to the sum of container resource requests when scheduling a Pod. Similarly, the kubelet will include the Pod overhead when sizing the Pod cgroup, and when carrying out Pod eviction ranking.

Configuring Pod overhead

You need to make sure a RuntimeClass is utilized which defines the overhead field.

Usage example

To work with Pod overhead, you need a RuntimeClass that defines the overhead field. As an example, you could use the following RuntimeClass definition with a virtualization container runtime (in this example, Kata Containers combined with the Firecracker virtual machine monitor) that uses around 120MiB per Pod for the virtual machine and the guest OS:

# You need to change this example to match the actual runtime name, and per-Pod
# resource overhead, that the container runtime is adding in your cluster.
apiVersion: node.k8s.io/v1
kind: RuntimeClass
metadata:
  name: kata-fc
handler: kata-fc
overhead:
  podFixed:
    memory: "120Mi"
    cpu: "250m"

Workloads which are created which specify the kata-fc RuntimeClass handler will take the memory and cpu overheads into account for resource quota calculations, node scheduling, as well as Pod cgroup sizing.

Consider running the given example workload, test-pod:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-pod
spec:
  runtimeClassName: kata-fc
  containers:
  - name: busybox-ctr
    image: busybox:1.28
    stdin: true
    tty: true
    resources:
      limits:
        cpu: 500m
        memory: 100Mi
  - name: nginx-ctr
    image: nginx
    resources:
      limits:
        cpu: 1500m
        memory: 100Mi

At admission time the RuntimeClass admission controller updates the workload's PodSpec to include the overhead as described in the RuntimeClass. If the PodSpec already has this field defined, the Pod will be rejected. In the given example, since only the RuntimeClass name is specified, the admission controller mutates the Pod to include an overhead.

After the RuntimeClass admission controller has made modifications, you can check the updated Pod overhead value:

kubectl get pod test-pod -o jsonpath='{.spec.overhead}'

The output is:

map[cpu:250m memory:120Mi]

If a ResourceQuota is defined, the sum of container requests as well as the overhead field are counted.

When the kube-scheduler is deciding which node should run a new Pod, the scheduler considers that Pod's overhead as well as the sum of container requests for that Pod. For this example, the scheduler adds the requests and the overhead, then looks for a node that has 2.25 CPU and 320 MiB of memory available.

Once a Pod is scheduled to a node, the kubelet on that node creates a new cgroup for the Pod. It is within this pod that the underlying container runtime will create containers.

If the resource has a limit defined for each container (Guaranteed QoS or Burstable QoS with limits defined), the kubelet will set an upper limit for the pod cgroup associated with that resource (cpu.cfs_quota_us for CPU and memory.limit_in_bytes memory). This upper limit is based on the sum of the container limits plus the overhead defined in the PodSpec.

For CPU, if the Pod is Guaranteed or Burstable QoS, the kubelet will set cpu.shares based on the sum of container requests plus the overhead defined in the PodSpec.

Looking at our example, verify the container requests for the workload:

kubectl get pod test-pod -o jsonpath='{.spec.containers[*].resources.limits}'

The total container requests are 2000m CPU and 200MiB of memory:

map[cpu: 500m memory:100Mi] map[cpu:1500m memory:100Mi]

Check this against what is observed by the node:

kubectl describe node | grep test-pod -B2

The output shows requests for 2250m CPU, and for 320MiB of memory. The requests include Pod overhead:

  Namespace    Name       CPU Requests  CPU Limits   Memory Requests  Memory Limits  AGE
  ---------    ----       ------------  ----------   ---------------  -------------  ---
  default      test-pod   2250m (56%)   2250m (56%)  320Mi (1%)       320Mi (1%)     36m

Verify Pod cgroup limits

Check the Pod's memory cgroups on the node where the workload is running. In the following example, crictl is used on the node, which provides a CLI for CRI-compatible container runtimes. This is an advanced example to show Pod overhead behavior, and it is not expected that users should need to check cgroups directly on the node.

First, on the particular node, determine the Pod identifier:

# Run this on the node where the Pod is scheduled
POD_ID="$(sudo crictl pods --name test-pod -q)"

From this, you can determine the cgroup path for the Pod:

# Run this on the node where the Pod is scheduled
sudo crictl inspectp -o=json $POD_ID | grep cgroupsPath

The resulting cgroup path includes the Pod's pause container. The Pod level cgroup is one directory above.

  "cgroupsPath": "/kubepods/podd7f4b509-cf94-4951-9417-d1087c92a5b2/7ccf55aee35dd16aca4189c952d83487297f3cd760f1bbf09620e206e7d0c27a"

In this specific case, the pod cgroup path is kubepods/podd7f4b509-cf94-4951-9417-d1087c92a5b2. Verify the Pod level cgroup setting for memory:

# Run this on the node where the Pod is scheduled.
# Also, change the name of the cgroup to match the cgroup allocated for your pod.
 cat /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/kubepods/podd7f4b509-cf94-4951-9417-d1087c92a5b2/memory.limit_in_bytes

This is 320 MiB, as expected:

335544320

Observability

Some kube_pod_overhead_* metrics are available in kube-state-metrics to help identify when Pod overhead is being utilized and to help observe stability of workloads running with a defined overhead.

What's next

10.4 - Pod Scheduling Readiness

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.30 [stable]

Pods were considered ready for scheduling once created. Kubernetes scheduler does its due diligence to find nodes to place all pending Pods. However, in a real-world case, some Pods may stay in a "miss-essential-resources" state for a long period. These Pods actually churn the scheduler (and downstream integrators like Cluster AutoScaler) in an unnecessary manner.

By specifying/removing a Pod's .spec.schedulingGates, you can control when a Pod is ready to be considered for scheduling.

Configuring Pod schedulingGates

The schedulingGates field contains a list of strings, and each string literal is perceived as a criteria that Pod should be satisfied before considered schedulable. This field can be initialized only when a Pod is created (either by the client, or mutated during admission). After creation, each schedulingGate can be removed in arbitrary order, but addition of a new scheduling gate is disallowed.

pod-scheduling-gates-diagram

Figure. Pod SchedulingGates

Usage example

To mark a Pod not-ready for scheduling, you can create it with one or more scheduling gates like this:

pods/pod-with-scheduling-gates.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-pod
spec:
  schedulingGates:
  - name: example.com/foo
  - name: example.com/bar
  containers:
  - name: pause
    image: registry.k8s.io/pause:3.6

After the Pod's creation, you can check its state using:

kubectl get pod test-pod

The output reveals it's in SchedulingGated state:

NAME       READY   STATUS            RESTARTS   AGE
test-pod   0/1     SchedulingGated   0          7s

You can also check its schedulingGates field by running:

kubectl get pod test-pod -o jsonpath='{.spec.schedulingGates}'

The output is:

[{"name":"example.com/foo"},{"name":"example.com/bar"}]

To inform scheduler this Pod is ready for scheduling, you can remove its schedulingGates entirely by reapplying a modified manifest:

pods/pod-without-scheduling-gates.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-pod
spec:
  containers:
  - name: pause
    image: registry.k8s.io/pause:3.6

You can check if the schedulingGates is cleared by running:

kubectl get pod test-pod -o jsonpath='{.spec.schedulingGates}'

The output is expected to be empty. And you can check its latest status by running:

kubectl get pod test-pod -o wide

Given the test-pod doesn't request any CPU/memory resources, it's expected that this Pod's state get transited from previous SchedulingGated to Running:

NAME       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   IP         NODE
test-pod   1/1     Running   0          15s   10.0.0.4   node-2

Observability

The metric scheduler_pending_pods comes with a new label "gated" to distinguish whether a Pod has been tried scheduling but claimed as unschedulable, or explicitly marked as not ready for scheduling. You can use scheduler_pending_pods{queue="gated"} to check the metric result.

Mutable Pod scheduling directives

You can mutate scheduling directives of Pods while they have scheduling gates, with certain constraints. At a high level, you can only tighten the scheduling directives of a Pod. In other words, the updated directives would cause the Pods to only be able to be scheduled on a subset of the nodes that it would previously match. More concretely, the rules for updating a Pod's scheduling directives are as follows:

  1. For .spec.nodeSelector, only additions are allowed. If absent, it will be allowed to be set.

  2. For spec.affinity.nodeAffinity, if nil, then setting anything is allowed.

  3. If NodeSelectorTerms was empty, it will be allowed to be set. If not empty, then only additions of NodeSelectorRequirements to matchExpressions or fieldExpressions are allowed, and no changes to existing matchExpressions and fieldExpressions will be allowed. This is because the terms in .requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution.NodeSelectorTerms, are ORed while the expressions in nodeSelectorTerms[].matchExpressions and nodeSelectorTerms[].fieldExpressions are ANDed.

  4. For .preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution, all updates are allowed. This is because preferred terms are not authoritative, and so policy controllers don't validate those terms.

What's next

10.5 - Pod Topology Spread Constraints

You can use topology spread constraints to control how Pods are spread across your cluster among failure-domains such as regions, zones, nodes, and other user-defined topology domains. This can help to achieve high availability as well as efficient resource utilization.

You can set cluster-level constraints as a default, or configure topology spread constraints for individual workloads.

Motivation

Imagine that you have a cluster of up to twenty nodes, and you want to run a workload that automatically scales how many replicas it uses. There could be as few as two Pods or as many as fifteen. When there are only two Pods, you'd prefer not to have both of those Pods run on the same node: you would run the risk that a single node failure takes your workload offline.

In addition to this basic usage, there are some advanced usage examples that enable your workloads to benefit on high availability and cluster utilization.

As you scale up and run more Pods, a different concern becomes important. Imagine that you have three nodes running five Pods each. The nodes have enough capacity to run that many replicas; however, the clients that interact with this workload are split across three different datacenters (or infrastructure zones). Now you have less concern about a single node failure, but you notice that latency is higher than you'd like, and you are paying for network costs associated with sending network traffic between the different zones.

You decide that under normal operation you'd prefer to have a similar number of replicas scheduled into each infrastructure zone, and you'd like the cluster to self-heal in the case that there is a problem.

Pod topology spread constraints offer you a declarative way to configure that.

topologySpreadConstraints field

The Pod API includes a field, spec.topologySpreadConstraints. The usage of this field looks like the following:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: example-pod
spec:
  # Configure a topology spread constraint
  topologySpreadConstraints:
    - maxSkew: <integer>
      minDomains: <integer> # optional
      topologyKey: <string>
      whenUnsatisfiable: <string>
      labelSelector: <object>
      matchLabelKeys: <list> # optional; beta since v1.27
      nodeAffinityPolicy: [Honor|Ignore] # optional; beta since v1.26
      nodeTaintsPolicy: [Honor|Ignore] # optional; beta since v1.26
  ### other Pod fields go here

You can read more about this field by running kubectl explain Pod.spec.topologySpreadConstraints or refer to the scheduling section of the API reference for Pod.

Spread constraint definition

You can define one or multiple topologySpreadConstraints entries to instruct the kube-scheduler how to place each incoming Pod in relation to the existing Pods across your cluster. Those fields are:

  • maxSkew describes the degree to which Pods may be unevenly distributed. You must specify this field and the number must be greater than zero. Its semantics differ according to the value of whenUnsatisfiable:

    • if you select whenUnsatisfiable: DoNotSchedule, then maxSkew defines the maximum permitted difference between the number of matching pods in the target topology and the global minimum (the minimum number of matching pods in an eligible domain or zero if the number of eligible domains is less than MinDomains). For example, if you have 3 zones with 2, 2 and 1 matching pods respectively, MaxSkew is set to 1 then the global minimum is 1.
    • if you select whenUnsatisfiable: ScheduleAnyway, the scheduler gives higher precedence to topologies that would help reduce the skew.

  • minDomains indicates a minimum number of eligible domains. This field is optional. A domain is a particular instance of a topology. An eligible domain is a domain whose nodes match the node selector.

    • The value of minDomains must be greater than 0, when specified. You can only specify minDomains in conjunction with whenUnsatisfiable: DoNotSchedule.
    • When the number of eligible domains with match topology keys is less than minDomains, Pod topology spread treats global minimum as 0, and then the calculation of skew is performed. The global minimum is the minimum number of matching Pods in an eligible domain, or zero if the number of eligible domains is less than minDomains.
    • When the number of eligible domains with matching topology keys equals or is greater than minDomains, this value has no effect on scheduling.
    • If you do not specify minDomains, the constraint behaves as if minDomains is 1.

  • topologyKey is the key of node labels. Nodes that have a label with this key and identical values are considered to be in the same topology. We call each instance of a topology (in other words, a <key, value> pair) a domain. The scheduler will try to put a balanced number of pods into each domain. Also, we define an eligible domain as a domain whose nodes meet the requirements of nodeAffinityPolicy and nodeTaintsPolicy.

  • whenUnsatisfiable indicates how to deal with a Pod if it doesn't satisfy the spread constraint:

    • DoNotSchedule (default) tells the scheduler not to schedule it.
    • ScheduleAnyway tells the scheduler to still schedule it while prioritizing nodes that minimize the skew.

  • labelSelector is used to find matching Pods. Pods that match this label selector are counted to determine the number of Pods in their corresponding topology domain. See Label Selectors for more details.

  • matchLabelKeys is a list of pod label keys to select the pods over which spreading will be calculated. The keys are used to lookup values from the pod labels, those key-value labels are ANDed with labelSelector to select the group of existing pods over which spreading will be calculated for the incoming pod. The same key is forbidden to exist in both matchLabelKeys and labelSelector. matchLabelKeys cannot be set when labelSelector isn't set. Keys that don't exist in the pod labels will be ignored. A null or empty list means only match against the labelSelector.

    With matchLabelKeys, you don't need to update the pod.spec between different revisions. The controller/operator just needs to set different values to the same label key for different revisions. The scheduler will assume the values automatically based on matchLabelKeys. For example, if you are configuring a Deployment, you can use the label keyed with pod-template-hash, which is added automatically by the Deployment controller, to distinguish between different revisions in a single Deployment.

        topologySpreadConstraints:
        - maxSkew: 1
          topologyKey: kubernetes.io/hostname
          whenUnsatisfiable: DoNotSchedule
          labelSelector:
            matchLabels:
              app: foo
          matchLabelKeys:
            - pod-template-hash

  • nodeAffinityPolicy indicates how we will treat Pod's nodeAffinity/nodeSelector when calculating pod topology spread skew. Options are:

    • Honor: only nodes matching nodeAffinity/nodeSelector are included in the calculations.
    • Ignore: nodeAffinity/nodeSelector are ignored. All nodes are included in the calculations.

    If this value is null, the behavior is equivalent to the Honor policy.

  • nodeTaintsPolicy indicates how we will treat node taints when calculating pod topology spread skew. Options are:

    • Honor: nodes without taints, along with tainted nodes for which the incoming pod has a toleration, are included.
    • Ignore: node taints are ignored. All nodes are included.

    If this value is null, the behavior is equivalent to the Ignore policy.

When a Pod defines more than one topologySpreadConstraint, those constraints are combined using a logical AND operation: the kube-scheduler looks for a node for the incoming Pod that satisfies all the configured constraints.

Node labels

Topology spread constraints rely on node labels to identify the topology domain(s) that each node is in. For example, a node might have labels:

  region: us-east-1
  zone: us-east-1a

Suppose you have a 4-node cluster with the following labels:

NAME    STATUS   ROLES    AGE     VERSION   LABELS
node1   Ready    <none>   4m26s   v1.16.0   node=node1,zone=zoneA
node2   Ready    <none>   3m58s   v1.16.0   node=node2,zone=zoneA
node3   Ready    <none>   3m17s   v1.16.0   node=node3,zone=zoneB
node4   Ready    <none>   2m43s   v1.16.0   node=node4,zone=zoneB

Then the cluster is logically viewed as below:

graph TB subgraph "zoneB" n3(Node3) n4(Node4) end subgraph "zoneA" n1(Node1) n2(Node2) end classDef plain fill:#ddd,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#000; classDef k8s fill:#326ce5,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#fff; classDef cluster fill:#fff,stroke:#bbb,stroke-width:2px,color:#326ce5; class n1,n2,n3,n4 k8s; class zoneA,zoneB cluster;

Consistency

You should set the same Pod topology spread constraints on all pods in a group.

Usually, if you are using a workload controller such as a Deployment, the pod template takes care of this for you. If you mix different spread constraints then Kubernetes follows the API definition of the field; however, the behavior is more likely to become confusing and troubleshooting is less straightforward.

You need a mechanism to ensure that all the nodes in a topology domain (such as a cloud provider region) are labeled consistently. To avoid you needing to manually label nodes, most clusters automatically populate well-known labels such as kubernetes.io/hostname. Check whether your cluster supports this.

Topology spread constraint examples

Example: one topology spread constraint

Suppose you have a 4-node cluster where 3 Pods labeled foo: bar are located in node1, node2 and node3 respectively:

graph BT subgraph "zoneB" p3(Pod) --> n3(Node3) n4(Node4) end subgraph "zoneA" p1(Pod) --> n1(Node1) p2(Pod) --> n2(Node2) end classDef plain fill:#ddd,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#000; classDef k8s fill:#326ce5,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#fff; classDef cluster fill:#fff,stroke:#bbb,stroke-width:2px,color:#326ce5; class n1,n2,n3,n4,p1,p2,p3 k8s; class zoneA,zoneB cluster;

If you want an incoming Pod to be evenly spread with existing Pods across zones, you can use a manifest similar to:

pods/topology-spread-constraints/one-constraint.yaml 
kind: Pod
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: mypod
  labels:
    foo: bar
spec:
  topologySpreadConstraints:
  - maxSkew: 1
    topologyKey: zone
    whenUnsatisfiable: DoNotSchedule
    labelSelector:
      matchLabels:
        foo: bar
  containers:
  - name: pause
    image: registry.k8s.io/pause:3.1

From that manifest, topologyKey: zone implies the even distribution will only be applied to nodes that are labeled zone: <any value> (nodes that don't have a zone label are skipped). The field whenUnsatisfiable: DoNotSchedule tells the scheduler to let the incoming Pod stay pending if the scheduler can't find a way to satisfy the constraint.

If the scheduler placed this incoming Pod into zone A, the distribution of Pods would become [3, 1]. That means the actual skew is then 2 (calculated as 3 - 1), which violates maxSkew: 1. To satisfy the constraints and context for this example, the incoming Pod can only be placed onto a node in zone B:

graph BT subgraph "zoneB" p3(Pod) --> n3(Node3) p4(mypod) --> n4(Node4) end subgraph "zoneA" p1(Pod) --> n1(Node1) p2(Pod) --> n2(Node2) end classDef plain fill:#ddd,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#000; classDef k8s fill:#326ce5,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#fff; classDef cluster fill:#fff,stroke:#bbb,stroke-width:2px,color:#326ce5; class n1,n2,n3,n4,p1,p2,p3 k8s; class p4 plain; class zoneA,zoneB cluster;

OR

graph BT subgraph "zoneB" p3(Pod) --> n3(Node3) p4(mypod) --> n3 n4(Node4) end subgraph "zoneA" p1(Pod) --> n1(Node1) p2(Pod) --> n2(Node2) end classDef plain fill:#ddd,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#000; classDef k8s fill:#326ce5,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#fff; classDef cluster fill:#fff,stroke:#bbb,stroke-width:2px,color:#326ce5; class n1,n2,n3,n4,p1,p2,p3 k8s; class p4 plain; class zoneA,zoneB cluster;

You can tweak the Pod spec to meet various kinds of requirements:

  • Change maxSkew to a bigger value - such as 2 - so that the incoming Pod can be placed into zone A as well.
  • Change topologyKey to node so as to distribute the Pods evenly across nodes instead of zones. In the above example, if maxSkew remains 1, the incoming Pod can only be placed onto the node node4.
  • Change whenUnsatisfiable: DoNotSchedule to whenUnsatisfiable: ScheduleAnyway to ensure the incoming Pod to be always schedulable (suppose other scheduling APIs are satisfied). However, it's preferred to be placed into the topology domain which has fewer matching Pods. (Be aware that this preference is jointly normalized with other internal scheduling priorities such as resource usage ratio).

Example: multiple topology spread constraints

This builds upon the previous example. Suppose you have a 4-node cluster where 3 existing Pods labeled foo: bar are located on node1, node2 and node3 respectively:

graph BT subgraph "zoneB" p3(Pod) --> n3(Node3) n4(Node4) end subgraph "zoneA" p1(Pod) --> n1(Node1) p2(Pod) --> n2(Node2) end classDef plain fill:#ddd,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#000; classDef k8s fill:#326ce5,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#fff; classDef cluster fill:#fff,stroke:#bbb,stroke-width:2px,color:#326ce5; class n1,n2,n3,n4,p1,p2,p3 k8s; class p4 plain; class zoneA,zoneB cluster;

You can combine two topology spread constraints to control the spread of Pods both by node and by zone:

pods/topology-spread-constraints/two-constraints.yaml 
kind: Pod
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: mypod
  labels:
    foo: bar
spec:
  topologySpreadConstraints:
  - maxSkew: 1
    topologyKey: zone
    whenUnsatisfiable: DoNotSchedule
    labelSelector:
      matchLabels:
        foo: bar
  - maxSkew: 1
    topologyKey: node
    whenUnsatisfiable: DoNotSchedule
    labelSelector:
      matchLabels:
        foo: bar
  containers:
  - name: pause
    image: registry.k8s.io/pause:3.1

In this case, to match the first constraint, the incoming Pod can only be placed onto nodes in zone B; while in terms of the second constraint, the incoming Pod can only be scheduled to the node node4. The scheduler only considers options that satisfy all defined constraints, so the only valid placement is onto node node4.

Example: conflicting topology spread constraints

Multiple constraints can lead to conflicts. Suppose you have a 3-node cluster across 2 zones:

graph BT subgraph "zoneB" p4(Pod) --> n3(Node3) p5(Pod) --> n3 end subgraph "zoneA" p1(Pod) --> n1(Node1) p2(Pod) --> n1 p3(Pod) --> n2(Node2) end classDef plain fill:#ddd,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#000; classDef k8s fill:#326ce5,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#fff; classDef cluster fill:#fff,stroke:#bbb,stroke-width:2px,color:#326ce5; class n1,n2,n3,n4,p1,p2,p3,p4,p5 k8s; class zoneA,zoneB cluster;

If you were to apply two-constraints.yaml (the manifest from the previous example) to this cluster, you would see that the Pod mypod stays in the Pending state. This happens because: to satisfy the first constraint, the Pod mypod can only be placed into zone B; while in terms of the second constraint, the Pod mypod can only schedule to node node2. The intersection of the two constraints returns an empty set, and the scheduler cannot place the Pod.

To overcome this situation, you can either increase the value of maxSkew or modify one of the constraints to use whenUnsatisfiable: ScheduleAnyway. Depending on circumstances, you might also decide to delete an existing Pod manually - for example, if you are troubleshooting why a bug-fix rollout is not making progress.

Interaction with node affinity and node selectors

The scheduler will skip the non-matching nodes from the skew calculations if the incoming Pod has spec.nodeSelector or spec.affinity.nodeAffinity defined.

Example: topology spread constraints with node affinity

Suppose you have a 5-node cluster ranging across zones A to C:

graph BT subgraph "zoneB" p3(Pod) --> n3(Node3) n4(Node4) end subgraph "zoneA" p1(Pod) --> n1(Node1) p2(Pod) --> n2(Node2) end classDef plain fill:#ddd,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#000; classDef k8s fill:#326ce5,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#fff; classDef cluster fill:#fff,stroke:#bbb,stroke-width:2px,color:#326ce5; class n1,n2,n3,n4,p1,p2,p3 k8s; class p4 plain; class zoneA,zoneB cluster;
graph BT subgraph "zoneC" n5(Node5) end classDef plain fill:#ddd,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#000; classDef k8s fill:#326ce5,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:4px,color:#fff; classDef cluster fill:#fff,stroke:#bbb,stroke-width:2px,color:#326ce5; class n5 k8s; class zoneC cluster;

and you know that zone C must be excluded. In this case, you can compose a manifest as below, so that Pod mypod will be placed into zone B instead of zone C. Similarly, Kubernetes also respects spec.nodeSelector.

pods/topology-spread-constraints/one-constraint-with-nodeaffinity.yaml 
kind: Pod
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: mypod
  labels:
    foo: bar
spec:
  topologySpreadConstraints:
  - maxSkew: 1
    topologyKey: zone
    whenUnsatisfiable: DoNotSchedule
    labelSelector:
      matchLabels:
        foo: bar
  affinity:
    nodeAffinity:
      requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
        nodeSelectorTerms:
        - matchExpressions:
          - key: zone
            operator: NotIn
            values:
            - zoneC
  containers:
  - name: pause
    image: registry.k8s.io/pause:3.1

Implicit conventions

There are some implicit conventions worth noting here:

  • Only the Pods holding the same namespace as the incoming Pod can be matching candidates.

  • The scheduler only considers nodes that have all topologySpreadConstraints[*].topologyKey present at the same time. Nodes missing any of these topologyKeys are bypassed. This implies that:

    1. any Pods located on those bypassed nodes do not impact maxSkew calculation - in the above example, suppose the node node1 does not have a label "zone", then the 2 Pods will be disregarded, hence the incoming Pod will be scheduled into zone A.
    2. the incoming Pod has no chances to be scheduled onto this kind of nodes - in the above example, suppose a node node5 has the mistyped label zone-typo: zoneC (and no zone label set). After node node5 joins the cluster, it will be bypassed and Pods for this workload aren't scheduled there.

  • Be aware of what will happen if the incoming Pod's topologySpreadConstraints[*].labelSelector doesn't match its own labels. In the above example, if you remove the incoming Pod's labels, it can still be placed onto nodes in zone B, since the constraints are still satisfied. However, after that placement, the degree of imbalance of the cluster remains unchanged - it's still zone A having 2 Pods labeled as foo: bar, and zone B having 1 Pod labeled as foo: bar. If this is not what you expect, update the workload's topologySpreadConstraints[*].labelSelector to match the labels in the pod template.

Cluster-level default constraints

It is possible to set default topology spread constraints for a cluster. Default topology spread constraints are applied to a Pod if, and only if:

  • It doesn't define any constraints in its .spec.topologySpreadConstraints.
  • It belongs to a Service, ReplicaSet, StatefulSet or ReplicationController.

Default constraints can be set as part of the PodTopologySpread plugin arguments in a scheduling profile. The constraints are specified with the same API above, except that labelSelector must be empty. The selectors are calculated from the Services, ReplicaSets, StatefulSets or ReplicationControllers that the Pod belongs to.

An example configuration might look like follows:

apiVersion: kubescheduler.config.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: KubeSchedulerConfiguration

profiles:
  - schedulerName: default-scheduler
    pluginConfig:
      - name: PodTopologySpread
        args:
          defaultConstraints:
            - maxSkew: 1
              topologyKey: topology.kubernetes.io/zone
              whenUnsatisfiable: ScheduleAnyway
          defaultingType: List

Built-in default constraints

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

If you don't configure any cluster-level default constraints for pod topology spreading, then kube-scheduler acts as if you specified the following default topology constraints:

defaultConstraints:
  - maxSkew: 3
    topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname"
    whenUnsatisfiable: ScheduleAnyway
  - maxSkew: 5
    topologyKey: "topology.kubernetes.io/zone"
    whenUnsatisfiable: ScheduleAnyway

Also, the legacy SelectorSpread plugin, which provides an equivalent behavior, is disabled by default.

If you don't want to use the default Pod spreading constraints for your cluster, you can disable those defaults by setting defaultingType to List and leaving empty defaultConstraints in the PodTopologySpread plugin configuration:

apiVersion: kubescheduler.config.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: KubeSchedulerConfiguration

profiles:
  - schedulerName: default-scheduler
    pluginConfig:
      - name: PodTopologySpread
        args:
          defaultConstraints: []
          defaultingType: List

Comparison with podAffinity and podAntiAffinity

In Kubernetes, inter-Pod affinity and anti-affinity control how Pods are scheduled in relation to one another - either more packed or more scattered.

podAffinity
attracts Pods; you can try to pack any number of Pods into qualifying topology domain(s).
podAntiAffinity
repels Pods. If you set this to requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution mode then only a single Pod can be scheduled into a single topology domain; if you choose preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution then you lose the ability to enforce the constraint.

For finer control, you can specify topology spread constraints to distribute Pods across different topology domains - to achieve either high availability or cost-saving. This can also help on rolling update workloads and scaling out replicas smoothly.

For more context, see the Motivation section of the enhancement proposal about Pod topology spread constraints.

Known limitations

  • There's no guarantee that the constraints remain satisfied when Pods are removed. For example, scaling down a Deployment may result in imbalanced Pods distribution.

    You can use a tool such as the Descheduler to rebalance the Pods distribution.

  • Pods matched on tainted nodes are respected. See Issue 80921.

  • The scheduler doesn't have prior knowledge of all the zones or other topology domains that a cluster has. They are determined from the existing nodes in the cluster. This could lead to a problem in autoscaled clusters, when a node pool (or node group) is scaled to zero nodes, and you're expecting the cluster to scale up, because, in this case, those topology domains won't be considered until there is at least one node in them.

    You can work around this by using a cluster autoscaling tool that is aware of Pod topology spread constraints and is also aware of the overall set of topology domains.

What's next

10.6 - Taints and Tolerations

Node affinity is a property of Pods that attracts them to a set of nodes (either as a preference or a hard requirement). Taints are the opposite -- they allow a node to repel a set of pods.

Tolerations are applied to pods. Tolerations allow the scheduler to schedule pods with matching taints. Tolerations allow scheduling but don't guarantee scheduling: the scheduler also evaluates other parameters as part of its function.

Taints and tolerations work together to ensure that pods are not scheduled onto inappropriate nodes. One or more taints are applied to a node; this marks that the node should not accept any pods that do not tolerate the taints.

Concepts

You add a taint to a node using kubectl taint. For example,

kubectl taint nodes node1 key1=value1:NoSchedule

places a taint on node node1. The taint has key key1, value value1, and taint effect NoSchedule. This means that no pod will be able to schedule onto node1 unless it has a matching toleration.

To remove the taint added by the command above, you can run:

kubectl taint nodes node1 key1=value1:NoSchedule-

You specify a toleration for a pod in the PodSpec. Both of the following tolerations "match" the taint created by the kubectl taint line above, and thus a pod with either toleration would be able to schedule onto node1:

tolerations:
- key: "key1"
  operator: "Equal"
  value: "value1"
  effect: "NoSchedule"

tolerations:
- key: "key1"
  operator: "Exists"
  effect: "NoSchedule"

The default Kubernetes scheduler takes taints and tolerations into account when selecting a node to run a particular Pod. However, if you manually specify the .spec.nodeName for a Pod, that action bypasses the scheduler; the Pod is then bound onto the node where you assigned it, even if there are NoSchedule taints on that node that you selected. If this happens and the node also has a NoExecute taint set, the kubelet will eject the Pod unless there is an appropriate tolerance set.

Here's an example of a pod that has some tolerations defined:

pods/pod-with-toleration.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: nginx
  labels:
    env: test
spec:
  containers:
  - name: nginx
    image: nginx
    imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
  tolerations:
  - key: "example-key"
    operator: "Exists"
    effect: "NoSchedule"

The default value for operator is Equal.

A toleration "matches" a taint if the keys are the same and the effects are the same, and:

  • the operator is Exists (in which case no value should be specified), or
  • the operator is Equal and the values should be equal.

The above example used the effect of NoSchedule. Alternatively, you can use the effect of PreferNoSchedule.

The allowed values for the effect field are:

NoExecute
This affects pods that are already running on the node as follows:
  • Pods that do not tolerate the taint are evicted immediately
  • Pods that tolerate the taint without specifying tolerationSeconds in their toleration specification remain bound forever
  • Pods that tolerate the taint with a specified tolerationSeconds remain bound for the specified amount of time. After that time elapses, the node lifecycle controller evicts the Pods from the node.
NoSchedule
No new Pods will be scheduled on the tainted node unless they have a matching toleration. Pods currently running on the node are not evicted.
PreferNoSchedule
PreferNoSchedule is a "preference" or "soft" version of NoSchedule. The control plane will try to avoid placing a Pod that does not tolerate the taint on the node, but it is not guaranteed.

You can put multiple taints on the same node and multiple tolerations on the same pod. The way Kubernetes processes multiple taints and tolerations is like a filter: start with all of a node's taints, then ignore the ones for which the pod has a matching toleration; the remaining un-ignored taints have the indicated effects on the pod. In particular,

  • if there is at least one un-ignored taint with effect NoSchedule then Kubernetes will not schedule the pod onto that node
  • if there is no un-ignored taint with effect NoSchedule but there is at least one un-ignored taint with effect PreferNoSchedule then Kubernetes will try to not schedule the pod onto the node
  • if there is at least one un-ignored taint with effect NoExecute then the pod will be evicted from the node (if it is already running on the node), and will not be scheduled onto the node (if it is not yet running on the node).

For example, imagine you taint a node like this

kubectl taint nodes node1 key1=value1:NoSchedule
kubectl taint nodes node1 key1=value1:NoExecute
kubectl taint nodes node1 key2=value2:NoSchedule

And a pod has two tolerations:

tolerations:
- key: "key1"
  operator: "Equal"
  value: "value1"
  effect: "NoSchedule"
- key: "key1"
  operator: "Equal"
  value: "value1"
  effect: "NoExecute"

In this case, the pod will not be able to schedule onto the node, because there is no toleration matching the third taint. But it will be able to continue running if it is already running on the node when the taint is added, because the third taint is the only one of the three that is not tolerated by the pod.

Normally, if a taint with effect NoExecute is added to a node, then any pods that do not tolerate the taint will be evicted immediately, and pods that do tolerate the taint will never be evicted. However, a toleration with NoExecute effect can specify an optional tolerationSeconds field that dictates how long the pod will stay bound to the node after the taint is added. For example,

tolerations:
- key: "key1"
  operator: "Equal"
  value: "value1"
  effect: "NoExecute"
  tolerationSeconds: 3600

means that if this pod is running and a matching taint is added to the node, then the pod will stay bound to the node for 3600 seconds, and then be evicted. If the taint is removed before that time, the pod will not be evicted.

Example Use Cases

Taints and tolerations are a flexible way to steer pods away from nodes or evict pods that shouldn't be running. A few of the use cases are

  • Dedicated Nodes: If you want to dedicate a set of nodes for exclusive use by a particular set of users, you can add a taint to those nodes (say, kubectl taint nodes nodename dedicated=groupName:NoSchedule) and then add a corresponding toleration to their pods (this would be done most easily by writing a custom admission controller). The pods with the tolerations will then be allowed to use the tainted (dedicated) nodes as well as any other nodes in the cluster. If you want to dedicate the nodes to them and ensure they only use the dedicated nodes, then you should additionally add a label similar to the taint to the same set of nodes (e.g. dedicated=groupName), and the admission controller should additionally add a node affinity to require that the pods can only schedule onto nodes labeled with dedicated=groupName.

  • Nodes with Special Hardware: In a cluster where a small subset of nodes have specialized hardware (for example GPUs), it is desirable to keep pods that don't need the specialized hardware off of those nodes, thus leaving room for later-arriving pods that do need the specialized hardware. This can be done by tainting the nodes that have the specialized hardware (e.g. kubectl taint nodes nodename special=true:NoSchedule or kubectl taint nodes nodename special=true:PreferNoSchedule) and adding a corresponding toleration to pods that use the special hardware. As in the dedicated nodes use case, it is probably easiest to apply the tolerations using a custom admission controller. For example, it is recommended to use Extended Resources to represent the special hardware, taint your special hardware nodes with the extended resource name and run the ExtendedResourceToleration admission controller. Now, because the nodes are tainted, no pods without the toleration will schedule on them. But when you submit a pod that requests the extended resource, the ExtendedResourceToleration admission controller will automatically add the correct toleration to the pod and that pod will schedule on the special hardware nodes. This will make sure that these special hardware nodes are dedicated for pods requesting such hardware and you don't have to manually add tolerations to your pods.

  • Taint based Evictions: A per-pod-configurable eviction behavior when there are node problems, which is described in the next section.

Taint based Evictions

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.18 [stable]

The node controller automatically taints a Node when certain conditions are true. The following taints are built in:

  • node.kubernetes.io/not-ready: Node is not ready. This corresponds to the NodeCondition Ready being "False".
  • node.kubernetes.io/unreachable: Node is unreachable from the node controller. This corresponds to the NodeCondition Ready being "Unknown".
  • node.kubernetes.io/memory-pressure: Node has memory pressure.
  • node.kubernetes.io/disk-pressure: Node has disk pressure.
  • node.kubernetes.io/pid-pressure: Node has PID pressure.
  • node.kubernetes.io/network-unavailable: Node's network is unavailable.
  • node.kubernetes.io/unschedulable: Node is unschedulable.
  • node.cloudprovider.kubernetes.io/uninitialized: When the kubelet is started with an "external" cloud provider, this taint is set on a node to mark it as unusable. After a controller from the cloud-controller-manager initializes this node, the kubelet removes this taint.

In case a node is to be drained, the node controller or the kubelet adds relevant taints with NoExecute effect. This effect is added by default for the node.kubernetes.io/not-ready and node.kubernetes.io/unreachable taints. If the fault condition returns to normal, the kubelet or node controller can remove the relevant taint(s).

In some cases when the node is unreachable, the API server is unable to communicate with the kubelet on the node. The decision to delete the pods cannot be communicated to the kubelet until communication with the API server is re-established. In the meantime, the pods that are scheduled for deletion may continue to run on the partitioned node.

You can specify tolerationSeconds for a Pod to define how long that Pod stays bound to a failing or unresponsive Node.

For example, you might want to keep an application with a lot of local state bound to node for a long time in the event of network partition, hoping that the partition will recover and thus the pod eviction can be avoided. The toleration you set for that Pod might look like:

tolerations:
- key: "node.kubernetes.io/unreachable"
  operator: "Exists"
  effect: "NoExecute"
  tolerationSeconds: 6000

DaemonSet pods are created with NoExecute tolerations for the following taints with no tolerationSeconds:

  • node.kubernetes.io/unreachable
  • node.kubernetes.io/not-ready

This ensures that DaemonSet pods are never evicted due to these problems.

Taint Nodes by Condition

The control plane, using the node controller, automatically creates taints with a NoSchedule effect for node conditions.

The scheduler checks taints, not node conditions, when it makes scheduling decisions. This ensures that node conditions don't directly affect scheduling. For example, if the DiskPressure node condition is active, the control plane adds the node.kubernetes.io/disk-pressure taint and does not schedule new pods onto the affected node. If the MemoryPressure node condition is active, the control plane adds the node.kubernetes.io/memory-pressure taint.

You can ignore node conditions for newly created pods by adding the corresponding Pod tolerations. The control plane also adds the node.kubernetes.io/memory-pressure toleration on pods that have a QoS class other than BestEffort. This is because Kubernetes treats pods in the Guaranteed or Burstable QoS classes (even pods with no memory request set) as if they are able to cope with memory pressure, while new BestEffort pods are not scheduled onto the affected node.

The DaemonSet controller automatically adds the following NoSchedule tolerations to all daemons, to prevent DaemonSets from breaking.

  • node.kubernetes.io/memory-pressure
  • node.kubernetes.io/disk-pressure
  • node.kubernetes.io/pid-pressure (1.14 or later)
  • node.kubernetes.io/unschedulable (1.10 or later)
  • node.kubernetes.io/network-unavailable (host network only)

Adding these tolerations ensures backward compatibility. You can also add arbitrary tolerations to DaemonSets.

What's next

10.7 - Scheduling Framework

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.19 [stable]

The scheduling framework is a pluggable architecture for the Kubernetes scheduler. It consists of a set of "plugin" APIs that are compiled directly into the scheduler. These APIs allow most scheduling features to be implemented as plugins, while keeping the scheduling "core" lightweight and maintainable. Refer to the design proposal of the scheduling framework for more technical information on the design of the framework.

Framework workflow

The Scheduling Framework defines a few extension points. Scheduler plugins register to be invoked at one or more extension points. Some of these plugins can change the scheduling decisions and some are informational only.

Each attempt to schedule one Pod is split into two phases, the scheduling cycle and the binding cycle.

Scheduling cycle & binding cycle

The scheduling cycle selects a node for the Pod, and the binding cycle applies that decision to the cluster. Together, a scheduling cycle and binding cycle are referred to as a "scheduling context".

Scheduling cycles are run serially, while binding cycles may run concurrently.

A scheduling or binding cycle can be aborted if the Pod is determined to be unschedulable or if there is an internal error. The Pod will be returned to the queue and retried.

Interfaces

The following picture shows the scheduling context of a Pod and the interfaces that the scheduling framework exposes.

One plugin may implement multiple interfaces to perform more complex or stateful tasks.

Some interfaces match the scheduler extension points which can be configured through Scheduler Configuration.

Scheduling framework extension points

PreEnqueue

These plugins are called prior to adding Pods to the internal active queue, where Pods are marked as ready for scheduling.

Only when all PreEnqueue plugins return Success, the Pod is allowed to enter the active queue. Otherwise, it's placed in the internal unschedulable Pods list, and doesn't get an Unschedulable condition.

For more details about how internal scheduler queues work, read Scheduling queue in kube-scheduler.

EnqueueExtension

EnqueueExtension is the interface where the plugin can control whether to retry scheduling of Pods rejected by this plugin, based on changes in the cluster. Plugins that implement PreEnqueue, PreFilter, Filter, Reserve or Permit should implement this interface.

QueueingHint

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.32 [beta]

QueueingHint is a callback function for deciding whether a Pod can be requeued to the active queue or backoff queue. It's executed every time a certain kind of event or change happens in the cluster. When the QueueingHint finds that the event might make the Pod schedulable, the Pod is put into the active queue or the backoff queue so that the scheduler will retry the scheduling of the Pod.

QueueSort

These plugins are used to sort Pods in the scheduling queue. A queue sort plugin essentially provides a Less(Pod1, Pod2) function. Only one queue sort plugin may be enabled at a time.

PreFilter

These plugins are used to pre-process info about the Pod, or to check certain conditions that the cluster or the Pod must meet. If a PreFilter plugin returns an error, the scheduling cycle is aborted.

Filter

These plugins are used to filter out nodes that cannot run the Pod. For each node, the scheduler will call filter plugins in their configured order. If any filter plugin marks the node as infeasible, the remaining plugins will not be called for that node. Nodes may be evaluated concurrently.

PostFilter

These plugins are called after the Filter phase, but only when no feasible nodes were found for the pod. Plugins are called in their configured order. If any postFilter plugin marks the node as Schedulable, the remaining plugins will not be called. A typical PostFilter implementation is preemption, which tries to make the pod schedulable by preempting other Pods.

PreScore

These plugins are used to perform "pre-scoring" work, which generates a sharable state for Score plugins to use. If a PreScore plugin returns an error, the scheduling cycle is aborted.

Score

These plugins are used to rank nodes that have passed the filtering phase. The scheduler will call each scoring plugin for each node. There will be a well defined range of integers representing the minimum and maximum scores. After the NormalizeScore phase, the scheduler will combine node scores from all plugins according to the configured plugin weights.

NormalizeScore

These plugins are used to modify scores before the scheduler computes a final ranking of Nodes. A plugin that registers for this extension point will be called with the Score results from the same plugin. This is called once per plugin per scheduling cycle.

For example, suppose a plugin BlinkingLightScorer ranks Nodes based on how many blinking lights they have.

func ScoreNode(_ *v1.pod, n *v1.Node) (int, error) {
    return getBlinkingLightCount(n)
}

However, the maximum count of blinking lights may be small compared to NodeScoreMax. To fix this, BlinkingLightScorer should also register for this extension point.

func NormalizeScores(scores map[string]int) {
    highest := 0
    for _, score := range scores {
        highest = max(highest, score)
    }
    for node, score := range scores {
        scores[node] = score*NodeScoreMax/highest
    }
}

If any NormalizeScore plugin returns an error, the scheduling cycle is aborted.

Reserve

A plugin that implements the Reserve interface has two methods, namely Reserve and Unreserve, that back two informational scheduling phases called Reserve and Unreserve, respectively. Plugins which maintain runtime state (aka "stateful plugins") should use these phases to be notified by the scheduler when resources on a node are being reserved and unreserved for a given Pod.

The Reserve phase happens before the scheduler actually binds a Pod to its designated node. It exists to prevent race conditions while the scheduler waits for the bind to succeed. The Reserve method of each Reserve plugin may succeed or fail; if one Reserve method call fails, subsequent plugins are not executed and the Reserve phase is considered to have failed. If the Reserve method of all plugins succeed, the Reserve phase is considered to be successful and the rest of the scheduling cycle and the binding cycle are executed.

The Unreserve phase is triggered if the Reserve phase or a later phase fails. When this happens, the Unreserve method of all Reserve plugins will be executed in the reverse order of Reserve method calls. This phase exists to clean up the state associated with the reserved Pod.

Permit

Permit plugins are invoked at the end of the scheduling cycle for each Pod, to prevent or delay the binding to the candidate node. A permit plugin can do one of the three things:

  1. approve
    Once all Permit plugins approve a Pod, it is sent for binding.

  2. deny
    If any Permit plugin denies a Pod, it is returned to the scheduling queue. This will trigger the Unreserve phase in Reserve plugins.

  3. wait (with a timeout)
    If a Permit plugin returns "wait", then the Pod is kept in an internal "waiting" Pods list, and the binding cycle of this Pod starts but directly blocks until it gets approved. If a timeout occurs, wait becomes deny and the Pod is returned to the scheduling queue, triggering the Unreserve phase in Reserve plugins.

PreBind

These plugins are used to perform any work required before a Pod is bound. For example, a pre-bind plugin may provision a network volume and mount it on the target node before allowing the Pod to run there.

If any PreBind plugin returns an error, the Pod is rejected and returned to the scheduling queue.

Bind

These plugins are used to bind a Pod to a Node. Bind plugins will not be called until all PreBind plugins have completed. Each bind plugin is called in the configured order. A bind plugin may choose whether or not to handle the given Pod. If a bind plugin chooses to handle a Pod, the remaining bind plugins are skipped.

PostBind

This is an informational interface. Post-bind plugins are called after a Pod is successfully bound. This is the end of a binding cycle, and can be used to clean up associated resources.

Plugin API

There are two steps to the plugin API. First, plugins must register and get configured, then they use the extension point interfaces. Extension point interfaces have the following form.

type Plugin interface {
    Name() string
}

type QueueSortPlugin interface {
    Plugin
    Less(*v1.pod, *v1.pod) bool
}

type PreFilterPlugin interface {
    Plugin
    PreFilter(context.Context, *framework.CycleState, *v1.pod) error
}

// ...

Plugin configuration

You can enable or disable plugins in the scheduler configuration. If you are using Kubernetes v1.18 or later, most scheduling plugins are in use and enabled by default.

In addition to default plugins, you can also implement your own scheduling plugins and get them configured along with default plugins. You can visit scheduler-plugins for more details.

If you are using Kubernetes v1.18 or later, you can configure a set of plugins as a scheduler profile and then define multiple profiles to fit various kinds of workload. Learn more at multiple profiles.

10.8 - Dynamic Resource Allocation

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.30 [alpha] (enabled by default: false)

Dynamic resource allocation is an API for requesting and sharing resources between pods and containers inside a pod. It is a generalization of the persistent volumes API for generic resources. Typically those resources are devices like GPUs.

Third-party resource drivers are responsible for tracking and preparing resources, with allocation of resources handled by Kubernetes via structured parameters (introduced in Kubernetes 1.30). Different kinds of resources support arbitrary parameters for defining requirements and initialization.

Kubernetes v1.26 through to 1.31 included an (alpha) implementation of classic DRA, which is no longer supported. This documentation, which is for Kubernetes v1.32, explains the current approach to dynamic resource allocation within Kubernetes.

Before you begin

Kubernetes v1.32 includes cluster-level API support for dynamic resource allocation, but it needs to be enabled explicitly. You also must install a resource driver for specific resources that are meant to be managed using this API. If you are not running Kubernetes v1.32, check the documentation for that version of Kubernetes.

API

The resource.k8s.io/v1alpha3 API group provides these types:

ResourceClaim
Describes a request for access to resources in the cluster, for use by workloads. For example, if a workload needs an accelerator device with specific properties, this is how that request is expressed. The status stanza tracks whether this claim has been satisfied and what specific resources have been allocated.
ResourceClaimTemplate
Defines the spec and some metadata for creating ResourceClaims. Created by a user when deploying a workload. The per-Pod ResourceClaims are then created and removed by Kubernetes automatically.
DeviceClass
Contains pre-defined selection criteria for certain devices and configuration for them. DeviceClasses are created by a cluster administrator when installing a resource driver. Each request to allocate a device in a ResourceClaim must reference exactly one DeviceClass.
ResourceSlice
Used by DRA drivers to publish information about resources that are available in the cluster.

All parameters that select devices are defined in the ResourceClaim and DeviceClass with in-tree types. Configuration parameters can be embedded there. Which configuration parameters are valid depends on the DRA driver -- Kubernetes only passes them through without interpreting them.

The core/v1 PodSpec defines ResourceClaims that are needed for a Pod in a resourceClaims field. Entries in that list reference either a ResourceClaim or a ResourceClaimTemplate. When referencing a ResourceClaim, all Pods using this PodSpec (for example, inside a Deployment or StatefulSet) share the same ResourceClaim instance. When referencing a ResourceClaimTemplate, each Pod gets its own instance.

The resources.claims list for container resources defines whether a container gets access to these resource instances, which makes it possible to share resources between one or more containers.

Here is an example for a fictional resource driver. Two ResourceClaim objects will get created for this Pod and each container gets access to one of them.

apiVersion: resource.k8s.io/v1alpha3
kind: DeviceClass
name: resource.example.com
spec:
  selectors:
  - cel:
      expression: device.driver == "resource-driver.example.com"
---
apiVersion: resource.k8s.io/v1alpha2
kind: ResourceClaimTemplate
metadata:
  name: large-black-cat-claim-template
spec:
  spec:
    devices:
      requests:
      - name: req-0
        deviceClassName: resource.example.com
        selectors:
        - cel:
           expression: |-
              device.attributes["resource-driver.example.com"].color == "black" &&
              device.attributes["resource-driver.example.com"].size == "large"              
–--
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pod-with-cats
spec:
  containers:
  - name: container0
    image: ubuntu:20.04
    command: ["sleep", "9999"]
    resources:
      claims:
      - name: cat-0
  - name: container1
    image: ubuntu:20.04
    command: ["sleep", "9999"]
    resources:
      claims:
      - name: cat-1
  resourceClaims:
  - name: cat-0
    resourceClaimTemplateName: large-black-cat-claim-template
  - name: cat-1
    resourceClaimTemplateName: large-black-cat-claim-template

Scheduling

The scheduler is responsible for allocating resources to a ResourceClaim whenever a pod needs them. It does so by retrieving the full list of available resources from ResourceSlice objects, tracking which of those resources have already been allocated to existing ResourceClaims, and then selecting from those resources that remain.

The only kind of supported resources at the moment are devices. A device instance has a name and several attributes and capacities. Devices get selected through CEL expressions which check those attributes and capacities. In addition, the set of selected devices also can be restricted to sets which meet certain constraints.

The chosen resource is recorded in the ResourceClaim status together with any vendor-specific configuration, so when a pod is about to start on a node, the resource driver on the node has all the information it needs to prepare the resource.

By using structured parameters, the scheduler is able to reach a decision without communicating with any DRA resource drivers. It is also able to schedule multiple pods quickly by keeping information about ResourceClaim allocations in memory and writing this information to the ResourceClaim objects in the background while concurrently binding the pod to a node.

Monitoring resources

The kubelet provides a gRPC service to enable discovery of dynamic resources of running Pods. For more information on the gRPC endpoints, see the resource allocation reporting.

Pre-scheduled Pods

When you - or another API client - create a Pod with spec.nodeName already set, the scheduler gets bypassed. If some ResourceClaim needed by that Pod does not exist yet, is not allocated or not reserved for the Pod, then the kubelet will fail to run the Pod and re-check periodically because those requirements might still get fulfilled later.

Such a situation can also arise when support for dynamic resource allocation was not enabled in the scheduler at the time when the Pod got scheduled (version skew, configuration, feature gate, etc.). kube-controller-manager detects this and tries to make the Pod runnable by reserving the required ResourceClaims. However, this only works if those were allocated by the scheduler for some other pod.

It is better to avoid bypassing the scheduler because a Pod that is assigned to a node blocks normal resources (RAM, CPU) that then cannot be used for other Pods while the Pod is stuck. To make a Pod run on a specific node while still going through the normal scheduling flow, create the Pod with a node selector that exactly matches the desired node:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pod-with-cats
spec:
  nodeSelector:
    kubernetes.io/hostname: name-of-the-intended-node
  ...

You may also be able to mutate the incoming Pod, at admission time, to unset the .spec.nodeName field and to use a node selector instead.

Enabling dynamic resource allocation

Dynamic resource allocation is an alpha feature and only enabled when the DynamicResourceAllocation feature gate and the resource.k8s.io/v1alpha3 API group are enabled. For details on that, see the --feature-gates and --runtime-config kube-apiserver parameters. kube-scheduler, kube-controller-manager and kubelet also need the feature gate.

A quick check whether a Kubernetes cluster supports the feature is to list DeviceClass objects with:

kubectl get deviceclasses

If your cluster supports dynamic resource allocation, the response is either a list of DeviceClass objects or:

No resources found

If not supported, this error is printed instead:

error: the server doesn't have a resource type "deviceclasses"

The default configuration of kube-scheduler enables the "DynamicResources" plugin if and only if the feature gate is enabled and when using the v1 configuration API. Custom configurations may have to be modified to include it.

In addition to enabling the feature in the cluster, a resource driver also has to be installed. Please refer to the driver's documentation for details.

What's next

10.9 - Scheduler Performance Tuning

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.14 [beta]

kube-scheduler is the Kubernetes default scheduler. It is responsible for placement of Pods on Nodes in a cluster.

Nodes in a cluster that meet the scheduling requirements of a Pod are called feasible Nodes for the Pod. The scheduler finds feasible Nodes for a Pod and then runs a set of functions to score the feasible Nodes, picking a Node with the highest score among the feasible ones to run the Pod. The scheduler then notifies the API server about this decision in a process called Binding.

This page explains performance tuning optimizations that are relevant for large Kubernetes clusters.

In large clusters, you can tune the scheduler's behaviour balancing scheduling outcomes between latency (new Pods are placed quickly) and accuracy (the scheduler rarely makes poor placement decisions).

You configure this tuning setting via kube-scheduler setting percentageOfNodesToScore. This KubeSchedulerConfiguration setting determines a threshold for scheduling nodes in your cluster.

Setting the threshold

The percentageOfNodesToScore option accepts whole numeric values between 0 and 100. The value 0 is a special number which indicates that the kube-scheduler should use its compiled-in default. If you set percentageOfNodesToScore above 100, kube-scheduler acts as if you had set a value of 100.

To change the value, edit the kube-scheduler configuration file and then restart the scheduler. In many cases, the configuration file can be found at /etc/kubernetes/config/kube-scheduler.yaml.

After you have made this change, you can run

kubectl get pods -n kube-system | grep kube-scheduler

to verify that the kube-scheduler component is healthy.

Node scoring threshold

To improve scheduling performance, the kube-scheduler can stop looking for feasible nodes once it has found enough of them. In large clusters, this saves time compared to a naive approach that would consider every node.

You specify a threshold for how many nodes are enough, as a whole number percentage of all the nodes in your cluster. The kube-scheduler converts this into an integer number of nodes. During scheduling, if the kube-scheduler has identified enough feasible nodes to exceed the configured percentage, the kube-scheduler stops searching for more feasible nodes and moves on to the scoring phase.

How the scheduler iterates over Nodes describes the process in detail.

Default threshold

If you don't specify a threshold, Kubernetes calculates a figure using a linear formula that yields 50% for a 100-node cluster and yields 10% for a 5000-node cluster. The lower bound for the automatic value is 5%.

This means that the kube-scheduler always scores at least 5% of your cluster no matter how large the cluster is, unless you have explicitly set percentageOfNodesToScore to be smaller than 5.

If you want the scheduler to score all nodes in your cluster, set percentageOfNodesToScore to 100.

Example

Below is an example configuration that sets percentageOfNodesToScore to 50%.

apiVersion: kubescheduler.config.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: KubeSchedulerConfiguration
algorithmSource:
  provider: DefaultProvider

...

percentageOfNodesToScore: 50

Tuning percentageOfNodesToScore

percentageOfNodesToScore must be a value between 1 and 100 with the default value being calculated based on the cluster size. There is also a hardcoded minimum value of 100 nodes.

An important detail to consider when setting this value is that when a smaller number of nodes in a cluster are checked for feasibility, some nodes are not sent to be scored for a given Pod. As a result, a Node which could possibly score a higher value for running the given Pod might not even be passed to the scoring phase. This would result in a less than ideal placement of the Pod.

You should avoid setting percentageOfNodesToScore very low so that kube-scheduler does not make frequent, poor Pod placement decisions. Avoid setting the percentage to anything below 10%, unless the scheduler's throughput is critical for your application and the score of nodes is not important. In other words, you prefer to run the Pod on any Node as long as it is feasible.

How the scheduler iterates over Nodes

This section is intended for those who want to understand the internal details of this feature.

In order to give all the Nodes in a cluster a fair chance of being considered for running Pods, the scheduler iterates over the nodes in a round robin fashion. You can imagine that Nodes are in an array. The scheduler starts from the start of the array and checks feasibility of the nodes until it finds enough Nodes as specified by percentageOfNodesToScore. For the next Pod, the scheduler continues from the point in the Node array that it stopped at when checking feasibility of Nodes for the previous Pod.

If Nodes are in multiple zones, the scheduler iterates over Nodes in various zones to ensure that Nodes from different zones are considered in the feasibility checks. As an example, consider six nodes in two zones:

Zone 1: Node 1, Node 2, Node 3, Node 4
Zone 2: Node 5, Node 6

The Scheduler evaluates feasibility of the nodes in this order:

Node 1, Node 5, Node 2, Node 6, Node 3, Node 4

After going over all the Nodes, it goes back to Node 1.

What's next

10.10 - Resource Bin Packing

In the scheduling-plugin NodeResourcesFit of kube-scheduler, there are two scoring strategies that support the bin packing of resources: MostAllocated and RequestedToCapacityRatio.

Enabling bin packing using MostAllocated strategy

The MostAllocated strategy scores the nodes based on the utilization of resources, favoring the ones with higher allocation. For each resource type, you can set a weight to modify its influence in the node score.

To set the MostAllocated strategy for the NodeResourcesFit plugin, use a scheduler configuration similar to the following:

apiVersion: kubescheduler.config.k8s.io/v1
kind: KubeSchedulerConfiguration
profiles:
- pluginConfig:
  - args:
      scoringStrategy:
        resources:
        - name: cpu
          weight: 1
        - name: memory
          weight: 1
        - name: intel.com/foo
          weight: 3
        - name: intel.com/bar
          weight: 3
        type: MostAllocated
    name: NodeResourcesFit

To learn more about other parameters and their default configuration, see the API documentation for NodeResourcesFitArgs.

Enabling bin packing using RequestedToCapacityRatio

The RequestedToCapacityRatio strategy allows the users to specify the resources along with weights for each resource to score nodes based on the request to capacity ratio. This allows users to bin pack extended resources by using appropriate parameters to improve the utilization of scarce resources in large clusters. It favors nodes according to a configured function of the allocated resources. The behavior of the RequestedToCapacityRatio in the NodeResourcesFit score function can be controlled by the scoringStrategy field. Within the scoringStrategy field, you can configure two parameters: requestedToCapacityRatio and resources. The shape in the requestedToCapacityRatio parameter allows the user to tune the function as least requested or most requested based on utilization and score values. The resources parameter comprises both the name of the resource to be considered during scoring and its corresponding weight, which specifies the weight of each resource.

Below is an example configuration that sets the bin packing behavior for extended resources intel.com/foo and intel.com/bar using the requestedToCapacityRatio field.

apiVersion: kubescheduler.config.k8s.io/v1
kind: KubeSchedulerConfiguration
profiles:
- pluginConfig:
  - args:
      scoringStrategy:
        resources:
        - name: intel.com/foo
          weight: 3
        - name: intel.com/bar
          weight: 3
        requestedToCapacityRatio:
          shape:
          - utilization: 0
            score: 0
          - utilization: 100
            score: 10
        type: RequestedToCapacityRatio
    name: NodeResourcesFit

Referencing the KubeSchedulerConfiguration file with the kube-scheduler flag --config=/path/to/config/file will pass the configuration to the scheduler.

To learn more about other parameters and their default configuration, see the API documentation for NodeResourcesFitArgs.

Tuning the score function

shape is used to specify the behavior of the RequestedToCapacityRatio function.

shape:
  - utilization: 0
    score: 0
  - utilization: 100
    score: 10

The above arguments give the node a score of 0 if utilization is 0% and 10 for utilization 100%, thus enabling bin packing behavior. To enable least requested the score value must be reversed as follows.

shape:
  - utilization: 0
    score: 10
  - utilization: 100
    score: 0

resources is an optional parameter which defaults to:

resources:
  - name: cpu
    weight: 1
  - name: memory
    weight: 1

It can be used to add extended resources as follows:

resources:
  - name: intel.com/foo
    weight: 5
  - name: cpu
    weight: 3
  - name: memory
    weight: 1

The weight parameter is optional and is set to 1 if not specified. Also, the weight cannot be set to a negative value.

Node scoring for capacity allocation

This section is intended for those who want to understand the internal details of this feature. Below is an example of how the node score is calculated for a given set of values.

Requested resources:

intel.com/foo : 2
memory: 256MB
cpu: 2

Resource weights:

intel.com/foo : 5
memory: 1
cpu: 3

FunctionShapePoint {{0, 0}, {100, 10}}

Node 1 spec:

Available:
  intel.com/foo: 4
  memory: 1 GB
  cpu: 8

Used:
  intel.com/foo: 1
  memory: 256MB
  cpu: 1

Node score:

intel.com/foo  = resourceScoringFunction((2+1),4)
               = (100 - ((4-3)*100/4)
               = (100 - 25)
               = 75                       # requested + used = 75% * available
               = rawScoringFunction(75)
               = 7                        # floor(75/10)

memory         = resourceScoringFunction((256+256),1024)
               = (100 -((1024-512)*100/1024))
               = 50                       # requested + used = 50% * available
               = rawScoringFunction(50)
               = 5                        # floor(50/10)

cpu            = resourceScoringFunction((2+1),8)
               = (100 -((8-3)*100/8))
               = 37.5                     # requested + used = 37.5% * available
               = rawScoringFunction(37.5)
               = 3                        # floor(37.5/10)

NodeScore   =  ((7 * 5) + (5 * 1) + (3 * 3)) / (5 + 1 + 3)
            =  5

Node 2 spec:

Available:
  intel.com/foo: 8
  memory: 1GB
  cpu: 8
Used:
  intel.com/foo: 2
  memory: 512MB
  cpu: 6

Node score:

intel.com/foo  = resourceScoringFunction((2+2),8)
               =  (100 - ((8-4)*100/8)
               =  (100 - 50)
               =  50
               =  rawScoringFunction(50)
               = 5

memory         = resourceScoringFunction((256+512),1024)
               = (100 -((1024-768)*100/1024))
               = 75
               = rawScoringFunction(75)
               = 7

cpu            = resourceScoringFunction((2+6),8)
               = (100 -((8-8)*100/8))
               = 100
               = rawScoringFunction(100)
               = 10

NodeScore   =  ((5 * 5) + (7 * 1) + (10 * 3)) / (5 + 1 + 3)
            =  7

What's next

10.11 - Pod Priority and Preemption

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.14 [stable]

Pods can have priority. Priority indicates the importance of a Pod relative to other Pods. If a Pod cannot be scheduled, the scheduler tries to preempt (evict) lower priority Pods to make scheduling of the pending Pod possible.

How to use priority and preemption

To use priority and preemption:

  1. Add one or more PriorityClasses.

  2. Create Pods withpriorityClassName set to one of the added PriorityClasses. Of course you do not need to create the Pods directly; normally you would add priorityClassName to the Pod template of a collection object like a Deployment.

Keep reading for more information about these steps.

PriorityClass

A PriorityClass is a non-namespaced object that defines a mapping from a priority class name to the integer value of the priority. The name is specified in the name field of the PriorityClass object's metadata. The value is specified in the required value field. The higher the value, the higher the priority. The name of a PriorityClass object must be a valid DNS subdomain name, and it cannot be prefixed with system-.

A PriorityClass object can have any 32-bit integer value smaller than or equal to 1 billion. This means that the range of values for a PriorityClass object is from -2147483648 to 1000000000 inclusive. Larger numbers are reserved for built-in PriorityClasses that represent critical system Pods. A cluster admin should create one PriorityClass object for each such mapping that they want.

PriorityClass also has two optional fields: globalDefault and description. The globalDefault field indicates that the value of this PriorityClass should be used for Pods without a priorityClassName. Only one PriorityClass with globalDefault set to true can exist in the system. If there is no PriorityClass with globalDefault set, the priority of Pods with no priorityClassName is zero.

The description field is an arbitrary string. It is meant to tell users of the cluster when they should use this PriorityClass.

Notes about PodPriority and existing clusters

  • If you upgrade an existing cluster without this feature, the priority of your existing Pods is effectively zero.

  • Addition of a PriorityClass with globalDefault set to true does not change the priorities of existing Pods. The value of such a PriorityClass is used only for Pods created after the PriorityClass is added.

  • If you delete a PriorityClass, existing Pods that use the name of the deleted PriorityClass remain unchanged, but you cannot create more Pods that use the name of the deleted PriorityClass.

Example PriorityClass

apiVersion: scheduling.k8s.io/v1
kind: PriorityClass
metadata:
  name: high-priority
value: 1000000
globalDefault: false
description: "This priority class should be used for XYZ service pods only."

Non-preempting PriorityClass

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [stable]

Pods with preemptionPolicy: Never will be placed in the scheduling queue ahead of lower-priority pods, but they cannot preempt other pods. A non-preempting pod waiting to be scheduled will stay in the scheduling queue, until sufficient resources are free, and it can be scheduled. Non-preempting pods, like other pods, are subject to scheduler back-off. This means that if the scheduler tries these pods and they cannot be scheduled, they will be retried with lower frequency, allowing other pods with lower priority to be scheduled before them.

Non-preempting pods may still be preempted by other, high-priority pods.

preemptionPolicy defaults to PreemptLowerPriority, which will allow pods of that PriorityClass to preempt lower-priority pods (as is existing default behavior). If preemptionPolicy is set to Never, pods in that PriorityClass will be non-preempting.

An example use case is for data science workloads. A user may submit a job that they want to be prioritized above other workloads, but do not wish to discard existing work by preempting running pods. The high priority job with preemptionPolicy: Never will be scheduled ahead of other queued pods, as soon as sufficient cluster resources "naturally" become free.

Example Non-preempting PriorityClass

apiVersion: scheduling.k8s.io/v1
kind: PriorityClass
metadata:
  name: high-priority-nonpreempting
value: 1000000
preemptionPolicy: Never
globalDefault: false
description: "This priority class will not cause other pods to be preempted."

Pod priority

After you have one or more PriorityClasses, you can create Pods that specify one of those PriorityClass names in their specifications. The priority admission controller uses the priorityClassName field and populates the integer value of the priority. If the priority class is not found, the Pod is rejected.

The following YAML is an example of a Pod configuration that uses the PriorityClass created in the preceding example. The priority admission controller checks the specification and resolves the priority of the Pod to 1000000.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: nginx
  labels:
    env: test
spec:
  containers:
  - name: nginx
    image: nginx
    imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
  priorityClassName: high-priority

Effect of Pod priority on scheduling order

When Pod priority is enabled, the scheduler orders pending Pods by their priority and a pending Pod is placed ahead of other pending Pods with lower priority in the scheduling queue. As a result, the higher priority Pod may be scheduled sooner than Pods with lower priority if its scheduling requirements are met. If such Pod cannot be scheduled, the scheduler will continue and try to schedule other lower priority Pods.

Preemption

When Pods are created, they go to a queue and wait to be scheduled. The scheduler picks a Pod from the queue and tries to schedule it on a Node. If no Node is found that satisfies all the specified requirements of the Pod, preemption logic is triggered for the pending Pod. Let's call the pending Pod P. Preemption logic tries to find a Node where removal of one or more Pods with lower priority than P would enable P to be scheduled on that Node. If such a Node is found, one or more lower priority Pods get evicted from the Node. After the Pods are gone, P can be scheduled on the Node.

User exposed information

When Pod P preempts one or more Pods on Node N, nominatedNodeName field of Pod P's status is set to the name of Node N. This field helps the scheduler track resources reserved for Pod P and also gives users information about preemptions in their clusters.

Please note that Pod P is not necessarily scheduled to the "nominated Node". The scheduler always tries the "nominated Node" before iterating over any other nodes. After victim Pods are preempted, they get their graceful termination period. If another node becomes available while scheduler is waiting for the victim Pods to terminate, scheduler may use the other node to schedule Pod P. As a result nominatedNodeName and nodeName of Pod spec are not always the same. Also, if the scheduler preempts Pods on Node N, but then a higher priority Pod than Pod P arrives, the scheduler may give Node N to the new higher priority Pod. In such a case, scheduler clears nominatedNodeName of Pod P. By doing this, scheduler makes Pod P eligible to preempt Pods on another Node.

Limitations of preemption

Graceful termination of preemption victims

When Pods are preempted, the victims get their graceful termination period. They have that much time to finish their work and exit. If they don't, they are killed. This graceful termination period creates a time gap between the point that the scheduler preempts Pods and the time when the pending Pod (P) can be scheduled on the Node (N). In the meantime, the scheduler keeps scheduling other pending Pods. As victims exit or get terminated, the scheduler tries to schedule Pods in the pending queue. Therefore, there is usually a time gap between the point that scheduler preempts victims and the time that Pod P is scheduled. In order to minimize this gap, one can set graceful termination period of lower priority Pods to zero or a small number.

PodDisruptionBudget is supported, but not guaranteed

A PodDisruptionBudget (PDB) allows application owners to limit the number of Pods of a replicated application that are down simultaneously from voluntary disruptions. Kubernetes supports PDB when preempting Pods, but respecting PDB is best effort. The scheduler tries to find victims whose PDB are not violated by preemption, but if no such victims are found, preemption will still happen, and lower priority Pods will be removed despite their PDBs being violated.

Inter-Pod affinity on lower-priority Pods

A Node is considered for preemption only when the answer to this question is yes: "If all the Pods with lower priority than the pending Pod are removed from the Node, can the pending Pod be scheduled on the Node?"

If a pending Pod has inter-pod affinity to one or more of the lower-priority Pods on the Node, the inter-Pod affinity rule cannot be satisfied in the absence of those lower-priority Pods. In this case, the scheduler does not preempt any Pods on the Node. Instead, it looks for another Node. The scheduler might find a suitable Node or it might not. There is no guarantee that the pending Pod can be scheduled.

Our recommended solution for this problem is to create inter-Pod affinity only towards equal or higher priority Pods.

Cross node preemption

Suppose a Node N is being considered for preemption so that a pending Pod P can be scheduled on N. P might become feasible on N only if a Pod on another Node is preempted. Here's an example:

  • Pod P is being considered for Node N.
  • Pod Q is running on another Node in the same Zone as Node N.
  • Pod P has Zone-wide anti-affinity with Pod Q (topologyKey: topology.kubernetes.io/zone).
  • There are no other cases of anti-affinity between Pod P and other Pods in the Zone.
  • In order to schedule Pod P on Node N, Pod Q can be preempted, but scheduler does not perform cross-node preemption. So, Pod P will be deemed unschedulable on Node N.

If Pod Q were removed from its Node, the Pod anti-affinity violation would be gone, and Pod P could possibly be scheduled on Node N.

We may consider adding cross Node preemption in future versions if there is enough demand and if we find an algorithm with reasonable performance.

Troubleshooting

Pod priority and preemption can have unwanted side effects. Here are some examples of potential problems and ways to deal with them.

Pods are preempted unnecessarily

Preemption removes existing Pods from a cluster under resource pressure to make room for higher priority pending Pods. If you give high priorities to certain Pods by mistake, these unintentionally high priority Pods may cause preemption in your cluster. Pod priority is specified by setting the priorityClassName field in the Pod's specification. The integer value for priority is then resolved and populated to the priority field of podSpec.

To address the problem, you can change the priorityClassName for those Pods to use lower priority classes, or leave that field empty. An empty priorityClassName is resolved to zero by default.

When a Pod is preempted, there will be events recorded for the preempted Pod. Preemption should happen only when a cluster does not have enough resources for a Pod. In such cases, preemption happens only when the priority of the pending Pod (preemptor) is higher than the victim Pods. Preemption must not happen when there is no pending Pod, or when the pending Pods have equal or lower priority than the victims. If preemption happens in such scenarios, please file an issue.

Pods are preempted, but the preemptor is not scheduled

When pods are preempted, they receive their requested graceful termination period, which is by default 30 seconds. If the victim Pods do not terminate within this period, they are forcibly terminated. Once all the victims go away, the preemptor Pod can be scheduled.

While the preemptor Pod is waiting for the victims to go away, a higher priority Pod may be created that fits on the same Node. In this case, the scheduler will schedule the higher priority Pod instead of the preemptor.

This is expected behavior: the Pod with the higher priority should take the place of a Pod with a lower priority.

Higher priority Pods are preempted before lower priority pods

The scheduler tries to find nodes that can run a pending Pod. If no node is found, the scheduler tries to remove Pods with lower priority from an arbitrary node in order to make room for the pending pod. If a node with low priority Pods is not feasible to run the pending Pod, the scheduler may choose another node with higher priority Pods (compared to the Pods on the other node) for preemption. The victims must still have lower priority than the preemptor Pod.

When there are multiple nodes available for preemption, the scheduler tries to choose the node with a set of Pods with lowest priority. However, if such Pods have PodDisruptionBudget that would be violated if they are preempted then the scheduler may choose another node with higher priority Pods.

When multiple nodes exist for preemption and none of the above scenarios apply, the scheduler chooses a node with the lowest priority.

Interactions between Pod priority and quality of service

Pod priority and QoS class are two orthogonal features with few interactions and no default restrictions on setting the priority of a Pod based on its QoS classes. The scheduler's preemption logic does not consider QoS when choosing preemption targets. Preemption considers Pod priority and attempts to choose a set of targets with the lowest priority. Higher-priority Pods are considered for preemption only if the removal of the lowest priority Pods is not sufficient to allow the scheduler to schedule the preemptor Pod, or if the lowest priority Pods are protected by PodDisruptionBudget.

The kubelet uses Priority to determine pod order for node-pressure eviction. You can use the QoS class to estimate the order in which pods are most likely to get evicted. The kubelet ranks pods for eviction based on the following factors:

  1. Whether the starved resource usage exceeds requests
  2. Pod Priority
  3. Amount of resource usage relative to requests

See Pod selection for kubelet eviction for more details.

kubelet node-pressure eviction does not evict Pods when their usage does not exceed their requests. If a Pod with lower priority is not exceeding its requests, it won't be evicted. Another Pod with higher priority that exceeds its requests may be evicted.

What's next

10.12 - Node-pressure Eviction

Node-pressure eviction is the process by which the kubelet proactively terminates pods to reclaim resources on nodes.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [beta] (enabled by default: true)

The kubelet monitors resources like memory, disk space, and filesystem inodes on your cluster's nodes. When one or more of these resources reach specific consumption levels, the kubelet can proactively fail one or more pods on the node to reclaim resources and prevent starvation.

During a node-pressure eviction, the kubelet sets the phase for the selected pods to Failed, and terminates the Pod.

Node-pressure eviction is not the same as API-initiated eviction.

The kubelet does not respect your configured PodDisruptionBudget or the pod's terminationGracePeriodSeconds. If you use soft eviction thresholds, the kubelet respects your configured eviction-max-pod-grace-period. If you use hard eviction thresholds, the kubelet uses a 0s grace period (immediate shutdown) for termination.

Self healing behavior

The kubelet attempts to reclaim node-level resources before it terminates end-user pods. For example, it removes unused container images when disk resources are starved.

If the pods are managed by a workload management object (such as StatefulSet or Deployment) that replaces failed pods, the control plane (kube-controller-manager) creates new pods in place of the evicted pods.

Self healing for static pods

If you are running a static pod on a node that is under resource pressure, the kubelet may evict that static Pod. The kubelet then tries to create a replacement, because static Pods always represent an intent to run a Pod on that node.

The kubelet takes the priority of the static pod into account when creating a replacement. If the static pod manifest specifies a low priority, and there are higher-priority Pods defined within the cluster's control plane, and the node is under resource pressure, the kubelet may not be able to make room for that static pod. The kubelet continues to attempt to run all static pods even when there is resource pressure on a node.

Eviction signals and thresholds

The kubelet uses various parameters to make eviction decisions, like the following:

  • Eviction signals
  • Eviction thresholds
  • Monitoring intervals

Eviction signals

Eviction signals are the current state of a particular resource at a specific point in time. The kubelet uses eviction signals to make eviction decisions by comparing the signals to eviction thresholds, which are the minimum amount of the resource that should be available on the node.

The kubelet uses the following eviction signals:

Eviction Signal Description Linux Only
memory.available memory.available := node.status.capacity[memory] - node.stats.memory.workingSet
nodefs.available nodefs.available := node.stats.fs.available
nodefs.inodesFree nodefs.inodesFree := node.stats.fs.inodesFree •
imagefs.available imagefs.available := node.stats.runtime.imagefs.available
imagefs.inodesFree imagefs.inodesFree := node.stats.runtime.imagefs.inodesFree •
containerfs.available containerfs.available := node.stats.runtime.containerfs.available
containerfs.inodesFree containerfs.inodesFree := node.stats.runtime.containerfs.inodesFree •
pid.available pid.available := node.stats.rlimit.maxpid - node.stats.rlimit.curproc •

In this table, the Description column shows how kubelet gets the value of the signal. Each signal supports either a percentage or a literal value. The kubelet calculates the percentage value relative to the total capacity associated with the signal.

Memory signals

On Linux nodes, the value for memory.available is derived from the cgroupfs instead of tools like free -m. This is important because free -m does not work in a container, and if users use the node allocatable feature, out of resource decisions are made local to the end user Pod part of the cgroup hierarchy as well as the root node. This script or cgroupv2 script reproduces the same set of steps that the kubelet performs to calculate memory.available. The kubelet excludes inactive_file (the number of bytes of file-backed memory on the inactive LRU list) from its calculation, as it assumes that memory is reclaimable under pressure.

On Windows nodes, the value for memory.available is derived from the node's global memory commit levels (queried through the GetPerformanceInfo() system call) by subtracting the node's global CommitTotal from the node's CommitLimit. Please note that CommitLimit can change if the node's page-file size changes!

Filesystem signals

The kubelet recognizes three specific filesystem identifiers that can be used with eviction signals (<identifier>.inodesFree or <identifier>.available):

  1. nodefs: The node's main filesystem, used for local disk volumes, emptyDir volumes not backed by memory, log storage, ephemeral storage, and more. For example, nodefs contains /var/lib/kubelet.

  2. imagefs: An optional filesystem that container runtimes can use to store container images (which are the read-only layers) and container writable layers.

  3. containerfs: An optional filesystem that container runtime can use to store the writeable layers. Similar to the main filesystem (see nodefs), it's used to store local disk volumes, emptyDir volumes not backed by memory, log storage, and ephemeral storage, except for the container images. When containerfs is used, the imagefs filesystem can be split to only store images (read-only layers) and nothing else.

As such, kubelet generally allows three options for container filesystems:

  • Everything is on the single nodefs, also referred to as "rootfs" or simply "root", and there is no dedicated image filesystem.

  • Container storage (see nodefs) is on a dedicated disk, and imagefs (writable and read-only layers) is separate from the root filesystem. This is often referred to as "split disk" (or "separate disk") filesystem.

  • Container filesystem containerfs (same as nodefs plus writable layers) is on root and the container images (read-only layers) are stored on separate imagefs. This is often referred to as "split image" filesystem.

The kubelet will attempt to auto-discover these filesystems with their current configuration directly from the underlying container runtime and will ignore other local node filesystems.

The kubelet does not support other container filesystems or storage configurations, and it does not currently support multiple filesystems for images and containers.

Deprecated kubelet garbage collection features

Some kubelet garbage collection features are deprecated in favor of eviction:

Existing Flag Rationale
--maximum-dead-containers deprecated once old logs are stored outside of container's context
--maximum-dead-containers-per-container deprecated once old logs are stored outside of container's context
--minimum-container-ttl-duration deprecated once old logs are stored outside of container's context

Eviction thresholds

You can specify custom eviction thresholds for the kubelet to use when it makes eviction decisions. You can configure soft and hard eviction thresholds.

Eviction thresholds have the form [eviction-signal][operator][quantity], where:

  • eviction-signal is the eviction signal to use.
  • operator is the relational operator you want, such as < (less than).
  • quantity is the eviction threshold amount, such as 1Gi. The value of quantity must match the quantity representation used by Kubernetes. You can use either literal values or percentages (%).

For example, if a node has 10GiB of total memory and you want trigger eviction if the available memory falls below 1GiB, you can define the eviction threshold as either memory.available<10% or memory.available<1Gi (you cannot use both).

Soft eviction thresholds

A soft eviction threshold pairs an eviction threshold with a required administrator-specified grace period. The kubelet does not evict pods until the grace period is exceeded. The kubelet returns an error on startup if you do not specify a grace period.

You can specify both a soft eviction threshold grace period and a maximum allowed pod termination grace period for kubelet to use during evictions. If you specify a maximum allowed grace period and the soft eviction threshold is met, the kubelet uses the lesser of the two grace periods. If you do not specify a maximum allowed grace period, the kubelet kills evicted pods immediately without graceful termination.

You can use the following flags to configure soft eviction thresholds:

  • eviction-soft: A set of eviction thresholds like memory.available<1.5Gi that can trigger pod eviction if held over the specified grace period.
  • eviction-soft-grace-period: A set of eviction grace periods like memory.available=1m30s that define how long a soft eviction threshold must hold before triggering a Pod eviction.
  • eviction-max-pod-grace-period: The maximum allowed grace period (in seconds) to use when terminating pods in response to a soft eviction threshold being met.

Hard eviction thresholds

A hard eviction threshold has no grace period. When a hard eviction threshold is met, the kubelet kills pods immediately without graceful termination to reclaim the starved resource.

You can use the eviction-hard flag to configure a set of hard eviction thresholds like memory.available<1Gi.

The kubelet has the following default hard eviction thresholds:

  • memory.available<100Mi (Linux nodes)
  • memory.available<500Mi (Windows nodes)
  • nodefs.available<10%
  • imagefs.available<15%
  • nodefs.inodesFree<5% (Linux nodes)
  • imagefs.inodesFree<5% (Linux nodes)

These default values of hard eviction thresholds will only be set if none of the parameters is changed. If you change the value of any parameter, then the values of other parameters will not be inherited as the default values and will be set to zero. In order to provide custom values, you should provide all the thresholds respectively.

The containerfs.available and containerfs.inodesFree (Linux nodes) default eviction thresholds will be set as follows:

  • If a single filesystem is used for everything, then containerfs thresholds are set the same as nodefs.

  • If separate filesystems are configured for both images and containers, then containerfs thresholds are set the same as imagefs.

Setting custom overrides for thresholds related to containersfs is currently not supported, and a warning will be issued if an attempt to do so is made; any provided custom values will, as such, be ignored.

Eviction monitoring interval

The kubelet evaluates eviction thresholds based on its configured housekeeping-interval, which defaults to 10s.

Node conditions

The kubelet reports node conditions to reflect that the node is under pressure because hard or soft eviction threshold is met, independent of configured grace periods.

The kubelet maps eviction signals to node conditions as follows:

Node Condition Eviction Signal Description
MemoryPressure memory.available Available memory on the node has satisfied an eviction threshold
DiskPressure nodefs.available, nodefs.inodesFree, imagefs.available, imagefs.inodesFree, containerfs.available, or containerfs.inodesFree Available disk space and inodes on either the node's root filesystem, image filesystem, or container filesystem has satisfied an eviction threshold
PIDPressure pid.available Available processes identifiers on the (Linux) node has fallen below an eviction threshold

The control plane also maps these node conditions to taints.

The kubelet updates the node conditions based on the configured --node-status-update-frequency, which defaults to 10s.

Node condition oscillation

In some cases, nodes oscillate above and below soft eviction thresholds without holding for the defined grace periods. This causes the reported node condition to constantly switch between true and false, leading to bad eviction decisions.

To protect against oscillation, you can use the eviction-pressure-transition-period flag, which controls how long the kubelet must wait before transitioning a node condition to a different state. The transition period has a default value of 5m.

Reclaiming node level resources

The kubelet tries to reclaim node-level resources before it evicts end-user pods.

When a DiskPressure node condition is reported, the kubelet reclaims node-level resources based on the filesystems on the node.

Without imagefs or containerfs

If the node only has a nodefs filesystem that meets eviction thresholds, the kubelet frees up disk space in the following order:

  1. Garbage collect dead pods and containers.
  2. Delete unused images.

With imagefs

If the node has a dedicated imagefs filesystem for container runtimes to use, the kubelet does the following:

  • If the nodefs filesystem meets the eviction thresholds, the kubelet garbage collects dead pods and containers.

  • If the imagefs filesystem meets the eviction thresholds, the kubelet deletes all unused images.

With imagefs and containerfs

If the node has a dedicated containerfs alongside the imagefs filesystem configured for the container runtimes to use, then kubelet will attempt to reclaim resources as follows:

  • If the containerfs filesystem meets the eviction thresholds, the kubelet garbage collects dead pods and containers.

  • If the imagefs filesystem meets the eviction thresholds, the kubelet deletes all unused images.

Pod selection for kubelet eviction

If the kubelet's attempts to reclaim node-level resources don't bring the eviction signal below the threshold, the kubelet begins to evict end-user pods.

The kubelet uses the following parameters to determine the pod eviction order:

  1. Whether the pod's resource usage exceeds requests
  2. Pod Priority
  3. The pod's resource usage relative to requests

As a result, kubelet ranks and evicts pods in the following order:

  1. BestEffort or Burstable pods where the usage exceeds requests. These pods are evicted based on their Priority and then by how much their usage level exceeds the request.

  2. Guaranteed pods and Burstable pods where the usage is less than requests are evicted last, based on their Priority.

Guaranteed pods are guaranteed only when requests and limits are specified for all the containers and they are equal. These pods will never be evicted because of another pod's resource consumption. If a system daemon (such as kubelet and journald) is consuming more resources than were reserved via system-reserved or kube-reserved allocations, and the node only has Guaranteed or Burstable pods using less resources than requests left on it, then the kubelet must choose to evict one of these pods to preserve node stability and to limit the impact of resource starvation on other pods. In this case, it will choose to evict pods of lowest Priority first.

If you are running a static pod and want to avoid having it evicted under resource pressure, set the priority field for that Pod directly. Static pods do not support the priorityClassName field.

When the kubelet evicts pods in response to inode or process ID starvation, it uses the Pods' relative priority to determine the eviction order, because inodes and PIDs have no requests.

The kubelet sorts pods differently based on whether the node has a dedicated imagefs or containerfs filesystem:

Without imagefs or containerfs (nodefs and imagefs use the same filesystem)

  • If nodefs triggers evictions, the kubelet sorts pods based on their total disk usage (local volumes + logs and a writable layer of all containers).

With imagefs (nodefs and imagefs filesystems are separate)

  • If nodefs triggers evictions, the kubelet sorts pods based on nodefs usage (local volumes + logs of all containers).

  • If imagefs triggers evictions, the kubelet sorts pods based on the writable layer usage of all containers.

With imagesfs and containerfs (imagefs and containerfs have been split)

  • If containerfs triggers evictions, the kubelet sorts pods based on containerfs usage (local volumes + logs and a writable layer of all containers).

  • If imagefs triggers evictions, the kubelet sorts pods based on the storage of images rank, which represents the disk usage of a given image.

Minimum eviction reclaim

In some cases, pod eviction only reclaims a small amount of the starved resource. This can lead to the kubelet repeatedly hitting the configured eviction thresholds and triggering multiple evictions.

You can use the --eviction-minimum-reclaim flag or a kubelet config file to configure a minimum reclaim amount for each resource. When the kubelet notices that a resource is starved, it continues to reclaim that resource until it reclaims the quantity you specify.

For example, the following configuration sets minimum reclaim amounts:

apiVersion: kubelet.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: KubeletConfiguration
evictionHard:
  memory.available: "500Mi"
  nodefs.available: "1Gi"
  imagefs.available: "100Gi"
evictionMinimumReclaim:
  memory.available: "0Mi"
  nodefs.available: "500Mi"
  imagefs.available: "2Gi"

In this example, if the nodefs.available signal meets the eviction threshold, the kubelet reclaims the resource until the signal reaches the threshold of 1GiB, and then continues to reclaim the minimum amount of 500MiB, until the available nodefs storage value reaches 1.5GiB.

Similarly, the kubelet tries to reclaim the imagefs resource until the imagefs.available value reaches 102Gi, representing 102 GiB of available container image storage. If the amount of storage that the kubelet could reclaim is less than 2GiB, the kubelet doesn't reclaim anything.

The default eviction-minimum-reclaim is 0 for all resources.

Node out of memory behavior

If the node experiences an out of memory (OOM) event prior to the kubelet being able to reclaim memory, the node depends on the oom_killer to respond.

The kubelet sets an oom_score_adj value for each container based on the QoS for the pod.

Quality of Service oom_score_adj
Guaranteed -997
BestEffort 1000
Burstable min(max(2, 1000 - (1000 × memoryRequestBytes) / machineMemoryCapacityBytes), 999)

If the kubelet can't reclaim memory before a node experiences OOM, the oom_killer calculates an oom_score based on the percentage of memory it's using on the node, and then adds the oom_score_adj to get an effective oom_score for each container. It then kills the container with the highest score.

This means that containers in low QoS pods that consume a large amount of memory relative to their scheduling requests are killed first.

Unlike pod eviction, if a container is OOM killed, the kubelet can restart it based on its restartPolicy.

Good practices

The following sections describe good practice for eviction configuration.

Schedulable resources and eviction policies

When you configure the kubelet with an eviction policy, you should make sure that the scheduler will not schedule pods if they will trigger eviction because they immediately induce memory pressure.

Consider the following scenario:

  • Node memory capacity: 10GiB
  • Operator wants to reserve 10% of memory capacity for system daemons (kernel, kubelet, etc.)
  • Operator wants to evict Pods at 95% memory utilization to reduce incidence of system OOM.

For this to work, the kubelet is launched as follows:

--eviction-hard=memory.available<500Mi
--system-reserved=memory=1.5Gi

In this configuration, the --system-reserved flag reserves 1.5GiB of memory for the system, which is 10% of the total memory + the eviction threshold amount.

The node can reach the eviction threshold if a pod is using more than its request, or if the system is using more than 1GiB of memory, which makes the memory.available signal fall below 500MiB and triggers the threshold.

DaemonSets and node-pressure eviction

Pod priority is a major factor in making eviction decisions. If you do not want the kubelet to evict pods that belong to a DaemonSet, give those pods a high enough priority by specifying a suitable priorityClassName in the pod spec. You can also use a lower priority, or the default, to only allow pods from that DaemonSet to run when there are enough resources.

Known issues

The following sections describe known issues related to out of resource handling.

kubelet may not observe memory pressure right away

By default, the kubelet polls cAdvisor to collect memory usage stats at a regular interval. If memory usage increases within that window rapidly, the kubelet may not observe MemoryPressure fast enough, and the OOM killer will still be invoked.

You can use the --kernel-memcg-notification flag to enable the memcg notification API on the kubelet to get notified immediately when a threshold is crossed.

If you are not trying to achieve extreme utilization, but a sensible measure of overcommit, a viable workaround for this issue is to use the --kube-reserved and --system-reserved flags to allocate memory for the system.

active_file memory is not considered as available memory

On Linux, the kernel tracks the number of bytes of file-backed memory on active least recently used (LRU) list as the active_file statistic. The kubelet treats active_file memory areas as not reclaimable. For workloads that make intensive use of block-backed local storage, including ephemeral local storage, kernel-level caches of file and block data means that many recently accessed cache pages are likely to be counted as active_file. If enough of these kernel block buffers are on the active LRU list, the kubelet is liable to observe this as high resource use and taint the node as experiencing memory pressure - triggering pod eviction.

For more details, see https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/43916

You can work around that behavior by setting the memory limit and memory request the same for containers likely to perform intensive I/O activity. You will need to estimate or measure an optimal memory limit value for that container.

What's next

10.13 - API-initiated Eviction

API-initiated eviction is the process by which you use the Eviction API to create an Eviction object that triggers graceful pod termination.

You can request eviction by calling the Eviction API directly, or programmatically using a client of the API server, like the kubectl drain command. This creates an Eviction object, which causes the API server to terminate the Pod.

API-initiated evictions respect your configured PodDisruptionBudgets and terminationGracePeriodSeconds.

Using the API to create an Eviction object for a Pod is like performing a policy-controlled DELETE operation on the Pod.

Calling the Eviction API

You can use a Kubernetes language client to access the Kubernetes API and create an Eviction object. To do this, you POST the attempted operation, similar to the following example:

{
  "apiVersion": "policy/v1",
  "kind": "Eviction",
  "metadata": {
    "name": "quux",
    "namespace": "default"
  }
}


{
  "apiVersion": "policy/v1beta1",
  "kind": "Eviction",
  "metadata": {
    "name": "quux",
    "namespace": "default"
  }
}

Alternatively, you can attempt an eviction operation by accessing the API using curl or wget, similar to the following example:

curl -v -H 'Content-type: application/json' https://your-cluster-api-endpoint.example/api/v1/namespaces/default/pods/quux/eviction -d @eviction.json

How API-initiated eviction works

When you request an eviction using the API, the API server performs admission checks and responds in one of the following ways:

  • 200 OK: the eviction is allowed, the Eviction subresource is created, and the Pod is deleted, similar to sending a DELETE request to the Pod URL.
  • 429 Too Many Requests: the eviction is not currently allowed because of the configured PodDisruptionBudget. You may be able to attempt the eviction again later. You might also see this response because of API rate limiting.
  • 500 Internal Server Error: the eviction is not allowed because there is a misconfiguration, like if multiple PodDisruptionBudgets reference the same Pod.

If the Pod you want to evict isn't part of a workload that has a PodDisruptionBudget, the API server always returns 200 OK and allows the eviction.

If the API server allows the eviction, the Pod is deleted as follows:

  1. The Pod resource in the API server is updated with a deletion timestamp, after which the API server considers the Pod resource to be terminated. The Pod resource is also marked with the configured grace period.
  2. The kubelet on the node where the local Pod is running notices that the Pod resource is marked for termination and starts to gracefully shut down the local Pod.
  3. While the kubelet is shutting the Pod down, the control plane removes the Pod from Endpoint and EndpointSlice objects. As a result, controllers no longer consider the Pod as a valid object.
  4. After the grace period for the Pod expires, the kubelet forcefully terminates the local Pod.
  5. The kubelet tells the API server to remove the Pod resource.
  6. The API server deletes the Pod resource.

Troubleshooting stuck evictions

In some cases, your applications may enter a broken state, where the Eviction API will only return 429 or 500 responses until you intervene. This can happen if, for example, a ReplicaSet creates pods for your application but new pods do not enter a Ready state. You may also notice this behavior in cases where the last evicted Pod had a long termination grace period.

If you notice stuck evictions, try one of the following solutions:

  • Abort or pause the automated operation causing the issue. Investigate the stuck application before you restart the operation.
  • Wait a while, then directly delete the Pod from your cluster control plane instead of using the Eviction API.

What's next

11 - Cluster Administration

Lower-level detail relevant to creating or administering a Kubernetes cluster.

The cluster administration overview is for anyone creating or administering a Kubernetes cluster. It assumes some familiarity with core Kubernetes concepts.

Planning a cluster

See the guides in Setup for examples of how to plan, set up, and configure Kubernetes clusters. The solutions listed in this article are called distros.

Before choosing a guide, here are some considerations:

  • Do you want to try out Kubernetes on your computer, or do you want to build a high-availability, multi-node cluster? Choose distros best suited for your needs.
  • Will you be using a hosted Kubernetes cluster, such as Google Kubernetes Engine, or hosting your own cluster?
  • Will your cluster be on-premises, or in the cloud (IaaS)? Kubernetes does not directly support hybrid clusters. Instead, you can set up multiple clusters.
  • If you are configuring Kubernetes on-premises, consider which networking model fits best.
  • Will you be running Kubernetes on "bare metal" hardware or on virtual machines (VMs)?
  • Do you want to run a cluster, or do you expect to do active development of Kubernetes project code? If the latter, choose an actively-developed distro. Some distros only use binary releases, but offer a greater variety of choices.
  • Familiarize yourself with the components needed to run a cluster.

Managing a cluster

Securing a cluster

Securing the kubelet

Optional Cluster Services

11.1 - Node Shutdowns

In a Kubernetes cluster, a node can be shutdown in a planned graceful way or unexpectedly because of reasons such as a power outage or something else external. A node shutdown could lead to workload failure if the node is not drained before the shutdown. A node shutdown can be either graceful or non-graceful.

Graceful node shutdown

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.21 [beta] (enabled by default: true)

The kubelet attempts to detect node system shutdown and terminates pods running on the node.

Kubelet ensures that pods follow the normal pod termination process during the node shutdown. During node shutdown, the kubelet does not accept new Pods (even if those Pods are already bound to the node).

The Graceful node shutdown feature depends on systemd since it takes advantage of systemd inhibitor locks to delay the node shutdown with a given duration.

Graceful node shutdown is controlled with the GracefulNodeShutdown feature gate which is enabled by default in 1.21.

Note that by default, both configuration options described below, shutdownGracePeriod and shutdownGracePeriodCriticalPods are set to zero, thus not activating the graceful node shutdown functionality. To activate the feature, the two kubelet config settings should be configured appropriately and set to non-zero values.

Once systemd detects or notifies node shutdown, the kubelet sets a NotReady condition on the Node, with the reason set to "node is shutting down". The kube-scheduler honors this condition and does not schedule any Pods onto the affected node; other third-party schedulers are expected to follow the same logic. This means that new Pods won't be scheduled onto that node and therefore none will start.

The kubelet also rejects Pods during the PodAdmission phase if an ongoing node shutdown has been detected, so that even Pods with a toleration for node.kubernetes.io/not-ready:NoSchedule do not start there.

At the same time when kubelet is setting that condition on its Node via the API, the kubelet also begins terminating any Pods that are running locally.

During a graceful shutdown, kubelet terminates pods in two phases:

  1. Terminate regular pods running on the node.
  2. Terminate critical pods running on the node.

Graceful node shutdown feature is configured with two KubeletConfiguration options:

  • shutdownGracePeriod:
    • Specifies the total duration that the node should delay the shutdown by. This is the total grace period for pod termination for both regular and critical pods.
  • shutdownGracePeriodCriticalPods:
    • Specifies the duration used to terminate critical pods during a node shutdown. This value should be less than shutdownGracePeriod.

For example, if shutdownGracePeriod=30s, and shutdownGracePeriodCriticalPods=10s, kubelet will delay the node shutdown by 30 seconds. During the shutdown, the first 20 (30-10) seconds would be reserved for gracefully terminating normal pods, and the last 10 seconds would be reserved for terminating critical pods.

Pod Priority based graceful node shutdown

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [beta] (enabled by default: true)

To provide more flexibility during graceful node shutdown around the ordering of pods during shutdown, graceful node shutdown honors the PriorityClass for Pods, provided that you enabled this feature in your cluster. The feature allows cluster administers to explicitly define the ordering of pods during graceful node shutdown based on priority classes.

The Graceful Node Shutdown feature, as described above, shuts down pods in two phases, non-critical pods, followed by critical pods. If additional flexibility is needed to explicitly define the ordering of pods during shutdown in a more granular way, pod priority based graceful shutdown can be used.

When graceful node shutdown honors pod priorities, this makes it possible to do graceful node shutdown in multiple phases, each phase shutting down a particular priority class of pods. The kubelet can be configured with the exact phases and shutdown time per phase.

Assuming the following custom pod priority classes in a cluster,

Pod priority class name Pod priority class value
custom-class-a 100000
custom-class-b 10000
custom-class-c 1000
regular/unset 0

Within the kubelet configuration the settings for shutdownGracePeriodByPodPriority could look like:

Pod priority class value Shutdown period
100000 10 seconds
10000 180 seconds
1000 120 seconds
0 60 seconds

The corresponding kubelet config YAML configuration would be:

shutdownGracePeriodByPodPriority:
  - priority: 100000
    shutdownGracePeriodSeconds: 10
  - priority: 10000
    shutdownGracePeriodSeconds: 180
  - priority: 1000
    shutdownGracePeriodSeconds: 120
  - priority: 0
    shutdownGracePeriodSeconds: 60

The above table implies that any pod with priority value >= 100000 will get just 10 seconds to stop, any pod with value >= 10000 and < 100000 will get 180 seconds to stop, any pod with value >= 1000 and < 10000 will get 120 seconds to stop. Finally, all other pods will get 60 seconds to stop.

One doesn't have to specify values corresponding to all of the classes. For example, you could instead use these settings:

Pod priority class value Shutdown period
100000 300 seconds
1000 120 seconds
0 60 seconds

In the above case, the pods with custom-class-b will go into the same bucket as custom-class-c for shutdown.

If there are no pods in a particular range, then the kubelet does not wait for pods in that priority range. Instead, the kubelet immediately skips to the next priority class value range.

If this feature is enabled and no configuration is provided, then no ordering action will be taken.

Using this feature requires enabling the GracefulNodeShutdownBasedOnPodPriority feature gate, and setting ShutdownGracePeriodByPodPriority in the kubelet config to the desired configuration containing the pod priority class values and their respective shutdown periods.

Metrics graceful_shutdown_start_time_seconds and graceful_shutdown_end_time_seconds are emitted under the kubelet subsystem to monitor node shutdowns.

Non-graceful node shutdown handling

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.28 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

A node shutdown action may not be detected by kubelet's Node Shutdown Manager, either because the command does not trigger the inhibitor locks mechanism used by kubelet or because of a user error, i.e., the ShutdownGracePeriod and ShutdownGracePeriodCriticalPods are not configured properly. Please refer to above section Graceful Node Shutdown for more details.

When a node is shutdown but not detected by kubelet's Node Shutdown Manager, the pods that are part of a StatefulSet will be stuck in terminating status on the shutdown node and cannot move to a new running node. This is because kubelet on the shutdown node is not available to delete the pods so the StatefulSet cannot create a new pod with the same name. If there are volumes used by the pods, the VolumeAttachments will not be deleted from the original shutdown node so the volumes used by these pods cannot be attached to a new running node. As a result, the application running on the StatefulSet cannot function properly. If the original shutdown node comes up, the pods will be deleted by kubelet and new pods will be created on a different running node. If the original shutdown node does not come up, these pods will be stuck in terminating status on the shutdown node forever.

To mitigate the above situation, a user can manually add the taint node.kubernetes.io/out-of-service with either NoExecute or NoSchedule effect to a Node marking it out-of-service. If a Node is marked out-of-service with this taint, the pods on the node will be forcefully deleted if there are no matching tolerations on it and volume detach operations for the pods terminating on the node will happen immediately. This allows the Pods on the out-of-service node to recover quickly on a different node.

During a non-graceful shutdown, Pods are terminated in the two phases:

  1. Force delete the Pods that do not have matching out-of-service tolerations.
  2. Immediately perform detach volume operation for such pods.

Forced storage detach on timeout

In any situation where a pod deletion has not succeeded for 6 minutes, kubernetes will force detach volumes being unmounted if the node is unhealthy at that instant. Any workload still running on the node that uses a force-detached volume will cause a violation of the CSI specification, which states that ControllerUnpublishVolume "must be called after all NodeUnstageVolume and NodeUnpublishVolume on the volume are called and succeed". In such circumstances, volumes on the node in question might encounter data corruption.

The forced storage detach behaviour is optional; users might opt to use the "Non-graceful node shutdown" feature instead.

Force storage detach on timeout can be disabled by setting the disable-force-detach-on-timeout config field in kube-controller-manager. Disabling the force detach on timeout feature means that a volume that is hosted on a node that is unhealthy for more than 6 minutes will not have its associated VolumeAttachment deleted.

After this setting has been applied, unhealthy pods still attached to a volumes must be recovered via the Non-Graceful Node Shutdown procedure mentioned above.

Windows Graceful node shutdown

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.32 [alpha] (enabled by default: false)

The Windows graceful node shutdown feature depends on kubelet running as a Windows service, it will then have a registered service control handler to delay the presshutdown event with a given duration.

Windows graceful node shutdown is controlled with the WindowsGracefulNodeShutdown feature gate which is introduced in 1.32 as an alpha feature.

Windows graceful node shutdown can not be cancelled.

If Kubelet is not running as a Windows service, it will not be able to set and monitor the Preshutdown event, the node will have to go through the Non-Graceful Node Shutdown procedure mentioned above.

In the case where the Windows graceful node shutdown feature is enabled, but the kubelet is not running as a Windows service, the kubelet will continue running instead of failing. However, it will log an error indicating that it needs to be run as a Windows service.

What's next

Learn more about the following:

11.2 - Certificates

To learn how to generate certificates for your cluster, see Certificates.

11.3 - Cluster Networking

Networking is a central part of Kubernetes, but it can be challenging to understand exactly how it is expected to work. There are 4 distinct networking problems to address:

  1. Highly-coupled container-to-container communications: this is solved by Pods and localhost communications.
  2. Pod-to-Pod communications: this is the primary focus of this document.
  3. Pod-to-Service communications: this is covered by Services.
  4. External-to-Service communications: this is also covered by Services.

Kubernetes is all about sharing machines among applications. Typically, sharing machines requires ensuring that two applications do not try to use the same ports. Coordinating ports across multiple developers is very difficult to do at scale and exposes users to cluster-level issues outside of their control.

Dynamic port allocation brings a lot of complications to the system - every application has to take ports as flags, the API servers have to know how to insert dynamic port numbers into configuration blocks, services have to know how to find each other, etc. Rather than deal with this, Kubernetes takes a different approach.

To learn about the Kubernetes networking model, see here.

Kubernetes IP address ranges

Kubernetes clusters require to allocate non-overlapping IP addresses for Pods, Services and Nodes, from a range of available addresses configured in the following components:

  • The network plugin is configured to assign IP addresses to Pods.
  • The kube-apiserver is configured to assign IP addresses to Services.
  • The kubelet or the cloud-controller-manager is configured to assign IP addresses to Nodes.
A figure illustrating the different network ranges in a kubernetes cluster

Cluster networking types

Kubernetes clusters, attending to the IP families configured, can be categorized into:

  • IPv4 only: The network plugin, kube-apiserver and kubelet/cloud-controller-manager are configured to assign only IPv4 addresses.
  • IPv6 only: The network plugin, kube-apiserver and kubelet/cloud-controller-manager are configured to assign only IPv6 addresses.
  • IPv4/IPv6 or IPv6/IPv4 dual-stack:
    • The network plugin is configured to assign IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
    • The kube-apiserver is configured to assign IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
    • The kubelet or cloud-controller-manager is configured to assign IPv4 and IPv6 address.
    • All components must agree on the configured primary IP family.

Kubernetes clusters only consider the IP families present on the Pods, Services and Nodes objects, independently of the existing IPs of the represented objects. Per example, a server or a pod can have multiple IP addresses on its interfaces, but only the IP addresses in node.status.addresses or pod.status.ips are considered for implementing the Kubernetes network model and defining the type of the cluster.

How to implement the Kubernetes network model

The network model is implemented by the container runtime on each node. The most common container runtimes use Container Network Interface (CNI) plugins to manage their network and security capabilities. Many different CNI plugins exist from many different vendors. Some of these provide only basic features of adding and removing network interfaces, while others provide more sophisticated solutions, such as integration with other container orchestration systems, running multiple CNI plugins, advanced IPAM features etc.

See this page for a non-exhaustive list of networking addons supported by Kubernetes.

What's next

The early design of the networking model and its rationale are described in more detail in the networking design document. For future plans and some on-going efforts that aim to improve Kubernetes networking, please refer to the SIG-Network KEPs.

11.4 - Logging Architecture

Application logs can help you understand what is happening inside your application. The logs are particularly useful for debugging problems and monitoring cluster activity. Most modern applications have some kind of logging mechanism. Likewise, container engines are designed to support logging. The easiest and most adopted logging method for containerized applications is writing to standard output and standard error streams.

However, the native functionality provided by a container engine or runtime is usually not enough for a complete logging solution.

For example, you may want to access your application's logs if a container crashes, a pod gets evicted, or a node dies.

In a cluster, logs should have a separate storage and lifecycle independent of nodes, pods, or containers. This concept is called cluster-level logging.

Cluster-level logging architectures require a separate backend to store, analyze, and query logs. Kubernetes does not provide a native storage solution for log data. Instead, there are many logging solutions that integrate with Kubernetes. The following sections describe how to handle and store logs on nodes.

Pod and container logs

Kubernetes captures logs from each container in a running Pod.

This example uses a manifest for a Pod with a container that writes text to the standard output stream, once per second.

debug/counter-pod.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: counter
spec:
  containers:
  - name: count
    image: busybox:1.28
    args: [/bin/sh, -c,
            'i=0; while true; do echo "$i: $(date)"; i=$((i+1)); sleep 1; done']

To run this pod, use the following command:

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/debug/counter-pod.yaml

The output is:

pod/counter created

To fetch the logs, use the kubectl logs command, as follows:

kubectl logs counter

The output is similar to:

0: Fri Apr  1 11:42:23 UTC 2022
1: Fri Apr  1 11:42:24 UTC 2022
2: Fri Apr  1 11:42:25 UTC 2022

You can use kubectl logs --previous to retrieve logs from a previous instantiation of a container. If your pod has multiple containers, specify which container's logs you want to access by appending a container name to the command, with a -c flag, like so:

kubectl logs counter -c count

See the kubectl logs documentation for more details.

How nodes handle container logs

Node level logging

A container runtime handles and redirects any output generated to a containerized application's stdout and stderr streams. Different container runtimes implement this in different ways; however, the integration with the kubelet is standardized as the CRI logging format.

By default, if a container restarts, the kubelet keeps one terminated container with its logs. If a pod is evicted from the node, all corresponding containers are also evicted, along with their logs.

The kubelet makes logs available to clients via a special feature of the Kubernetes API. The usual way to access this is by running kubectl logs.

Log rotation

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.21 [stable]

The kubelet is responsible for rotating container logs and managing the logging directory structure. The kubelet sends this information to the container runtime (using CRI), and the runtime writes the container logs to the given location.

You can configure two kubelet configuration settings, containerLogMaxSize (default 10Mi) and containerLogMaxFiles (default 5), using the kubelet configuration file. These settings let you configure the maximum size for each log file and the maximum number of files allowed for each container respectively.

In order to perform an efficient log rotation in clusters where the volume of the logs generated by the workload is large, kubelet also provides a mechanism to tune how the logs are rotated in terms of how many concurrent log rotations can be performed and the interval at which the logs are monitored and rotated as required. You can configure two kubelet configuration settings, containerLogMaxWorkers and containerLogMonitorInterval using the kubelet configuration file.

When you run kubectl logs as in the basic logging example, the kubelet on the node handles the request and reads directly from the log file. The kubelet returns the content of the log file.

System component logs

There are two types of system components: those that typically run in a container, and those components directly involved in running containers. For example:

  • The kubelet and container runtime do not run in containers. The kubelet runs your containers (grouped together in pods)
  • The Kubernetes scheduler, controller manager, and API server run within pods (usually static Pods). The etcd component runs in the control plane, and most commonly also as a static pod. If your cluster uses kube-proxy, you typically run this as a DaemonSet.

Log locations

The way that the kubelet and container runtime write logs depends on the operating system that the node uses:

On Linux nodes that use systemd, the kubelet and container runtime write to journald by default. You use journalctl to read the systemd journal; for example: journalctl -u kubelet.

If systemd is not present, the kubelet and container runtime write to .log files in the /var/log directory. If you want to have logs written elsewhere, you can indirectly run the kubelet via a helper tool, kube-log-runner, and use that tool to redirect kubelet logs to a directory that you choose.

By default, kubelet directs your container runtime to write logs into directories within /var/log/pods.

For more information on kube-log-runner, read System Logs.

By default, the kubelet writes logs to files within the directory C:\var\logs (notice that this is not C:\var\log).

Although C:\var\log is the Kubernetes default location for these logs, several cluster deployment tools set up Windows nodes to log to C:\var\log\kubelet instead.

If you want to have logs written elsewhere, you can indirectly run the kubelet via a helper tool, kube-log-runner, and use that tool to redirect kubelet logs to a directory that you choose.

However, by default, kubelet directs your container runtime to write logs within the directory C:\var\log\pods.

For more information on kube-log-runner, read System Logs.


For Kubernetes cluster components that run in pods, these write to files inside the /var/log directory, bypassing the default logging mechanism (the components do not write to the systemd journal). You can use Kubernetes' storage mechanisms to map persistent storage into the container that runs the component.

Kubelet allows changing the pod logs directory from default /var/log/pods to a custom path. This adjustment can be made by configuring the podLogsDir parameter in the kubelet's configuration file.

For details about etcd and its logs, view the etcd documentation. Again, you can use Kubernetes' storage mechanisms to map persistent storage into the container that runs the component.

Cluster-level logging architectures

While Kubernetes does not provide a native solution for cluster-level logging, there are several common approaches you can consider. Here are some options:

  • Use a node-level logging agent that runs on every node.
  • Include a dedicated sidecar container for logging in an application pod.
  • Push logs directly to a backend from within an application.

Using a node logging agent

Using a node level logging agent

You can implement cluster-level logging by including a node-level logging agent on each node. The logging agent is a dedicated tool that exposes logs or pushes logs to a backend. Commonly, the logging agent is a container that has access to a directory with log files from all of the application containers on that node.

Because the logging agent must run on every node, it is recommended to run the agent as a DaemonSet.

Node-level logging creates only one agent per node and doesn't require any changes to the applications running on the node.

Containers write to stdout and stderr, but with no agreed format. A node-level agent collects these logs and forwards them for aggregation.

Using a sidecar container with the logging agent

You can use a sidecar container in one of the following ways:

  • The sidecar container streams application logs to its own stdout.
  • The sidecar container runs a logging agent, which is configured to pick up logs from an application container.

Streaming sidecar container

Sidecar container with a streaming container

By having your sidecar containers write to their own stdout and stderr streams, you can take advantage of the kubelet and the logging agent that already run on each node. The sidecar containers read logs from a file, a socket, or journald. Each sidecar container prints a log to its own stdout or stderr stream.

This approach allows you to separate several log streams from different parts of your application, some of which can lack support for writing to stdout or stderr. The logic behind redirecting logs is minimal, so it's not a significant overhead. Additionally, because stdout and stderr are handled by the kubelet, you can use built-in tools like kubectl logs.

For example, a pod runs a single container, and the container writes to two different log files using two different formats. Here's a manifest for the Pod:

admin/logging/two-files-counter-pod.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: counter
spec:
  containers:
  - name: count
    image: busybox:1.28
    args:
    - /bin/sh
    - -c
    - >
      i=0;
      while true;
      do
        echo "$i: $(date)" >> /var/log/1.log;
        echo "$(date) INFO $i" >> /var/log/2.log;
        i=$((i+1));
        sleep 1;
      done      
    volumeMounts:
    - name: varlog
      mountPath: /var/log
  volumes:
  - name: varlog
    emptyDir: {}

It is not recommended to write log entries with different formats to the same log stream, even if you managed to redirect both components to the stdout stream of the container. Instead, you can create two sidecar containers. Each sidecar container could tail a particular log file from a shared volume and then redirect the logs to its own stdout stream.

Here's a manifest for a pod that has two sidecar containers:

admin/logging/two-files-counter-pod-streaming-sidecar.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: counter
spec:
  containers:
  - name: count
    image: busybox:1.28
    args:
    - /bin/sh
    - -c
    - >
      i=0;
      while true;
      do
        echo "$i: $(date)" >> /var/log/1.log;
        echo "$(date) INFO $i" >> /var/log/2.log;
        i=$((i+1));
        sleep 1;
      done      
    volumeMounts:
    - name: varlog
      mountPath: /var/log
  - name: count-log-1
    image: busybox:1.28
    args: [/bin/sh, -c, 'tail -n+1 -F /var/log/1.log']
    volumeMounts:
    - name: varlog
      mountPath: /var/log
  - name: count-log-2
    image: busybox:1.28
    args: [/bin/sh, -c, 'tail -n+1 -F /var/log/2.log']
    volumeMounts:
    - name: varlog
      mountPath: /var/log
  volumes:
  - name: varlog
    emptyDir: {}

Now when you run this pod, you can access each log stream separately by running the following commands:

kubectl logs counter count-log-1

The output is similar to:

0: Fri Apr  1 11:42:26 UTC 2022
1: Fri Apr  1 11:42:27 UTC 2022
2: Fri Apr  1 11:42:28 UTC 2022
...

kubectl logs counter count-log-2

The output is similar to:

Fri Apr  1 11:42:29 UTC 2022 INFO 0
Fri Apr  1 11:42:30 UTC 2022 INFO 0
Fri Apr  1 11:42:31 UTC 2022 INFO 0
...

If you installed a node-level agent in your cluster, that agent picks up those log streams automatically without any further configuration. If you like, you can configure the agent to parse log lines depending on the source container.

Even for Pods that only have low CPU and memory usage (order of a couple of millicores for cpu and order of several megabytes for memory), writing logs to a file and then streaming them to stdout can double how much storage you need on the node. If you have an application that writes to a single file, it's recommended to set /dev/stdout as the destination rather than implement the streaming sidecar container approach.

Sidecar containers can also be used to rotate log files that cannot be rotated by the application itself. An example of this approach is a small container running logrotate periodically. However, it's more straightforward to use stdout and stderr directly, and leave rotation and retention policies to the kubelet.

Sidecar container with a logging agent

Sidecar container with a logging agent

If the node-level logging agent is not flexible enough for your situation, you can create a sidecar container with a separate logging agent that you have configured specifically to run with your application.

Here are two example manifests that you can use to implement a sidecar container with a logging agent. The first manifest contains a ConfigMap to configure fluentd.

admin/logging/fluentd-sidecar-config.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: fluentd-config
data:
  fluentd.conf: |
    <source>
      type tail
      format none
      path /var/log/1.log
      pos_file /var/log/1.log.pos
      tag count.format1
    </source>

    <source>
      type tail
      format none
      path /var/log/2.log
      pos_file /var/log/2.log.pos
      tag count.format2
    </source>

    <match **>
      type google_cloud
    </match>

The second manifest describes a pod that has a sidecar container running fluentd. The pod mounts a volume where fluentd can pick up its configuration data.

admin/logging/two-files-counter-pod-agent-sidecar.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: counter
spec:
  containers:
  - name: count
    image: busybox:1.28
    args:
    - /bin/sh
    - -c
    - >
      i=0;
      while true;
      do
        echo "$i: $(date)" >> /var/log/1.log;
        echo "$(date) INFO $i" >> /var/log/2.log;
        i=$((i+1));
        sleep 1;
      done      
    volumeMounts:
    - name: varlog
      mountPath: /var/log
  - name: count-agent
    image: registry.k8s.io/fluentd-gcp:1.30
    env:
    - name: FLUENTD_ARGS
      value: -c /etc/fluentd-config/fluentd.conf
    volumeMounts:
    - name: varlog
      mountPath: /var/log
    - name: config-volume
      mountPath: /etc/fluentd-config
  volumes:
  - name: varlog
    emptyDir: {}
  - name: config-volume
    configMap:
      name: fluentd-config

Exposing logs directly from the application

Exposing logs directly from the application

Cluster-logging that exposes or pushes logs directly from every application is outside the scope of Kubernetes.

What's next

11.5 - Compatibility Version For Kubernetes Control Plane Components

Since release v1.32, we introduced configurable version compatibility and emulation options to Kubernetes control plane components to make upgrades safer by providing more control and increasing the granularity of steps available to cluster administrators.

Emulated Version

The emulation option is set by the --emulated-version flag of control plane components. It allows the component to emulate the behavior (APIs, features, ...) of an earlier version of Kubernetes.

When used, the capabilities available will match the emulated version:

  • Any capabilities present in the binary version that were introduced after the emulation version will be unavailable.
  • Any capabilities removed after the emulation version will be available.

This enables a binary from a particular Kubernetes release to emulate the behavior of a previous version with sufficient fidelity that interoperability with other system components can be defined in terms of the emulated version.

The --emulated-version must be <= binaryVersion. See the help message of the --emulated-version flag for supported range of emulated versions.

11.6 - Metrics For Kubernetes System Components

System component metrics can give a better look into what is happening inside them. Metrics are particularly useful for building dashboards and alerts.

Kubernetes components emit metrics in Prometheus format. This format is structured plain text, designed so that people and machines can both read it.

Metrics in Kubernetes

In most cases metrics are available on /metrics endpoint of the HTTP server. For components that don't expose endpoint by default, it can be enabled using --bind-address flag.

Examples of those components:

In a production environment you may want to configure Prometheus Server or some other metrics scraper to periodically gather these metrics and make them available in some kind of time series database.

Note that kubelet also exposes metrics in /metrics/cadvisor, /metrics/resource and /metrics/probes endpoints. Those metrics do not have the same lifecycle.

If your cluster uses RBAC, reading metrics requires authorization via a user, group or ServiceAccount with a ClusterRole that allows accessing /metrics. For example:

apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: prometheus
rules:
  - nonResourceURLs:
      - "/metrics"
    verbs:
      - get

Metric lifecycle

Alpha metric → Stable metric → Deprecated metric → Hidden metric → Deleted metric

Alpha metrics have no stability guarantees. These metrics can be modified or deleted at any time.

Stable metrics are guaranteed to not change. This means:

  • A stable metric without a deprecated signature will not be deleted or renamed
  • A stable metric's type will not be modified

Deprecated metrics are slated for deletion, but are still available for use. These metrics include an annotation about the version in which they became deprecated.

For example:

  • Before deprecation

    # HELP some_counter this counts things
# TYPE some_counter counter
some_counter 0

  • After deprecation

    # HELP some_counter (Deprecated since 1.15.0) this counts things
# TYPE some_counter counter
some_counter 0

Hidden metrics are no longer published for scraping, but are still available for use. To use a hidden metric, please refer to the Show hidden metrics section.

Deleted metrics are no longer published and cannot be used.

Show hidden metrics

As described above, admins can enable hidden metrics through a command-line flag on a specific binary. This intends to be used as an escape hatch for admins if they missed the migration of the metrics deprecated in the last release.

The flag show-hidden-metrics-for-version takes a version for which you want to show metrics deprecated in that release. The version is expressed as x.y, where x is the major version, y is the minor version. The patch version is not needed even though a metrics can be deprecated in a patch release, the reason for that is the metrics deprecation policy runs against the minor release.

The flag can only take the previous minor version as it's value. All metrics hidden in previous will be emitted if admins set the previous version to show-hidden-metrics-for-version. The too old version is not allowed because this violates the metrics deprecated policy.

Take metric A as an example, here assumed that A is deprecated in 1.n. According to metrics deprecated policy, we can reach the following conclusion:

  • In release 1.n, the metric is deprecated, and it can be emitted by default.
  • In release 1.n+1, the metric is hidden by default and it can be emitted by command line show-hidden-metrics-for-version=1.n.
  • In release 1.n+2, the metric should be removed from the codebase. No escape hatch anymore.

If you're upgrading from release 1.12 to 1.13, but still depend on a metric A deprecated in 1.12, you should set hidden metrics via command line: --show-hidden-metrics=1.12 and remember to remove this metric dependency before upgrading to 1.14

Component metrics

kube-controller-manager metrics

Controller manager metrics provide important insight into the performance and health of the controller manager. These metrics include common Go language runtime metrics such as go_routine count and controller specific metrics such as etcd request latencies or Cloudprovider (AWS, GCE, OpenStack) API latencies that can be used to gauge the health of a cluster.

Starting from Kubernetes 1.7, detailed Cloudprovider metrics are available for storage operations for GCE, AWS, Vsphere and OpenStack. These metrics can be used to monitor health of persistent volume operations.

For example, for GCE these metrics are called:

cloudprovider_gce_api_request_duration_seconds { request = "instance_list"}
cloudprovider_gce_api_request_duration_seconds { request = "disk_insert"}
cloudprovider_gce_api_request_duration_seconds { request = "disk_delete"}
cloudprovider_gce_api_request_duration_seconds { request = "attach_disk"}
cloudprovider_gce_api_request_duration_seconds { request = "detach_disk"}
cloudprovider_gce_api_request_duration_seconds { request = "list_disk"}

kube-scheduler metrics

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.21 [beta]

The scheduler exposes optional metrics that reports the requested resources and the desired limits of all running pods. These metrics can be used to build capacity planning dashboards, assess current or historical scheduling limits, quickly identify workloads that cannot schedule due to lack of resources, and compare actual usage to the pod's request.

The kube-scheduler identifies the resource requests and limits configured for each Pod; when either a request or limit is non-zero, the kube-scheduler reports a metrics timeseries. The time series is labelled by:

  • namespace
  • pod name
  • the node where the pod is scheduled or an empty string if not yet scheduled
  • priority
  • the assigned scheduler for that pod
  • the name of the resource (for example, cpu)
  • the unit of the resource if known (for example, cores)

Once a pod reaches completion (has a restartPolicy of Never or OnFailure and is in the Succeeded or Failed pod phase, or has been deleted and all containers have a terminated state) the series is no longer reported since the scheduler is now free to schedule other pods to run. The two metrics are called kube_pod_resource_request and kube_pod_resource_limit.

The metrics are exposed at the HTTP endpoint /metrics/resources and require the same authorization as the /metrics endpoint on the scheduler. You must use the --show-hidden-metrics-for-version=1.20 flag to expose these alpha stability metrics.

Disabling metrics

You can explicitly turn off metrics via command line flag --disabled-metrics. This may be desired if, for example, a metric is causing a performance problem. The input is a list of disabled metrics (i.e. --disabled-metrics=metric1,metric2).

Metric cardinality enforcement

Metrics with unbounded dimensions could cause memory issues in the components they instrument. To limit resource use, you can use the --allow-metric-labels command line option to dynamically configure an allow-list of label values for a metric.

In alpha stage, the flag can only take in a series of mappings as metric label allow-list. Each mapping is of the format <metric_name>,<label_name>=<allowed_labels> where <allowed_labels> is a comma-separated list of acceptable label names.

The overall format looks like:

--allow-metric-labels <metric_name>,<label_name>='<allow_value1>, <allow_value2>...', <metric_name2>,<label_name>='<allow_value1>, <allow_value2>...', ...

Here is an example:

--allow-metric-labels number_count_metric,odd_number='1,3,5', number_count_metric,even_number='2,4,6', date_gauge_metric,weekend='Saturday,Sunday'

In addition to specifying this from the CLI, this can also be done within a configuration file. You can specify the path to that configuration file using the --allow-metric-labels-manifest command line argument to a component. Here's an example of the contents of that configuration file:

"metric1,label2": "v1,v2,v3"
"metric2,label1": "v1,v2,v3"

Additionally, the cardinality_enforcement_unexpected_categorizations_total meta-metric records the count of unexpected categorizations during cardinality enforcement, that is, whenever a label value is encountered that is not allowed with respect to the allow-list constraints.

What's next

11.7 - Metrics for Kubernetes Object States

kube-state-metrics, an add-on agent to generate and expose cluster-level metrics.

The state of Kubernetes objects in the Kubernetes API can be exposed as metrics. An add-on agent called kube-state-metrics can connect to the Kubernetes API server and expose a HTTP endpoint with metrics generated from the state of individual objects in the cluster. It exposes various information about the state of objects like labels and annotations, startup and termination times, status or the phase the object currently is in. For example, containers running in pods create a kube_pod_container_info metric. This includes the name of the container, the name of the pod it is part of, the namespace the pod is running in, the name of the container image, the ID of the image, the image name from the spec of the container, the ID of the running container and the ID of the pod as labels.

An external component that is able and capable to scrape the endpoint of kube-state-metrics (for example via Prometheus) can now be used to enable the following use cases.

Example: using metrics from kube-state-metrics to query the cluster state

Metric series generated by kube-state-metrics are helpful to gather further insights into the cluster, as they can be used for querying.

If you use Prometheus or another tool that uses the same query language, the following PromQL query returns the number of pods that are not ready:

count(kube_pod_status_ready{condition="false"}) by (namespace, pod)

Example: alerting based on from kube-state-metrics

Metrics generated from kube-state-metrics also allow for alerting on issues in the cluster.

If you use Prometheus or a similar tool that uses the same alert rule language, the following alert will fire if there are pods that have been in a Terminating state for more than 5 minutes:

groups:
- name: Pod state
  rules:
  - alert: PodsBlockedInTerminatingState
    expr: count(kube_pod_deletion_timestamp) by (namespace, pod) * count(kube_pod_status_reason{reason="NodeLost"} == 0) by (namespace, pod) > 0
    for: 5m
    labels:
      severity: page
    annotations:
      summary: Pod {{$labels.namespace}}/{{$labels.pod}} blocked in Terminating state.

11.8 - System Logs

System component logs record events happening in cluster, which can be very useful for debugging. You can configure log verbosity to see more or less detail. Logs can be as coarse-grained as showing errors within a component, or as fine-grained as showing step-by-step traces of events (like HTTP access logs, pod state changes, controller actions, or scheduler decisions).

Klog

klog is the Kubernetes logging library. klog generates log messages for the Kubernetes system components.

Kubernetes is in the process of simplifying logging in its components. The following klog command line flags are deprecated starting with Kubernetes v1.23 and removed in Kubernetes v1.26:

  • --add-dir-header
  • --alsologtostderr
  • --log-backtrace-at
  • --log-dir
  • --log-file
  • --log-file-max-size
  • --logtostderr
  • --one-output
  • --skip-headers
  • --skip-log-headers
  • --stderrthreshold

Output will always be written to stderr, regardless of the output format. Output redirection is expected to be handled by the component which invokes a Kubernetes component. This can be a POSIX shell or a tool like systemd.

In some cases, for example a distroless container or a Windows system service, those options are not available. Then the kube-log-runner binary can be used as wrapper around a Kubernetes component to redirect output. A prebuilt binary is included in several Kubernetes base images under its traditional name as /go-runner and as kube-log-runner in server and node release archives.

This table shows how kube-log-runner invocations correspond to shell redirection:

Usage POSIX shell (such as bash) kube-log-runner <options> <cmd>
Merge stderr and stdout, write to stdout 2>&1 kube-log-runner (default behavior)
Redirect both into log file 1>>/tmp/log 2>&1 kube-log-runner -log-file=/tmp/log
Copy into log file and to stdout 2>&1 | tee -a /tmp/log kube-log-runner -log-file=/tmp/log -also-stdout
Redirect only stdout into log file >/tmp/log kube-log-runner -log-file=/tmp/log -redirect-stderr=false

Klog output

An example of the traditional klog native format:

I1025 00:15:15.525108       1 httplog.go:79] GET /api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/pods/metrics-server-v0.3.1-57c75779f-9p8wg: (1.512ms) 200 [pod_nanny/v0.0.0 (linux/amd64) kubernetes/$Format 10.56.1.19:51756]

The message string may contain line breaks:

I1025 00:15:15.525108       1 example.go:79] This is a message
which has a line break.

Structured Logging

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.23 [beta]

Structured logging introduces a uniform structure in log messages allowing for programmatic extraction of information. You can store and process structured logs with less effort and cost. The code which generates a log message determines whether it uses the traditional unstructured klog output or structured logging.

The default formatting of structured log messages is as text, with a format that is backward compatible with traditional klog:

<klog header> "<message>" <key1>="<value1>" <key2>="<value2>" ...

Example:

I1025 00:15:15.525108       1 controller_utils.go:116] "Pod status updated" pod="kube-system/kubedns" status="ready"

Strings are quoted. Other values are formatted with %+v, which may cause log messages to continue on the next line depending on the data.

I1025 00:15:15.525108       1 example.go:116] "Example" data="This is text with a line break\nand \"quotation marks\"." someInt=1 someFloat=0.1 someStruct={StringField: First line,
second line.}

Contextual Logging

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.30 [beta]

Contextual logging builds on top of structured logging. It is primarily about how developers use logging calls: code based on that concept is more flexible and supports additional use cases as described in the Contextual Logging KEP.

If developers use additional functions like WithValues or WithName in their components, then log entries contain additional information that gets passed into functions by their caller.

For Kubernetes 1.32, this is gated behind the ContextualLogging feature gate and is enabled by default. The infrastructure for this was added in 1.24 without modifying components. The component-base/logs/example command demonstrates how to use the new logging calls and how a component behaves that supports contextual logging.

$ cd $GOPATH/src/k8s.io/kubernetes/staging/src/k8s.io/component-base/logs/example/cmd/
$ go run . --help
...
      --feature-gates mapStringBool  A set of key=value pairs that describe feature gates for alpha/experimental features. Options are:
                                     AllAlpha=true|false (ALPHA - default=false)
                                     AllBeta=true|false (BETA - default=false)
                                     ContextualLogging=true|false (BETA - default=true)
$ go run . --feature-gates ContextualLogging=true
...
I0222 15:13:31.645988  197901 example.go:54] "runtime" logger="example.myname" foo="bar" duration="1m0s"
I0222 15:13:31.646007  197901 example.go:55] "another runtime" logger="example" foo="bar" duration="1h0m0s" duration="1m0s"

The logger key and foo="bar" were added by the caller of the function which logs the runtime message and duration="1m0s" value, without having to modify that function.

With contextual logging disable, WithValues and WithName do nothing and log calls go through the global klog logger. Therefore this additional information is not in the log output anymore:

$ go run . --feature-gates ContextualLogging=false
...
I0222 15:14:40.497333  198174 example.go:54] "runtime" duration="1m0s"
I0222 15:14:40.497346  198174 example.go:55] "another runtime" duration="1h0m0s" duration="1m0s"

JSON log format

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.19 [alpha]

The --logging-format=json flag changes the format of logs from klog native format to JSON format. Example of JSON log format (pretty printed):

{
   "ts": 1580306777.04728,
   "v": 4,
   "msg": "Pod status updated",
   "pod":{
      "name": "nginx-1",
      "namespace": "default"
   },
   "status": "ready"
}

Keys with special meaning:

  • ts - timestamp as Unix time (required, float)
  • v - verbosity (only for info and not for error messages, int)
  • err - error string (optional, string)
  • msg - message (required, string)

List of components currently supporting JSON format:

Log verbosity level

The -v flag controls log verbosity. Increasing the value increases the number of logged events. Decreasing the value decreases the number of logged events. Increasing verbosity settings logs increasingly less severe events. A verbosity setting of 0 logs only critical events.

Log location

There are two types of system components: those that run in a container and those that do not run in a container. For example:

  • The Kubernetes scheduler and kube-proxy run in a container.
  • The kubelet and container runtime do not run in containers.

On machines with systemd, the kubelet and container runtime write to journald. Otherwise, they write to .log files in the /var/log directory. System components inside containers always write to .log files in the /var/log directory, bypassing the default logging mechanism. Similar to the container logs, you should rotate system component logs in the /var/log directory. In Kubernetes clusters created by the kube-up.sh script, log rotation is configured by the logrotate tool. The logrotate tool rotates logs daily, or once the log size is greater than 100MB.

Log query

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.30 [beta] (enabled by default: false)

To help with debugging issues on nodes, Kubernetes v1.27 introduced a feature that allows viewing logs of services running on the node. To use the feature, ensure that the NodeLogQuery feature gate is enabled for that node, and that the kubelet configuration options enableSystemLogHandler and enableSystemLogQuery are both set to true. On Linux the assumption is that service logs are available via journald. On Windows the assumption is that service logs are available in the application log provider. On both operating systems, logs are also available by reading files within /var/log/.

Provided you are authorized to interact with node objects, you can try out this feature on all your nodes or just a subset. Here is an example to retrieve the kubelet service logs from a node:

# Fetch kubelet logs from a node named node-1.example
kubectl get --raw "/api/v1/nodes/node-1.example/proxy/logs/?query=kubelet"

You can also fetch files, provided that the files are in a directory that the kubelet allows for log fetches. For example, you can fetch a log from /var/log on a Linux node:

kubectl get --raw "/api/v1/nodes/<insert-node-name-here>/proxy/logs/?query=/<insert-log-file-name-here>"

The kubelet uses heuristics to retrieve logs. This helps if you are not aware whether a given system service is writing logs to the operating system's native logger like journald or to a log file in /var/log/. The heuristics first checks the native logger and if that is not available attempts to retrieve the first logs from /var/log/<servicename> or /var/log/<servicename>.log or /var/log/<servicename>/<servicename>.log.

The complete list of options that can be used are:

Option Description
boot boot show messages from a specific system boot
pattern pattern filters log entries by the provided PERL-compatible regular expression
query query specifies services(s) or files from which to return logs (required)
sinceTime an RFC3339 timestamp from which to show logs (inclusive)
untilTime an RFC3339 timestamp until which to show logs (inclusive)
tailLines specify how many lines from the end of the log to retrieve; the default is to fetch the whole log

Example of a more complex query:

# Fetch kubelet logs from a node named node-1.example that have the word "error"
kubectl get --raw "/api/v1/nodes/node-1.example/proxy/logs/?query=kubelet&pattern=error"

What's next

11.9 - Traces For Kubernetes System Components

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [beta]

System component traces record the latency of and relationships between operations in the cluster.

Kubernetes components emit traces using the OpenTelemetry Protocol with the gRPC exporter and can be collected and routed to tracing backends using an OpenTelemetry Collector.

Trace Collection

Kubernetes components have built-in gRPC exporters for OTLP to export traces, either with an OpenTelemetry Collector, or without an OpenTelemetry Collector.

For a complete guide to collecting traces and using the collector, see Getting Started with the OpenTelemetry Collector. However, there are a few things to note that are specific to Kubernetes components.

By default, Kubernetes components export traces using the grpc exporter for OTLP on the IANA OpenTelemetry port, 4317. As an example, if the collector is running as a sidecar to a Kubernetes component, the following receiver configuration will collect spans and log them to standard output:

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
exporters:
  # Replace this exporter with the exporter for your backend
  logging:
    logLevel: debug
service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      exporters: [logging]

To directly emit traces to a backend without utilizing a collector, specify the endpoint field in the Kubernetes tracing configuration file with the desired trace backend address. This method negates the need for a collector and simplifies the overall structure.

For trace backend header configuration, including authentication details, environment variables can be used with OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS, see OTLP Exporter Configuration.

Additionally, for trace resource attribute configuration such as Kubernetes cluster name, namespace, Pod name, etc., environment variables can also be used with OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES, see OTLP Kubernetes Resource.

Component traces

kube-apiserver traces

The kube-apiserver generates spans for incoming HTTP requests, and for outgoing requests to webhooks, etcd, and re-entrant requests. It propagates the W3C Trace Context with outgoing requests but does not make use of the trace context attached to incoming requests, as the kube-apiserver is often a public endpoint.

Enabling tracing in the kube-apiserver

To enable tracing, provide the kube-apiserver with a tracing configuration file with --tracing-config-file=<path-to-config>. This is an example config that records spans for 1 in 10000 requests, and uses the default OpenTelemetry endpoint:

apiVersion: apiserver.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: TracingConfiguration
# default value
#endpoint: localhost:4317
samplingRatePerMillion: 100

For more information about the TracingConfiguration struct, see API server config API (v1beta1).

kubelet traces

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [beta] (enabled by default: true)

The kubelet CRI interface and authenticated http servers are instrumented to generate trace spans. As with the apiserver, the endpoint and sampling rate are configurable. Trace context propagation is also configured. A parent span's sampling decision is always respected. A provided tracing configuration sampling rate will apply to spans without a parent. Enabled without a configured endpoint, the default OpenTelemetry Collector receiver address of "localhost:4317" is set.

Enabling tracing in the kubelet

To enable tracing, apply the tracing configuration. This is an example snippet of a kubelet config that records spans for 1 in 10000 requests, and uses the default OpenTelemetry endpoint:

apiVersion: kubelet.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: KubeletConfiguration
featureGates:
  KubeletTracing: true
tracing:
  # default value
  #endpoint: localhost:4317
  samplingRatePerMillion: 100

If the samplingRatePerMillion is set to one million (1000000), then every span will be sent to the exporter.

The kubelet in Kubernetes v1.32 collects spans from the garbage collection, pod synchronization routine as well as every gRPC method. The kubelet propagates trace context with gRPC requests so that container runtimes with trace instrumentation, such as CRI-O and containerd, can associate their exported spans with the trace context from the kubelet. The resulting traces will have parent-child links between kubelet and container runtime spans, providing helpful context when debugging node issues.

Please note that exporting spans always comes with a small performance overhead on the networking and CPU side, depending on the overall configuration of the system. If there is any issue like that in a cluster which is running with tracing enabled, then mitigate the problem by either reducing the samplingRatePerMillion or disabling tracing completely by removing the configuration.

Stability

Tracing instrumentation is still under active development, and may change in a variety of ways. This includes span names, attached attributes, instrumented endpoints, etc. Until this feature graduates to stable, there are no guarantees of backwards compatibility for tracing instrumentation.

What's next

11.10 - Proxies in Kubernetes

This page explains proxies used with Kubernetes.

Proxies

There are several different proxies you may encounter when using Kubernetes:

  1. The kubectl proxy:

    • runs on a user's desktop or in a pod
    • proxies from a localhost address to the Kubernetes apiserver
    • client to proxy uses HTTP
    • proxy to apiserver uses HTTPS
    • locates apiserver
    • adds authentication headers

  2. The apiserver proxy:

    • is a bastion built into the apiserver
    • connects a user outside of the cluster to cluster IPs which otherwise might not be reachable
    • runs in the apiserver processes
    • client to proxy uses HTTPS (or http if apiserver so configured)
    • proxy to target may use HTTP or HTTPS as chosen by proxy using available information
    • can be used to reach a Node, Pod, or Service
    • does load balancing when used to reach a Service

  3. The kube proxy:

    • runs on each node
    • proxies UDP, TCP and SCTP
    • does not understand HTTP
    • provides load balancing
    • is only used to reach services

  4. A Proxy/Load-balancer in front of apiserver(s):

    • existence and implementation varies from cluster to cluster (e.g. nginx)
    • sits between all clients and one or more apiservers
    • acts as load balancer if there are several apiservers.

  5. Cloud Load Balancers on external services:

    • are provided by some cloud providers (e.g. AWS ELB, Google Cloud Load Balancer)
    • are created automatically when the Kubernetes service has type LoadBalancer
    • usually supports UDP/TCP only
    • SCTP support is up to the load balancer implementation of the cloud provider
    • implementation varies by cloud provider.

Kubernetes users will typically not need to worry about anything other than the first two types. The cluster admin will typically ensure that the latter types are set up correctly.

Requesting redirects

Proxies have replaced redirect capabilities. Redirects have been deprecated.

11.11 - API Priority and Fairness

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [stable]

Controlling the behavior of the Kubernetes API server in an overload situation is a key task for cluster administrators. The kube-apiserver has some controls available (i.e. the --max-requests-inflight and --max-mutating-requests-inflight command-line flags) to limit the amount of outstanding work that will be accepted, preventing a flood of inbound requests from overloading and potentially crashing the API server, but these flags are not enough to ensure that the most important requests get through in a period of high traffic.

The API Priority and Fairness feature (APF) is an alternative that improves upon aforementioned max-inflight limitations. APF classifies and isolates requests in a more fine-grained way. It also introduces a limited amount of queuing, so that no requests are rejected in cases of very brief bursts. Requests are dispatched from queues using a fair queuing technique so that, for example, a poorly-behaved controller need not starve others (even at the same priority level).

This feature is designed to work well with standard controllers, which use informers and react to failures of API requests with exponential back-off, and other clients that also work this way.

Enabling/Disabling API Priority and Fairness

The API Priority and Fairness feature is controlled by a command-line flag and is enabled by default. See Options for a general explanation of the available kube-apiserver command-line options and how to enable and disable them. The name of the command-line option for APF is "--enable-priority-and-fairness". This feature also involves an API Group with: (a) a stable v1 version, introduced in 1.29, and enabled by default (b) a v1beta3 version, enabled by default, and deprecated in v1.29. You can disable the API group beta version v1beta3 by adding the following command-line flags to your kube-apiserver invocation:

kube-apiserver \
--runtime-config=flowcontrol.apiserver.k8s.io/v1beta3=false \
 # …and other flags as usual

The command-line flag --enable-priority-and-fairness=false will disable the API Priority and Fairness feature.

Recursive server scenarios

API Priority and Fairness must be used carefully in recursive server scenarios. These are scenarios in which some server A, while serving a request, issues a subsidiary request to some server B. Perhaps server B might even make a further subsidiary call back to server A. In situations where Priority and Fairness control is applied to both the original request and some subsidiary ones(s), no matter how deep in the recursion, there is a danger of priority inversions and/or deadlocks.

One example of recursion is when the kube-apiserver issues an admission webhook call to server B, and while serving that call, server B makes a further subsidiary request back to the kube-apiserver. Another example of recursion is when an APIService object directs the kube-apiserver to delegate requests about a certain API group to a custom external server B (this is one of the things called "aggregation").

When the original request is known to belong to a certain priority level, and the subsidiary controlled requests are classified to higher priority levels, this is one possible solution. When the original requests can belong to any priority level, the subsidiary controlled requests have to be exempt from Priority and Fairness limitation. One way to do that is with the objects that configure classification and handling, discussed below. Another way is to disable Priority and Fairness on server B entirely, using the techniques discussed above. A third way, which is the simplest to use when server B is not kube-apisever, is to build server B with Priority and Fairness disabled in the code.

Concepts

There are several distinct features involved in the API Priority and Fairness feature. Incoming requests are classified by attributes of the request using FlowSchemas, and assigned to priority levels. Priority levels add a degree of isolation by maintaining separate concurrency limits, so that requests assigned to different priority levels cannot starve each other. Within a priority level, a fair-queuing algorithm prevents requests from different flows from starving each other, and allows for requests to be queued to prevent bursty traffic from causing failed requests when the average load is acceptably low.

Priority Levels

Without APF enabled, overall concurrency in the API server is limited by the kube-apiserver flags --max-requests-inflight and --max-mutating-requests-inflight. With APF enabled, the concurrency limits defined by these flags are summed and then the sum is divided up among a configurable set of priority levels. Each incoming request is assigned to a single priority level, and each priority level will only dispatch as many concurrent requests as its particular limit allows.

The default configuration, for example, includes separate priority levels for leader-election requests, requests from built-in controllers, and requests from Pods. This means that an ill-behaved Pod that floods the API server with requests cannot prevent leader election or actions by the built-in controllers from succeeding.

The concurrency limits of the priority levels are periodically adjusted, allowing under-utilized priority levels to temporarily lend concurrency to heavily-utilized levels. These limits are based on nominal limits and bounds on how much concurrency a priority level may lend and how much it may borrow, all derived from the configuration objects mentioned below.

Seats Occupied by a Request

The above description of concurrency management is the baseline story. Requests have different durations but are counted equally at any given moment when comparing against a priority level's concurrency limit. In the baseline story, each request occupies one unit of concurrency. The word "seat" is used to mean one unit of concurrency, inspired by the way each passenger on a train or aircraft takes up one of the fixed supply of seats.

But some requests take up more than one seat. Some of these are list requests that the server estimates will return a large number of objects. These have been found to put an exceptionally heavy burden on the server. For this reason, the server estimates the number of objects that will be returned and considers the request to take a number of seats that is proportional to that estimated number.

Execution time tweaks for watch requests

API Priority and Fairness manages watch requests, but this involves a couple more excursions from the baseline behavior. The first concerns how long a watch request is considered to occupy its seat. Depending on request parameters, the response to a watch request may or may not begin with create notifications for all the relevant pre-existing objects. API Priority and Fairness considers a watch request to be done with its seat once that initial burst of notifications, if any, is over.

The normal notifications are sent in a concurrent burst to all relevant watch response streams whenever the server is notified of an object create/update/delete. To account for this work, API Priority and Fairness considers every write request to spend some additional time occupying seats after the actual writing is done. The server estimates the number of notifications to be sent and adjusts the write request's number of seats and seat occupancy time to include this extra work.

Queuing

Even within a priority level there may be a large number of distinct sources of traffic. In an overload situation, it is valuable to prevent one stream of requests from starving others (in particular, in the relatively common case of a single buggy client flooding the kube-apiserver with requests, that buggy client would ideally not have much measurable impact on other clients at all). This is handled by use of a fair-queuing algorithm to process requests that are assigned the same priority level. Each request is assigned to a flow, identified by the name of the matching FlowSchema plus a flow distinguisher — which is either the requesting user, the target resource's namespace, or nothing — and the system attempts to give approximately equal weight to requests in different flows of the same priority level. To enable distinct handling of distinct instances, controllers that have many instances should authenticate with distinct usernames

After classifying a request into a flow, the API Priority and Fairness feature then may assign the request to a queue. This assignment uses a technique known as shuffle sharding, which makes relatively efficient use of queues to insulate low-intensity flows from high-intensity flows.

The details of the queuing algorithm are tunable for each priority level, and allow administrators to trade off memory use, fairness (the property that independent flows will all make progress when total traffic exceeds capacity), tolerance for bursty traffic, and the added latency induced by queuing.

Exempt requests

Some requests are considered sufficiently important that they are not subject to any of the limitations imposed by this feature. These exemptions prevent an improperly-configured flow control configuration from totally disabling an API server.

Resources

The flow control API involves two kinds of resources. PriorityLevelConfigurations define the available priority levels, the share of the available concurrency budget that each can handle, and allow for fine-tuning queuing behavior. FlowSchemas are used to classify individual inbound requests, matching each to a single PriorityLevelConfiguration.

PriorityLevelConfiguration

A PriorityLevelConfiguration represents a single priority level. Each PriorityLevelConfiguration has an independent limit on the number of outstanding requests, and limitations on the number of queued requests.

The nominal concurrency limit for a PriorityLevelConfiguration is not specified in an absolute number of seats, but rather in "nominal concurrency shares." The total concurrency limit for the API Server is distributed among the existing PriorityLevelConfigurations in proportion to these shares, to give each level its nominal limit in terms of seats. This allows a cluster administrator to scale up or down the total amount of traffic to a server by restarting kube-apiserver with a different value for --max-requests-inflight (or --max-mutating-requests-inflight), and all PriorityLevelConfigurations will see their maximum allowed concurrency go up (or down) by the same fraction.

The bounds on how much concurrency a priority level may lend and how much it may borrow are expressed in the PriorityLevelConfiguration as percentages of the level's nominal limit. These are resolved to absolute numbers of seats by multiplying with the nominal limit / 100.0 and rounding. The dynamically adjusted concurrency limit of a priority level is constrained to lie between (a) a lower bound of its nominal limit minus its lendable seats and (b) an upper bound of its nominal limit plus the seats it may borrow. At each adjustment the dynamic limits are derived by each priority level reclaiming any lent seats for which demand recently appeared and then jointly fairly responding to the recent seat demand on the priority levels, within the bounds just described.

When the volume of inbound requests assigned to a single PriorityLevelConfiguration is more than its permitted concurrency level, the type field of its specification determines what will happen to extra requests. A type of Reject means that excess traffic will immediately be rejected with an HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) error. A type of Queue means that requests above the threshold will be queued, with the shuffle sharding and fair queuing techniques used to balance progress between request flows.

The queuing configuration allows tuning the fair queuing algorithm for a priority level. Details of the algorithm can be read in the enhancement proposal, but in short:

  • Increasing queues reduces the rate of collisions between different flows, at the cost of increased memory usage. A value of 1 here effectively disables the fair-queuing logic, but still allows requests to be queued.

  • Increasing queueLengthLimit allows larger bursts of traffic to be sustained without dropping any requests, at the cost of increased latency and memory usage.

  • Changing handSize allows you to adjust the probability of collisions between different flows and the overall concurrency available to a single flow in an overload situation.

Following is a table showing an interesting collection of shuffle sharding configurations, showing for each the probability that a given mouse (low-intensity flow) is squished by the elephants (high-intensity flows) for an illustrative collection of numbers of elephants. See https://play.golang.org/p/Gi0PLgVHiUg , which computes this table.

Example Shuffle Sharding Configurations
HandSize Queues 1 elephant 4 elephants 16 elephants
12 32 4.428838398950118e-09 0.11431348830099144 0.9935089607656024
10 32 1.550093439632541e-08 0.0626479840223545 0.9753101519027554
10 64 6.601827268370426e-12 0.00045571320990370776 0.49999929150089345
9 64 3.6310049976037345e-11 0.00045501212304112273 0.4282314876454858
8 64 2.25929199850899e-10 0.0004886697053040446 0.35935114681123076
8 128 6.994461389026097e-13 3.4055790161620863e-06 0.02746173137155063
7 128 1.0579122850901972e-11 6.960839379258192e-06 0.02406157386340147
7 256 7.597695465552631e-14 6.728547142019406e-08 0.0006709661542533682
6 256 2.7134626662687968e-12 2.9516464018476436e-07 0.0008895654642000348
6 512 4.116062922897309e-14 4.982983350480894e-09 2.26025764343413e-05
6 1024 6.337324016514285e-16 8.09060164312957e-11 4.517408062903668e-07

FlowSchema

A FlowSchema matches some inbound requests and assigns them to a priority level. Every inbound request is tested against FlowSchemas, starting with those with the numerically lowest matchingPrecedence and working upward. The first match wins.

A FlowSchema matches a given request if at least one of its rules matches. A rule matches if at least one of its subjects and at least one of its resourceRules or nonResourceRules (depending on whether the incoming request is for a resource or non-resource URL) match the request.

For the name field in subjects, and the verbs, apiGroups, resources, namespaces, and nonResourceURLs fields of resource and non-resource rules, the wildcard * may be specified to match all values for the given field, effectively removing it from consideration.

A FlowSchema's distinguisherMethod.type determines how requests matching that schema will be separated into flows. It may be ByUser, in which one requesting user will not be able to starve other users of capacity; ByNamespace, in which requests for resources in one namespace will not be able to starve requests for resources in other namespaces of capacity; or blank (or distinguisherMethod may be omitted entirely), in which all requests matched by this FlowSchema will be considered part of a single flow. The correct choice for a given FlowSchema depends on the resource and your particular environment.

Defaults

Each kube-apiserver maintains two sorts of APF configuration objects: mandatory and suggested.

Mandatory Configuration Objects

The four mandatory configuration objects reflect fixed built-in guardrail behavior. This is behavior that the servers have before those objects exist, and when those objects exist their specs reflect this behavior. The four mandatory objects are as follows.

  • The mandatory exempt priority level is used for requests that are not subject to flow control at all: they will always be dispatched immediately. The mandatory exempt FlowSchema classifies all requests from the system:masters group into this priority level. You may define other FlowSchemas that direct other requests to this priority level, if appropriate.

  • The mandatory catch-all priority level is used in combination with the mandatory catch-all FlowSchema to make sure that every request gets some kind of classification. Typically you should not rely on this catch-all configuration, and should create your own catch-all FlowSchema and PriorityLevelConfiguration (or use the suggested global-default priority level that is installed by default) as appropriate. Because it is not expected to be used normally, the mandatory catch-all priority level has a very small concurrency share and does not queue requests.

Suggested Configuration Objects

The suggested FlowSchemas and PriorityLevelConfigurations constitute a reasonable default configuration. You can modify these and/or create additional configuration objects if you want. If your cluster is likely to experience heavy load then you should consider what configuration will work best.

The suggested configuration groups requests into six priority levels:

  • The node-high priority level is for health updates from nodes.

  • The system priority level is for non-health requests from the system:nodes group, i.e. Kubelets, which must be able to contact the API server in order for workloads to be able to schedule on them.

  • The leader-election priority level is for leader election requests from built-in controllers (in particular, requests for endpoints, configmaps, or leases coming from the system:kube-controller-manager or system:kube-scheduler users and service accounts in the kube-system namespace). These are important to isolate from other traffic because failures in leader election cause their controllers to fail and restart, which in turn causes more expensive traffic as the new controllers sync their informers.

  • The workload-high priority level is for other requests from built-in controllers.

  • The workload-low priority level is for requests from any other service account, which will typically include all requests from controllers running in Pods.

  • The global-default priority level handles all other traffic, e.g. interactive kubectl commands run by nonprivileged users.

The suggested FlowSchemas serve to steer requests into the above priority levels, and are not enumerated here.

Maintenance of the Mandatory and Suggested Configuration Objects

Each kube-apiserver independently maintains the mandatory and suggested configuration objects, using initial and periodic behavior. Thus, in a situation with a mixture of servers of different versions there may be thrashing as long as different servers have different opinions of the proper content of these objects.

Each kube-apiserver makes an initial maintenance pass over the mandatory and suggested configuration objects, and after that does periodic maintenance (once per minute) of those objects.

For the mandatory configuration objects, maintenance consists of ensuring that the object exists and, if it does, has the proper spec. The server refuses to allow a creation or update with a spec that is inconsistent with the server's guardrail behavior.

Maintenance of suggested configuration objects is designed to allow their specs to be overridden. Deletion, on the other hand, is not respected: maintenance will restore the object. If you do not want a suggested configuration object then you need to keep it around but set its spec to have minimal consequences. Maintenance of suggested objects is also designed to support automatic migration when a new version of the kube-apiserver is rolled out, albeit potentially with thrashing while there is a mixed population of servers.

Maintenance of a suggested configuration object consists of creating it --- with the server's suggested spec --- if the object does not exist. OTOH, if the object already exists, maintenance behavior depends on whether the kube-apiservers or the users control the object. In the former case, the server ensures that the object's spec is what the server suggests; in the latter case, the spec is left alone.

The question of who controls the object is answered by first looking for an annotation with key apf.kubernetes.io/autoupdate-spec. If there is such an annotation and its value is true then the kube-apiservers control the object. If there is such an annotation and its value is false then the users control the object. If neither of those conditions holds then the metadata.generation of the object is consulted. If that is 1 then the kube-apiservers control the object. Otherwise the users control the object. These rules were introduced in release 1.22 and their consideration of metadata.generation is for the sake of migration from the simpler earlier behavior. Users who wish to control a suggested configuration object should set its apf.kubernetes.io/autoupdate-spec annotation to false.

Maintenance of a mandatory or suggested configuration object also includes ensuring that it has an apf.kubernetes.io/autoupdate-spec annotation that accurately reflects whether the kube-apiservers control the object.

Maintenance also includes deleting objects that are neither mandatory nor suggested but are annotated apf.kubernetes.io/autoupdate-spec=true.

Health check concurrency exemption

The suggested configuration gives no special treatment to the health check requests on kube-apiservers from their local kubelets --- which tend to use the secured port but supply no credentials. With the suggested config, these requests get assigned to the global-default FlowSchema and the corresponding global-default priority level, where other traffic can crowd them out.

If you add the following additional FlowSchema, this exempts those requests from rate limiting.

priority-and-fairness/health-for-strangers.yaml 
apiVersion: flowcontrol.apiserver.k8s.io/v1
kind: FlowSchema
metadata:
  name: health-for-strangers
spec:
  matchingPrecedence: 1000
  priorityLevelConfiguration:
    name: exempt
  rules:
    - nonResourceRules:
      - nonResourceURLs:
          - "/healthz"
          - "/livez"
          - "/readyz"
        verbs:
          - "*"
      subjects:
        - kind: Group
          group:
            name: "system:unauthenticated"

Observability

Metrics

When you enable the API Priority and Fairness feature, the kube-apiserver exports additional metrics. Monitoring these can help you determine whether your configuration is inappropriately throttling important traffic, or find poorly-behaved workloads that may be harming system health.

Maturity level BETA

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_rejected_requests_total is a counter vector (cumulative since server start) of requests that were rejected, broken down by the labels flow_schema (indicating the one that matched the request), priority_level (indicating the one to which the request was assigned), and reason. The reason label will be one of the following values:

    • queue-full, indicating that too many requests were already queued.
    • concurrency-limit, indicating that the PriorityLevelConfiguration is configured to reject rather than queue excess requests.
    • time-out, indicating that the request was still in the queue when its queuing time limit expired.
    • cancelled, indicating that the request is not purge locked and has been ejected from the queue.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_dispatched_requests_total is a counter vector (cumulative since server start) of requests that began executing, broken down by flow_schema and priority_level.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_current_inqueue_requests is a gauge vector holding the instantaneous number of queued (not executing) requests, broken down by priority_level and flow_schema.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_current_executing_requests is a gauge vector holding the instantaneous number of executing (not waiting in a queue) requests, broken down by priority_level and flow_schema.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_current_executing_seats is a gauge vector holding the instantaneous number of occupied seats, broken down by priority_level and flow_schema.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_request_wait_duration_seconds is a histogram vector of how long requests spent queued, broken down by the labels flow_schema, priority_level, and execute. The execute label indicates whether the request has started executing.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_nominal_limit_seats is a gauge vector holding each priority level's nominal concurrency limit, computed from the API server's total concurrency limit and the priority level's configured nominal concurrency shares.

Maturity level ALPHA

  • apiserver_current_inqueue_requests is a gauge vector of recent high water marks of the number of queued requests, grouped by a label named request_kind whose value is mutating or readOnly. These high water marks describe the largest number seen in the one second window most recently completed. These complement the older apiserver_current_inflight_requests gauge vector that holds the last window's high water mark of number of requests actively being served.

  • apiserver_current_inqueue_seats is a gauge vector of the sum over queued requests of the largest number of seats each will occupy, grouped by labels named flow_schema and priority_level.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_read_vs_write_current_requests is a histogram vector of observations, made at the end of every nanosecond, of the number of requests broken down by the labels phase (which takes on the values waiting and executing) and request_kind (which takes on the values mutating and readOnly). Each observed value is a ratio, between 0 and 1, of the number of requests divided by the corresponding limit on the number of requests (queue volume limit for waiting and concurrency limit for executing).

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_request_concurrency_in_use is a gauge vector holding the instantaneous number of occupied seats, broken down by priority_level and flow_schema.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_priority_level_request_utilization is a histogram vector of observations, made at the end of each nanosecond, of the number of requests broken down by the labels phase (which takes on the values waiting and executing) and priority_level. Each observed value is a ratio, between 0 and 1, of a number of requests divided by the corresponding limit on the number of requests (queue volume limit for waiting and concurrency limit for executing).

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_priority_level_seat_utilization is a histogram vector of observations, made at the end of each nanosecond, of the utilization of a priority level's concurrency limit, broken down by priority_level. This utilization is the fraction (number of seats occupied) / (concurrency limit). This metric considers all stages of execution (both normal and the extra delay at the end of a write to cover for the corresponding notification work) of all requests except WATCHes; for those it considers only the initial stage that delivers notifications of pre-existing objects. Each histogram in the vector is also labeled with phase: executing (there is no seat limit for the waiting phase).

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_request_queue_length_after_enqueue is a histogram vector of queue lengths for the queues, broken down by priority_level and flow_schema, as sampled by the enqueued requests. Each request that gets queued contributes one sample to its histogram, reporting the length of the queue immediately after the request was added. Note that this produces different statistics than an unbiased survey would.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_request_concurrency_limit is the same as apiserver_flowcontrol_nominal_limit_seats. Before the introduction of concurrency borrowing between priority levels, this was always equal to apiserver_flowcontrol_current_limit_seats (which did not exist as a distinct metric).

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_lower_limit_seats is a gauge vector holding the lower bound on each priority level's dynamic concurrency limit.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_upper_limit_seats is a gauge vector holding the upper bound on each priority level's dynamic concurrency limit.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_demand_seats is a histogram vector counting observations, at the end of every nanosecond, of each priority level's ratio of (seat demand) / (nominal concurrency limit). A priority level's seat demand is the sum, over both queued requests and those in the initial phase of execution, of the maximum of the number of seats occupied in the request's initial and final execution phases.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_demand_seats_high_watermark is a gauge vector holding, for each priority level, the maximum seat demand seen during the last concurrency borrowing adjustment period.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_demand_seats_average is a gauge vector holding, for each priority level, the time-weighted average seat demand seen during the last concurrency borrowing adjustment period.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_demand_seats_stdev is a gauge vector holding, for each priority level, the time-weighted population standard deviation of seat demand seen during the last concurrency borrowing adjustment period.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_demand_seats_smoothed is a gauge vector holding, for each priority level, the smoothed enveloped seat demand determined at the last concurrency adjustment.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_target_seats is a gauge vector holding, for each priority level, the concurrency target going into the borrowing allocation problem.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_seat_fair_frac is a gauge holding the fair allocation fraction determined in the last borrowing adjustment.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_current_limit_seats is a gauge vector holding, for each priority level, the dynamic concurrency limit derived in the last adjustment.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_request_execution_seconds is a histogram vector of how long requests took to actually execute, broken down by flow_schema and priority_level.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_watch_count_samples is a histogram vector of the number of active WATCH requests relevant to a given write, broken down by flow_schema and priority_level.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_work_estimated_seats is a histogram vector of the number of estimated seats (maximum of initial and final stage of execution) associated with requests, broken down by flow_schema and priority_level.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_request_dispatch_no_accommodation_total is a counter vector of the number of events that in principle could have led to a request being dispatched but did not, due to lack of available concurrency, broken down by flow_schema and priority_level.

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_epoch_advance_total is a counter vector of the number of attempts to jump a priority level's progress meter backward to avoid numeric overflow, grouped by priority_level and success.

Good practices for using API Priority and Fairness

When a given priority level exceeds its permitted concurrency, requests can experience increased latency or be dropped with an HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) error. To prevent these side effects of APF, you can modify your workload or tweak your APF settings to ensure there are sufficient seats available to serve your requests.

To detect whether requests are being rejected due to APF, check the following metrics:

  • apiserver_flowcontrol_rejected_requests_total: the total number of requests rejected per FlowSchema and PriorityLevelConfiguration.
  • apiserver_flowcontrol_current_inqueue_requests: the current number of requests queued per FlowSchema and PriorityLevelConfiguration.
  • apiserver_flowcontrol_request_wait_duration_seconds: the latency added to requests waiting in queues.
  • apiserver_flowcontrol_priority_level_seat_utilization: the seat utilization per PriorityLevelConfiguration.

Workload modifications

To prevent requests from queuing and adding latency or being dropped due to APF, you can optimize your requests by:

  • Reducing the rate at which requests are executed. A fewer number of requests over a fixed period will result in a fewer number of seats being needed at a given time.
  • Avoid issuing a large number of expensive requests concurrently. Requests can be optimized to use fewer seats or have lower latency so that these requests hold those seats for a shorter duration. List requests can occupy more than 1 seat depending on the number of objects fetched during the request. Restricting the number of objects retrieved in a list request, for example by using pagination, will use less total seats over a shorter period. Furthermore, replacing list requests with watch requests will require lower total concurrency shares as watch requests only occupy 1 seat during its initial burst of notifications. If using streaming lists in versions 1.27 and later, watch requests will occupy the same number of seats as a list request for its initial burst of notifications because the entire state of the collection has to be streamed. Note that in both cases, a watch request will not hold any seats after this initial phase.

Keep in mind that queuing or rejected requests from APF could be induced by either an increase in the number of requests or an increase in latency for existing requests. For example, if requests that normally take 1s to execute start taking 60s, it is possible that APF will start rejecting requests because requests are occupying seats for a longer duration than normal due to this increase in latency. If APF starts rejecting requests across multiple priority levels without a significant change in workload, it is possible there is an underlying issue with control plane performance rather than the workload or APF settings.

Priority and fairness settings

You can also modify the default FlowSchema and PriorityLevelConfiguration objects or create new objects of these types to better accommodate your workload.

APF settings can be modified to:

  • Give more seats to high priority requests.
  • Isolate non-essential or expensive requests that would starve a concurrency level if it was shared with other flows.

Give more seats to high priority requests

  1. If possible, the number of seats available across all priority levels for a particular kube-apiserver can be increased by increasing the values for the max-requests-inflight and max-mutating-requests-inflight flags. Alternatively, horizontally scaling the number of kube-apiserver instances will increase the total concurrency per priority level across the cluster assuming there is sufficient load balancing of requests.
  2. You can create a new FlowSchema which references a PriorityLevelConfiguration with a larger concurrency level. This new PriorityLevelConfiguration could be an existing level or a new level with its own set of nominal concurrency shares. For example, a new FlowSchema could be introduced to change the PriorityLevelConfiguration for your requests from global-default to workload-low to increase the number of seats available to your user. Creating a new PriorityLevelConfiguration will reduce the number of seats designated for existing levels. Recall that editing a default FlowSchema or PriorityLevelConfiguration will require setting the apf.kubernetes.io/autoupdate-spec annotation to false.
  3. You can also increase the NominalConcurrencyShares for the PriorityLevelConfiguration which is serving your high priority requests. Alternatively, for versions 1.26 and later, you can increase the LendablePercent for competing priority levels so that the given priority level has a higher pool of seats it can borrow.

Isolate non-essential requests from starving other flows

For request isolation, you can create a FlowSchema whose subject matches the user making these requests or create a FlowSchema that matches what the request is (corresponding to the resourceRules). Next, you can map this FlowSchema to a PriorityLevelConfiguration with a low share of seats.

For example, suppose list event requests from Pods running in the default namespace are using 10 seats each and execute for 1 minute. To prevent these expensive requests from impacting requests from other Pods using the existing service-accounts FlowSchema, you can apply the following FlowSchema to isolate these list calls from other requests.

Example FlowSchema object to isolate list event requests:

priority-and-fairness/list-events-default-service-account.yaml 
apiVersion: flowcontrol.apiserver.k8s.io/v1
kind: FlowSchema
metadata:
  name: list-events-default-service-account
spec:
  distinguisherMethod:
    type: ByUser
  matchingPrecedence: 8000
  priorityLevelConfiguration:
    name: catch-all
  rules:
    - resourceRules:
      - apiGroups:
          - '*'
        namespaces:
          - default
        resources:
          - events
        verbs:
          - list
      subjects:
        - kind: ServiceAccount
          serviceAccount:
            name: default
            namespace: default
  • This FlowSchema captures all list event calls made by the default service account in the default namespace. The matching precedence 8000 is lower than the value of 9000 used by the existing service-accounts FlowSchema so these list event calls will match list-events-default-service-account rather than service-accounts.
  • The catch-all PriorityLevelConfiguration is used to isolate these requests. The catch-all priority level has a very small concurrency share and does not queue requests.

What's next

11.12 - Cluster Autoscaling

Automatically manage the nodes in your cluster to adapt to demand.

Kubernetes requires nodes in your cluster to run pods. This means providing capacity for the workload Pods and for Kubernetes itself.

You can adjust the amount of resources available in your cluster automatically: node autoscaling. You can either change the number of nodes, or change the capacity that nodes provide. The first approach is referred to as horizontal scaling, while the second is referred to as vertical scaling.

Kubernetes can even provide multidimensional automatic scaling for nodes.

Manual node management

You can manually manage node-level capacity, where you configure a fixed amount of nodes; you can use this approach even if the provisioning (the process to set up, manage, and decommission) for these nodes is automated.

This page is about taking the next step, and automating management of the amount of node capacity (CPU, memory, and other node resources) available in your cluster.

Automatic horizontal scaling

Cluster Autoscaler

You can use the Cluster Autoscaler to manage the scale of your nodes automatically. The cluster autoscaler can integrate with a cloud provider, or with Kubernetes' cluster API, to achieve the actual node management that's needed.

The cluster autoscaler adds nodes when there are unschedulable Pods, and removes nodes when those nodes are empty.

Cloud provider integrations

The README for the cluster autoscaler lists some of the cloud provider integrations that are available.

Cost-aware multidimensional scaling

Karpenter

Karpenter supports direct node management, via plugins that integrate with specific cloud providers, and can manage nodes for you whilst optimizing for overall cost.

Karpenter automatically launches just the right compute resources to handle your cluster's applications. It is designed to let you take full advantage of the cloud with fast and simple compute provisioning for Kubernetes clusters.

The Karpenter tool is designed to integrate with a cloud provider that provides API-driven server management, and where the price information for available servers is also available via a web API.

For example, if you start some more Pods in your cluster, the Karpenter tool might buy a new node that is larger than one of the nodes you are already using, and then shut down an existing node once the new node is in service.

Cloud provider integrations

There are integrations available between Karpenter's core and the following cloud providers:

Descheduler

The descheduler can help you consolidate Pods onto a smaller number of nodes, to help with automatic scale down when the cluster has spare capacity.

Sizing a workload based on cluster size

Cluster proportional autoscaler

For workloads that need to be scaled based on the size of the cluster (for example cluster-dns or other system components), you can use the Cluster Proportional Autoscaler.

The Cluster Proportional Autoscaler watches the number of schedulable nodes and cores, and scales the number of replicas of the target workload accordingly.

Cluster proportional vertical autoscaler

If the number of replicas should stay the same, you can scale your workloads vertically according to the cluster size using the Cluster Proportional Vertical Autoscaler. This project is in beta and can be found on GitHub.

While the Cluster Proportional Autoscaler scales the number of replicas of a workload, the Cluster Proportional Vertical Autoscaler adjusts the resource requests for a workload (for example a Deployment or DaemonSet) based on the number of nodes and/or cores in the cluster.

What's next

11.13 - Installing Addons

Add-ons extend the functionality of Kubernetes.

This page lists some of the available add-ons and links to their respective installation instructions. The list does not try to be exhaustive.

Networking and Network Policy

  • ACI provides integrated container networking and network security with Cisco ACI.
  • Antrea operates at Layer 3/4 to provide networking and security services for Kubernetes, leveraging Open vSwitch as the networking data plane. Antrea is a CNCF project at the Sandbox level.
  • Calico is a networking and network policy provider. Calico supports a flexible set of networking options so you can choose the most efficient option for your situation, including non-overlay and overlay networks, with or without BGP. Calico uses the same engine to enforce network policy for hosts, pods, and (if using Istio & Envoy) applications at the service mesh layer.
  • Canal unites Flannel and Calico, providing networking and network policy.
  • Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution with an eBPF-based data plane. Cilium provides a simple flat Layer 3 network with the ability to span multiple clusters in either a native routing or overlay/encapsulation mode, and can enforce network policies on L3-L7 using an identity-based security model that is decoupled from network addressing. Cilium can act as a replacement for kube-proxy; it also offers additional, opt-in observability and security features. Cilium is a CNCF project at the Graduated level.
  • CNI-Genie enables Kubernetes to seamlessly connect to a choice of CNI plugins, such as Calico, Canal, Flannel, or Weave. CNI-Genie is a CNCF project at the Sandbox level.
  • Contiv provides configurable networking (native L3 using BGP, overlay using vxlan, classic L2, and Cisco-SDN/ACI) for various use cases and a rich policy framework. Contiv project is fully open sourced. The installer provides both kubeadm and non-kubeadm based installation options.
  • Contrail, based on Tungsten Fabric, is an open source, multi-cloud network virtualization and policy management platform. Contrail and Tungsten Fabric are integrated with orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, OpenShift, OpenStack and Mesos, and provide isolation modes for virtual machines, containers/pods and bare metal workloads.
  • Flannel is an overlay network provider that can be used with Kubernetes.
  • Gateway API is an open source project managed by the SIG Network community and provides an expressive, extensible, and role-oriented API for modeling service networking.
  • Knitter is a plugin to support multiple network interfaces in a Kubernetes pod.
  • Multus is a Multi plugin for multiple network support in Kubernetes to support all CNI plugins (e.g. Calico, Cilium, Contiv, Flannel), in addition to SRIOV, DPDK, OVS-DPDK and VPP based workloads in Kubernetes.
  • OVN-Kubernetes is a networking provider for Kubernetes based on OVN (Open Virtual Network), a virtual networking implementation that came out of the Open vSwitch (OVS) project. OVN-Kubernetes provides an overlay based networking implementation for Kubernetes, including an OVS based implementation of load balancing and network policy.
  • Nodus is an OVN based CNI controller plugin to provide cloud native based Service function chaining(SFC).
  • NSX-T Container Plug-in (NCP) provides integration between VMware NSX-T and container orchestrators such as Kubernetes, as well as integration between NSX-T and container-based CaaS/PaaS platforms such as Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and OpenShift.
  • Nuage is an SDN platform that provides policy-based networking between Kubernetes Pods and non-Kubernetes environments with visibility and security monitoring.
  • Romana is a Layer 3 networking solution for pod networks that also supports the NetworkPolicy API.
  • Spiderpool is an underlay and RDMA networking solution for Kubernetes. Spiderpool is supported on bare metal, virtual machines, and public cloud environments.
  • Weave Net provides networking and network policy, will carry on working on both sides of a network partition, and does not require an external database.

Service Discovery

  • CoreDNS is a flexible, extensible DNS server which can be installed as the in-cluster DNS for pods.

Visualization & Control

  • Dashboard is a dashboard web interface for Kubernetes.

Infrastructure

Instrumentation

Legacy Add-ons

There are several other add-ons documented in the deprecated cluster/addons directory.

Well-maintained ones should be linked to here. PRs welcome!

11.14 - Coordinated Leader Election

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [alpha] (enabled by default: false)

Kubernetes 1.32 includes an alpha feature that allows control plane components to deterministically select a leader via coordinated leader election. This is useful to satisfy Kubernetes version skew constraints during cluster upgrades. Currently, the only builtin selection strategy is OldestEmulationVersion, preferring the leader with the lowest emulation version, followed by binary version, followed by creation timestamp.

Enabling coordinated leader election

Ensure that CoordinatedLeaderElection feature gate is enabled when you start the API Server: and that the coordination.k8s.io/v1alpha1 API group is enabled.

This can be done by setting flags --feature-gates="CoordinatedLeaderElection=true" and --runtime-config="coordination.k8s.io/v1alpha1=true".

Component configuration

Provided that you have enabled the CoordinatedLeaderElection feature gate and
have the coordination.k8s.io/v1alpha1 API group enabled, compatible control plane
components automatically use the LeaseCandidate and Lease APIs to elect a leader
as needed.

For Kubernetes 1.32, two control plane components
(kube-controller-manager and kube-scheduler) automatically use coordinated
leader election when the feature gate and API group are enabled.

12 - Windows in Kubernetes

Kubernetes supports nodes that run Microsoft Windows.

Kubernetes supports worker nodes running either Linux or Microsoft Windows.

The CNCF and its parent the Linux Foundation take a vendor-neutral approach towards compatibility. It is possible to join your Windows server as a worker node to a Kubernetes cluster.

You can install and set up kubectl on Windows no matter what operating system you use within your cluster.

If you are using Windows nodes, you can read:

or, for an overview, read:

12.1 - Windows containers in Kubernetes

Windows applications constitute a large portion of the services and applications that run in many organizations. Windows containers provide a way to encapsulate processes and package dependencies, making it easier to use DevOps practices and follow cloud native patterns for Windows applications.

Organizations with investments in Windows-based applications and Linux-based applications don't have to look for separate orchestrators to manage their workloads, leading to increased operational efficiencies across their deployments, regardless of operating system.

Windows nodes in Kubernetes

To enable the orchestration of Windows containers in Kubernetes, include Windows nodes in your existing Linux cluster. Scheduling Windows containers in Pods on Kubernetes is similar to scheduling Linux-based containers.

In order to run Windows containers, your Kubernetes cluster must include multiple operating systems. While you can only run the control plane on Linux, you can deploy worker nodes running either Windows or Linux.

Windows nodes are supported provided that the operating system is Windows Server 2019 or Windows Server 2022.

This document uses the term Windows containers to mean Windows containers with process isolation. Kubernetes does not support running Windows containers with Hyper-V isolation.

Compatibility and limitations

Some node features are only available if you use a specific container runtime; others are not available on Windows nodes, including:

  • HugePages: not supported for Windows containers
  • Privileged containers: not supported for Windows containers. HostProcess Containers offer similar functionality.
  • TerminationGracePeriod: requires containerD

Not all features of shared namespaces are supported. See API compatibility for more details.

See Windows OS version compatibility for details on the Windows versions that Kubernetes is tested against.

From an API and kubectl perspective, Windows containers behave in much the same way as Linux-based containers. However, there are some notable differences in key functionality which are outlined in this section.

Comparison with Linux

Key Kubernetes elements work the same way in Windows as they do in Linux. This section refers to several key workload abstractions and how they map to Windows.

  • Pods

    A Pod is the basic building block of Kubernetes–the smallest and simplest unit in the Kubernetes object model that you create or deploy. You may not deploy Windows and Linux containers in the same Pod. All containers in a Pod are scheduled onto a single Node where each Node represents a specific platform and architecture. The following Pod capabilities, properties and events are supported with Windows containers:

    • Single or multiple containers per Pod with process isolation and volume sharing

    • Pod status fields

    • Readiness, liveness, and startup probes

    • postStart & preStop container lifecycle hooks

    • ConfigMap, Secrets: as environment variables or volumes

    • emptyDir volumes

    • Named pipe host mounts

    • Resource limits

    • OS field:

      The .spec.os.name field should be set to windows to indicate that the current Pod uses Windows containers.

      If you set the .spec.os.name field to windows, you must not set the following fields in the .spec of that Pod:

      • spec.hostPID
      • spec.hostIPC
      • spec.securityContext.seLinuxOptions
      • spec.securityContext.seccompProfile
      • spec.securityContext.fsGroup
      • spec.securityContext.fsGroupChangePolicy
      • spec.securityContext.sysctls
      • spec.shareProcessNamespace
      • spec.securityContext.runAsUser
      • spec.securityContext.runAsGroup
      • spec.securityContext.supplementalGroups
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.seLinuxOptions
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.seccompProfile
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.capabilities
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.readOnlyRootFilesystem
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.privileged
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.allowPrivilegeEscalation
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.procMount
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.runAsUser
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.runAsGroup

      In the above list, wildcards (*) indicate all elements in a list. For example, spec.containers[*].securityContext refers to the SecurityContext object for all containers. If any of these fields is specified, the Pod will not be admitted by the API server.

  • Workload resources including:

    • ReplicaSet
    • Deployment
    • StatefulSet
    • DaemonSet
    • Job
    • CronJob
    • ReplicationController

  • Services See Load balancing and Services for more details.

Pods, workload resources, and Services are critical elements to managing Windows workloads on Kubernetes. However, on their own they are not enough to enable the proper lifecycle management of Windows workloads in a dynamic cloud native environment.

Command line options for the kubelet

Some kubelet command line options behave differently on Windows, as described below:

  • The --windows-priorityclass lets you set the scheduling priority of the kubelet process (see CPU resource management)
  • The --kube-reserved, --system-reserved , and --eviction-hard flags update NodeAllocatable
  • Eviction by using --enforce-node-allocable is not implemented
  • When running on a Windows node the kubelet does not have memory or CPU restrictions. --kube-reserved and --system-reserved only subtract from NodeAllocatable and do not guarantee resource provided for workloads. See Resource Management for Windows nodes for more information.
  • The PIDPressure Condition is not implemented
  • The kubelet does not take OOM eviction actions

API compatibility

There are subtle differences in the way the Kubernetes APIs work for Windows due to the OS and container runtime. Some workload properties were designed for Linux, and fail to run on Windows.

At a high level, these OS concepts are different:

  • Identity - Linux uses userID (UID) and groupID (GID) which are represented as integer types. User and group names are not canonical - they are just an alias in /etc/groups or /etc/passwd back to UID+GID. Windows uses a larger binary security identifier (SID) which is stored in the Windows Security Access Manager (SAM) database. This database is not shared between the host and containers, or between containers.
  • File permissions - Windows uses an access control list based on (SIDs), whereas POSIX systems such as Linux use a bitmask based on object permissions and UID+GID, plus optional access control lists.
  • File paths - the convention on Windows is to use \ instead of /. The Go IO libraries typically accept both and just make it work, but when you're setting a path or command line that's interpreted inside a container, \ may be needed.
  • Signals - Windows interactive apps handle termination differently, and can implement one or more of these:
    • A UI thread handles well-defined messages including WM_CLOSE.
    • Console apps handle Ctrl-C or Ctrl-break using a Control Handler.
    • Services register a Service Control Handler function that can accept SERVICE_CONTROL_STOP control codes.

Container exit codes follow the same convention where 0 is success, and nonzero is failure. The specific error codes may differ across Windows and Linux. However, exit codes passed from the Kubernetes components (kubelet, kube-proxy) are unchanged.

Field compatibility for container specifications

The following list documents differences between how Pod container specifications work between Windows and Linux:

  • Huge pages are not implemented in the Windows container runtime, and are not available. They require asserting a user privilege that's not configurable for containers.
  • requests.cpu and requests.memory - requests are subtracted from node available resources, so they can be used to avoid overprovisioning a node. However, they cannot be used to guarantee resources in an overprovisioned node. They should be applied to all containers as a best practice if the operator wants to avoid overprovisioning entirely.
  • securityContext.allowPrivilegeEscalation - not possible on Windows; none of the capabilities are hooked up
  • securityContext.capabilities - POSIX capabilities are not implemented on Windows
  • securityContext.privileged - Windows doesn't support privileged containers, use HostProcess Containers instead
  • securityContext.procMount - Windows doesn't have a /proc filesystem
  • securityContext.readOnlyRootFilesystem - not possible on Windows; write access is required for registry & system processes to run inside the container
  • securityContext.runAsGroup - not possible on Windows as there is no GID support
  • securityContext.runAsNonRoot - this setting will prevent containers from running as ContainerAdministrator which is the closest equivalent to a root user on Windows.
  • securityContext.runAsUser - use runAsUserName instead
  • securityContext.seLinuxOptions - not possible on Windows as SELinux is Linux-specific
  • terminationMessagePath - this has some limitations in that Windows doesn't support mapping single files. The default value is /dev/termination-log, which does work because it does not exist on Windows by default.

Field compatibility for Pod specifications

The following list documents differences between how Pod specifications work between Windows and Linux:

  • hostIPC and hostpid - host namespace sharing is not possible on Windows
  • hostNetwork - see below
  • dnsPolicy - setting the Pod dnsPolicy to ClusterFirstWithHostNet is not supported on Windows because host networking is not provided. Pods always run with a container network.
  • podSecurityContext see below
  • shareProcessNamespace - this is a beta feature, and depends on Linux namespaces which are not implemented on Windows. Windows cannot share process namespaces or the container's root filesystem. Only the network can be shared.
  • terminationGracePeriodSeconds - this is not fully implemented in Docker on Windows, see the GitHub issue. The behavior today is that the ENTRYPOINT process is sent CTRL_SHUTDOWN_EVENT, then Windows waits 5 seconds by default, and finally shuts down all processes using the normal Windows shutdown behavior. The 5 second default is actually in the Windows registry inside the container, so it can be overridden when the container is built.
  • volumeDevices - this is a beta feature, and is not implemented on Windows. Windows cannot attach raw block devices to pods.
  • volumes
    • If you define an emptyDir volume, you cannot set its volume source to memory.
  • You cannot enable mountPropagation for volume mounts as this is not supported on Windows.

Field compatibility for hostNetwork

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [alpha]

The kubelet can now request that pods running on Windows nodes use the host's network namespace instead of creating a new pod network namespace. To enable this functionality pass --feature-gates=WindowsHostNetwork=true to the kubelet.

Field compatibility for Pod security context

Only the securityContext.runAsNonRoot and securityContext.windowsOptions from the Pod securityContext fields work on Windows.

Node problem detector

The node problem detector (see Monitor Node Health) has preliminary support for Windows. For more information, visit the project's GitHub page.

Pause container

In a Kubernetes Pod, an infrastructure or “pause” container is first created to host the container. In Linux, the cgroups and namespaces that make up a pod need a process to maintain their continued existence; the pause process provides this. Containers that belong to the same pod, including infrastructure and worker containers, share a common network endpoint (same IPv4 and / or IPv6 address, same network port spaces). Kubernetes uses pause containers to allow for worker containers crashing or restarting without losing any of the networking configuration.

Kubernetes maintains a multi-architecture image that includes support for Windows. For Kubernetes v1.32.0 the recommended pause image is registry.k8s.io/pause:3.6. The source code is available on GitHub.

Microsoft maintains a different multi-architecture image, with Linux and Windows amd64 support, that you can find as mcr.microsoft.com/oss/kubernetes/pause:3.6. This image is built from the same source as the Kubernetes maintained image but all of the Windows binaries are authenticode signed by Microsoft. The Kubernetes project recommends using the Microsoft maintained image if you are deploying to a production or production-like environment that requires signed binaries.

Container runtimes

You need to install a container runtime into each node in the cluster so that Pods can run there.

The following container runtimes work with Windows:

ContainerD

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.20 [stable]

You can use ContainerD 1.4.0+ as the container runtime for Kubernetes nodes that run Windows.

Learn how to install ContainerD on a Windows node.

Mirantis Container Runtime

Mirantis Container Runtime (MCR) is available as a container runtime for all Windows Server 2019 and later versions.

See Install MCR on Windows Servers for more information.

Windows OS version compatibility

On Windows nodes, strict compatibility rules apply where the host OS version must match the container base image OS version. Only Windows containers with a container operating system of Windows Server 2019 are fully supported.

For Kubernetes v1.32, operating system compatibility for Windows nodes (and Pods) is as follows:

Windows Server LTSC release
Windows Server 2019
Windows Server 2022
Windows Server SAC release
Windows Server version 20H2

The Kubernetes version-skew policy also applies.

Hardware recommendations and considerations

  • 64-bit processor 4 CPU cores or more, capable of supporting virtualization
  • 8GB or more of RAM
  • 50GB or more of free disk space

Refer to Hardware requirements for Windows Server Microsoft documentation for the most up-to-date information on minimum hardware requirements. For guidance on deciding on resources for production worker nodes refer to Production worker nodes Kubernetes documentation.

To optimize system resources, if a graphical user interface is not required, it may be preferable to use a Windows Server OS installation that excludes the Windows Desktop Experience installation option, as this configuration typically frees up more system resources.

In assessing disk space for Windows worker nodes, take note that Windows container images are typically larger than Linux container images, with container image sizes ranging from 300MB to over 10GB for a single image. Additionally, take note that the C: drive in Windows containers represents a virtual free size of 20GB by default, which is not the actual consumed space, but rather the disk size for which a single container can grow to occupy when using local storage on the host. See Containers on Windows - Container Storage Documentation for more detail.

Getting help and troubleshooting

Your main source of help for troubleshooting your Kubernetes cluster should start with the Troubleshooting page.

Some additional, Windows-specific troubleshooting help is included in this section. Logs are an important element of troubleshooting issues in Kubernetes. Make sure to include them any time you seek troubleshooting assistance from other contributors. Follow the instructions in the SIG Windows contributing guide on gathering logs.

Reporting issues and feature requests

If you have what looks like a bug, or you would like to make a feature request, please follow the SIG Windows contributing guide to create a new issue. You should first search the list of issues in case it was reported previously and comment with your experience on the issue and add additional logs. SIG Windows channel on the Kubernetes Slack is also a great avenue to get some initial support and troubleshooting ideas prior to creating a ticket.

Validating the Windows cluster operability

The Kubernetes project provides a Windows Operational Readiness specification, accompanied by a structured test suite. This suite is split into two sets of tests, core and extended, each containing categories aimed at testing specific areas. It can be used to validate all the functionalities of a Windows and hybrid system (mixed with Linux nodes) with full coverage.

To set up the project on a newly created cluster, refer to the instructions in the project guide.

Deployment tools

The kubeadm tool helps you to deploy a Kubernetes cluster, providing the control plane to manage the cluster it, and nodes to run your workloads.

The Kubernetes cluster API project also provides means to automate deployment of Windows nodes.

Windows distribution channels

For a detailed explanation of Windows distribution channels see the Microsoft documentation.

Information on the different Windows Server servicing channels including their support models can be found at Windows Server servicing channels.

12.2 - Guide for Running Windows Containers in Kubernetes

This page provides a walkthrough for some steps you can follow to run Windows containers using Kubernetes. The page also highlights some Windows specific functionality within Kubernetes.

It is important to note that creating and deploying services and workloads on Kubernetes behaves in much the same way for Linux and Windows containers. The kubectl commands to interface with the cluster are identical. The examples in this page are provided to jumpstart your experience with Windows containers.

Objectives

Configure an example deployment to run Windows containers on a Windows node.

Before you begin

You should already have access to a Kubernetes cluster that includes a worker node running Windows Server.

Getting Started: Deploying a Windows workload

The example YAML file below deploys a simple webserver application running inside a Windows container.

Create a manifest named win-webserver.yaml with the contents below:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: win-webserver
  labels:
    app: win-webserver
spec:
  ports:
    # the port that this service should serve on
    - port: 80
      targetPort: 80
  selector:
    app: win-webserver
  type: NodePort
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app: win-webserver
  name: win-webserver
spec:
  replicas: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: win-webserver
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: win-webserver
      name: win-webserver
    spec:
     containers:
      - name: windowswebserver
        image: mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2019
        command:
        - powershell.exe
        - -command
        - "<#code used from https://gist.github.com/19WAS85/5424431#> ; $$listener = New-Object System.Net.HttpListener ; $$listener.Prefixes.Add('http://*:80/') ; $$listener.Start() ; $$callerCounts = @{} ; Write-Host('Listening at http://*:80/') ; while ($$listener.IsListening) { ;$$context = $$listener.GetContext() ;$$requestUrl = $$context.Request.Url ;$$clientIP = $$context.Request.RemoteEndPoint.Address ;$$response = $$context.Response ;Write-Host '' ;Write-Host('> {0}' -f $$requestUrl) ;  ;$$count = 1 ;$$k=$$callerCounts.Get_Item($$clientIP) ;if ($$k -ne $$null) { $$count += $$k } ;$$callerCounts.Set_Item($$clientIP, $$count) ;$$ip=(Get-NetAdapter | Get-NetIpAddress); $$header='<html><body><H1>Windows Container Web Server</H1>' ;$$callerCountsString='' ;$$callerCounts.Keys | % { $$callerCountsString+='<p>IP {0} callerCount {1} ' -f $$ip[1].IPAddress,$$callerCounts.Item($$_) } ;$$footer='</body></html>' ;$$content='{0}{1}{2}' -f $$header,$$callerCountsString,$$footer ;Write-Output $$content ;$$buffer = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($$content) ;$$response.ContentLength64 = $$buffer.Length ;$$response.OutputStream.Write($$buffer, 0, $$buffer.Length) ;$$response.Close() ;$$responseStatus = $$response.StatusCode ;Write-Host('< {0}' -f $$responseStatus)  } ; "
     nodeSelector:
      kubernetes.io/os: windows

  1. Check that all nodes are healthy:

    kubectl get nodes

  2. Deploy the service and watch for pod updates:

    kubectl apply -f win-webserver.yaml
kubectl get pods -o wide -w

    When the service is deployed correctly both Pods are marked as Ready. To exit the watch command, press Ctrl+C.

  3. Check that the deployment succeeded. To verify:

    • Several pods listed from the Linux control plane node, use kubectl get pods
    • Node-to-pod communication across the network, curl port 80 of your pod IPs from the Linux control plane node to check for a web server response
    • Pod-to-pod communication, ping between pods (and across hosts, if you have more than one Windows node) using kubectl exec
    • Service-to-pod communication, curl the virtual service IP (seen under kubectl get services) from the Linux control plane node and from individual pods
    • Service discovery, curl the service name with the Kubernetes default DNS suffix
    • Inbound connectivity, curl the NodePort from the Linux control plane node or machines outside of the cluster
    • Outbound connectivity, curl external IPs from inside the pod using kubectl exec

Observability

Capturing logs from workloads

Logs are an important element of observability; they enable users to gain insights into the operational aspect of workloads and are a key ingredient to troubleshooting issues. Because Windows containers and workloads inside Windows containers behave differently from Linux containers, users had a hard time collecting logs, limiting operational visibility. Windows workloads for example are usually configured to log to ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) or push entries to the application event log. LogMonitor, an open source tool by Microsoft, is the recommended way to monitor configured log sources inside a Windows container. LogMonitor supports monitoring event logs, ETW providers, and custom application logs, piping them to STDOUT for consumption by kubectl logs <pod>.

Follow the instructions in the LogMonitor GitHub page to copy its binaries and configuration files to all your containers and add the necessary entrypoints for LogMonitor to push your logs to STDOUT.

Configuring container user

Using configurable Container usernames

Windows containers can be configured to run their entrypoints and processes with different usernames than the image defaults. Learn more about it here.

Managing Workload Identity with Group Managed Service Accounts

Windows container workloads can be configured to use Group Managed Service Accounts (GMSA). Group Managed Service Accounts are a specific type of Active Directory account that provide automatic password management, simplified service principal name (SPN) management, and the ability to delegate the management to other administrators across multiple servers. Containers configured with a GMSA can access external Active Directory Domain resources while carrying the identity configured with the GMSA. Learn more about configuring and using GMSA for Windows containers here.

Taints and tolerations

Users need to use some combination of taint and node selectors in order to schedule Linux and Windows workloads to their respective OS-specific nodes. The recommended approach is outlined below, with one of its main goals being that this approach should not break compatibility for existing Linux workloads.

You can (and should) set .spec.os.name for each Pod, to indicate the operating system that the containers in that Pod are designed for. For Pods that run Linux containers, set .spec.os.name to linux. For Pods that run Windows containers, set .spec.os.name to windows.

The scheduler does not use the value of .spec.os.name when assigning Pods to nodes. You should use normal Kubernetes mechanisms for assigning pods to nodes to ensure that the control plane for your cluster places pods onto nodes that are running the appropriate operating system.

The .spec.os.name value has no effect on the scheduling of the Windows pods, so taints and tolerations (or node selectors) are still required to ensure that the Windows pods land onto appropriate Windows nodes.

Ensuring OS-specific workloads land on the appropriate container host

Users can ensure Windows containers can be scheduled on the appropriate host using taints and tolerations. All Kubernetes nodes running Kubernetes 1.32 have the following default labels:

  • kubernetes.io/os = [windows|linux]
  • kubernetes.io/arch = [amd64|arm64|...]

If a Pod specification does not specify a nodeSelector such as "kubernetes.io/os": windows, it is possible the Pod can be scheduled on any host, Windows or Linux. This can be problematic since a Windows container can only run on Windows and a Linux container can only run on Linux. The best practice for Kubernetes 1.32 is to use a nodeSelector.

However, in many cases users have a pre-existing large number of deployments for Linux containers, as well as an ecosystem of off-the-shelf configurations, such as community Helm charts, and programmatic Pod generation cases, such as with operators. In those situations, you may be hesitant to make the configuration change to add nodeSelector fields to all Pods and Pod templates. The alternative is to use taints. Because the kubelet can set taints during registration, it could easily be modified to automatically add a taint when running on Windows only.

For example: --register-with-taints='os=windows:NoSchedule'

By adding a taint to all Windows nodes, nothing will be scheduled on them (that includes existing Linux Pods). In order for a Windows Pod to be scheduled on a Windows node, it would need both the nodeSelector and the appropriate matching toleration to choose Windows.

nodeSelector:
    kubernetes.io/os: windows
    node.kubernetes.io/windows-build: '10.0.17763'
tolerations:
    - key: "os"
      operator: "Equal"
      value: "windows"
      effect: "NoSchedule"

Handling multiple Windows versions in the same cluster

The Windows Server version used by each pod must match that of the node. If you want to use multiple Windows Server versions in the same cluster, then you should set additional node labels and nodeSelector fields.

Kubernetes automatically adds a label, node.kubernetes.io/windows-build to simplify this.

This label reflects the Windows major, minor, and build number that need to match for compatibility. Here are values used for each Windows Server version:

Product Name Version
Windows Server 2019 10.0.17763
Windows Server 2022 10.0.20348

Simplifying with RuntimeClass

RuntimeClass can be used to simplify the process of using taints and tolerations. A cluster administrator can create a RuntimeClass object which is used to encapsulate these taints and tolerations.

  1. Save this file to runtimeClasses.yml. It includes the appropriate nodeSelector for the Windows OS, architecture, and version.

    ---
apiVersion: node.k8s.io/v1
kind: RuntimeClass
metadata:
  name: windows-2019
handler: example-container-runtime-handler
scheduling:
  nodeSelector:
    kubernetes.io/os: 'windows'
    kubernetes.io/arch: 'amd64'
    node.kubernetes.io/windows-build: '10.0.17763'
  tolerations:
  - effect: NoSchedule
    key: os
    operator: Equal
    value: "windows"

  2. Run kubectl create -f runtimeClasses.yml using as a cluster administrator

  3. Add runtimeClassName: windows-2019 as appropriate to Pod specs

    For example:

    ---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: iis-2019
  labels:
    app: iis-2019
spec:
  replicas: 1
  template:
    metadata:
      name: iis-2019
      labels:
        app: iis-2019
    spec:
      runtimeClassName: windows-2019
      containers:
      - name: iis
        image: mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore/iis:windowsservercore-ltsc2019
        resources:
          limits:
            cpu: 1
            memory: 800Mi
          requests:
            cpu: .1
            memory: 300Mi
        ports:
          - containerPort: 80
 selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: iis-2019
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: iis
spec:
  type: LoadBalancer
  ports:
  - protocol: TCP
    port: 80
  selector:
    app: iis-2019

13 - Extending Kubernetes

Different ways to change the behavior of your Kubernetes cluster.

Kubernetes is highly configurable and extensible. As a result, there is rarely a need to fork or submit patches to the Kubernetes project code.

This guide describes the options for customizing a Kubernetes cluster. It is aimed at cluster operators who want to understand how to adapt their Kubernetes cluster to the needs of their work environment. Developers who are prospective Platform Developers or Kubernetes Project Contributors will also find it useful as an introduction to what extension points and patterns exist, and their trade-offs and limitations.

Customization approaches can be broadly divided into configuration, which only involves changing command line arguments, local configuration files, or API resources; and extensions, which involve running additional programs, additional network services, or both. This document is primarily about extensions.

Configuration

Configuration files and command arguments are documented in the Reference section of the online documentation, with a page for each binary:

Command arguments and configuration files may not always be changeable in a hosted Kubernetes service or a distribution with managed installation. When they are changeable, they are usually only changeable by the cluster operator. Also, they are subject to change in future Kubernetes versions, and setting them may require restarting processes. For those reasons, they should be used only when there are no other options.

Built-in policy APIs, such as ResourceQuota, NetworkPolicy and Role-based Access Control (RBAC), are built-in Kubernetes APIs that provide declaratively configured policy settings. APIs are typically usable even with hosted Kubernetes services and with managed Kubernetes installations. The built-in policy APIs follow the same conventions as other Kubernetes resources such as Pods. When you use a policy APIs that is stable, you benefit from a defined support policy like other Kubernetes APIs. For these reasons, policy APIs are recommended over configuration files and command arguments where suitable.

Extensions

Extensions are software components that extend and deeply integrate with Kubernetes. They adapt it to support new types and new kinds of hardware.

Many cluster administrators use a hosted or distribution instance of Kubernetes. These clusters come with extensions pre-installed. As a result, most Kubernetes users will not need to install extensions and even fewer users will need to author new ones.

Extension patterns

Kubernetes is designed to be automated by writing client programs. Any program that reads and/or writes to the Kubernetes API can provide useful automation. Automation can run on the cluster or off it. By following the guidance in this doc you can write highly available and robust automation. Automation generally works with any Kubernetes cluster, including hosted clusters and managed installations.

There is a specific pattern for writing client programs that work well with Kubernetes called the controller pattern. Controllers typically read an object's .spec, possibly do things, and then update the object's .status.

A controller is a client of the Kubernetes API. When Kubernetes is the client and calls out to a remote service, Kubernetes calls this a webhook. The remote service is called a webhook backend. As with custom controllers, webhooks do add a point of failure.

In the webhook model, Kubernetes makes a network request to a remote service. With the alternative binary Plugin model, Kubernetes executes a binary (program). Binary plugins are used by the kubelet (for example, CSI storage plugins and CNI network plugins), and by kubectl (see Extend kubectl with plugins).

Extension points

This diagram shows the extension points in a Kubernetes cluster and the clients that access it.

Symbolic representation of seven numbered extension points for Kubernetes

Kubernetes extension points

Key to the figure

  1. Users often interact with the Kubernetes API using kubectl. Plugins customise the behaviour of clients. There are generic extensions that can apply to different clients, as well as specific ways to extend kubectl.

  2. The API server handles all requests. Several types of extension points in the API server allow authenticating requests, or blocking them based on their content, editing content, and handling deletion. These are described in the API Access Extensions section.

  3. The API server serves various kinds of resources. Built-in resource kinds, such as pods, are defined by the Kubernetes project and can't be changed. Read API extensions to learn about extending the Kubernetes API.

  4. The Kubernetes scheduler decides which nodes to place pods on. There are several ways to extend scheduling, which are described in the Scheduling extensions section.

  5. Much of the behavior of Kubernetes is implemented by programs called controllers, that are clients of the API server. Controllers are often used in conjunction with custom resources. Read combining new APIs with automation and Changing built-in resources to learn more.

  6. The kubelet runs on servers (nodes), and helps pods appear like virtual servers with their own IPs on the cluster network. Network Plugins allow for different implementations of pod networking.

  7. You can use Device Plugins to integrate custom hardware or other special node-local facilities, and make these available to Pods running in your cluster. The kubelet includes support for working with device plugins.

    The kubelet also mounts and unmounts volume for pods and their containers. You can use Storage Plugins to add support for new kinds of storage and other volume types.

Extension point choice flowchart

If you are unsure where to start, this flowchart can help. Note that some solutions may involve several types of extensions.

Flowchart with questions about use cases and guidance for implementers. Green circles indicate yes; red circles indicate no.

Flowchart guide to select an extension approach

Client extensions

Plugins for kubectl are separate binaries that add or replace the behavior of specific subcommands. The kubectl tool can also integrate with credential plugins These extensions only affect a individual user's local environment, and so cannot enforce site-wide policies.

If you want to extend the kubectl tool, read Extend kubectl with plugins.

API extensions

Custom resource definitions

Consider adding a Custom Resource to Kubernetes if you want to define new controllers, application configuration objects or other declarative APIs, and to manage them using Kubernetes tools, such as kubectl.

For more about Custom Resources, see the Custom Resources concept guide.

API aggregation layer

You can use Kubernetes' API Aggregation Layer to integrate the Kubernetes API with additional services such as for metrics.

Combining new APIs with automation

A combination of a custom resource API and a control loop is called the controllers pattern. If your controller takes the place of a human operator deploying infrastructure based on a desired state, then the controller may also be following the operator pattern. The Operator pattern is used to manage specific applications; usually, these are applications that maintain state and require care in how they are managed.

You can also make your own custom APIs and control loops that manage other resources, such as storage, or to define policies (such as an access control restriction).

Changing built-in resources

When you extend the Kubernetes API by adding custom resources, the added resources always fall into a new API Groups. You cannot replace or change existing API groups. Adding an API does not directly let you affect the behavior of existing APIs (such as Pods), whereas API Access Extensions do.

API access extensions

When a request reaches the Kubernetes API Server, it is first authenticated, then authorized, and is then subject to various types of admission control (some requests are in fact not authenticated, and get special treatment). See Controlling Access to the Kubernetes API for more on this flow.

Each of the steps in the Kubernetes authentication / authorization flow offers extension points.

Authentication

Authentication maps headers or certificates in all requests to a username for the client making the request.

Kubernetes has several built-in authentication methods that it supports. It can also sit behind an authenticating proxy, and it can send a token from an Authorization: header to a remote service for verification (an authentication webhook) if those don't meet your needs.

Authorization

Authorization determines whether specific users can read, write, and do other operations on API resources. It works at the level of whole resources -- it doesn't discriminate based on arbitrary object fields.

If the built-in authorization options don't meet your needs, an authorization webhook allows calling out to custom code that makes an authorization decision.

Dynamic admission control

After a request is authorized, if it is a write operation, it also goes through Admission Control steps. In addition to the built-in steps, there are several extensions:

  • The Image Policy webhook restricts what images can be run in containers.
  • To make arbitrary admission control decisions, a general Admission webhook can be used. Admission webhooks can reject creations or updates. Some admission webhooks modify the incoming request data before it is handled further by Kubernetes.

Infrastructure extensions

Device plugins

Device plugins allow a node to discover new Node resources (in addition to the builtin ones like cpu and memory) via a Device Plugin.

Storage plugins

Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugins provide a way to extend Kubernetes with supports for new kinds of volumes. The volumes can be backed by durable external storage, or provide ephemeral storage, or they might offer a read-only interface to information using a filesystem paradigm.

Kubernetes also includes support for FlexVolume plugins, which are deprecated since Kubernetes v1.23 (in favour of CSI).

FlexVolume plugins allow users to mount volume types that aren't natively supported by Kubernetes. When you run a Pod that relies on FlexVolume storage, the kubelet calls a binary plugin to mount the volume. The archived FlexVolume design proposal has more detail on this approach.

The Kubernetes Volume Plugin FAQ for Storage Vendors includes general information on storage plugins.

Network plugins

Your Kubernetes cluster needs a network plugin in order to have a working Pod network and to support other aspects of the Kubernetes network model.

Network Plugins allow Kubernetes to work with different networking topologies and technologies.

Kubelet image credential provider plugins

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [stable]
Kubelet image credential providers are plugins for the kubelet to dynamically retrieve image registry credentials. The credentials are then used when pulling images from container image registries that match the configuration.

The plugins can communicate with external services or use local files to obtain credentials. This way, the kubelet does not need to have static credentials for each registry, and can support various authentication methods and protocols.

For plugin configuration details, see Configure a kubelet image credential provider.

Scheduling extensions

The scheduler is a special type of controller that watches pods, and assigns pods to nodes. The default scheduler can be replaced entirely, while continuing to use other Kubernetes components, or multiple schedulers can run at the same time.

This is a significant undertaking, and almost all Kubernetes users find they do not need to modify the scheduler.

You can control which scheduling plugins are active, or associate sets of plugins with different named scheduler profiles. You can also write your own plugin that integrates with one or more of the kube-scheduler's extension points.

Finally, the built in kube-scheduler component supports a webhook that permits a remote HTTP backend (scheduler extension) to filter and / or prioritize the nodes that the kube-scheduler chooses for a pod.

What's next

13.1 - Compute, Storage, and Networking Extensions

This section covers extensions to your cluster that do not come as part as Kubernetes itself. You can use these extensions to enhance the nodes in your cluster, or to provide the network fabric that links Pods together.

  • CSI and FlexVolume storage plugins

    Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugins provide a way to extend Kubernetes with supports for new kinds of volumes. The volumes can be backed by durable external storage, or provide ephemeral storage, or they might offer a read-only interface to information using a filesystem paradigm.

    Kubernetes also includes support for FlexVolume plugins, which are deprecated since Kubernetes v1.23 (in favour of CSI).

    FlexVolume plugins allow users to mount volume types that aren't natively supported by Kubernetes. When you run a Pod that relies on FlexVolume storage, the kubelet calls a binary plugin to mount the volume. The archived FlexVolume design proposal has more detail on this approach.

    The Kubernetes Volume Plugin FAQ for Storage Vendors includes general information on storage plugins.

  • Device plugins

    Device plugins allow a node to discover new Node facilities (in addition to the built-in node resources such as cpu and memory), and provide these custom node-local facilities to Pods that request them.

  • Network plugins

    Network plugins allow Kubernetes to work with different networking topologies and technologies. Your Kubernetes cluster needs a network plugin in order to have a working Pod network and to support other aspects of the Kubernetes network model.

    Kubernetes 1.32 is compatible with CNI network plugins.

13.1.1 - Network Plugins

Kubernetes (version 1.3 through to the latest 1.32, and likely onwards) lets you use Container Network Interface (CNI) plugins for cluster networking. You must use a CNI plugin that is compatible with your cluster and that suits your needs. Different plugins are available (both open- and closed- source) in the wider Kubernetes ecosystem.

A CNI plugin is required to implement the Kubernetes network model.

You must use a CNI plugin that is compatible with the v0.4.0 or later releases of the CNI specification. The Kubernetes project recommends using a plugin that is compatible with the v1.0.0 CNI specification (plugins can be compatible with multiple spec versions).

Installation

A Container Runtime, in the networking context, is a daemon on a node configured to provide CRI Services for kubelet. In particular, the Container Runtime must be configured to load the CNI plugins required to implement the Kubernetes network model.

For specific information about how a Container Runtime manages the CNI plugins, see the documentation for that Container Runtime, for example:

For specific information about how to install and manage a CNI plugin, see the documentation for that plugin or networking provider.

Network Plugin Requirements

Loopback CNI

In addition to the CNI plugin installed on the nodes for implementing the Kubernetes network model, Kubernetes also requires the container runtimes to provide a loopback interface lo, which is used for each sandbox (pod sandboxes, vm sandboxes, ...). Implementing the loopback interface can be accomplished by re-using the CNI loopback plugin. or by developing your own code to achieve this (see this example from CRI-O).

Support hostPort

The CNI networking plugin supports hostPort. You can use the official portmap plugin offered by the CNI plugin team or use your own plugin with portMapping functionality.

If you want to enable hostPort support, you must specify portMappings capability in your cni-conf-dir. For example:

{
  "name": "k8s-pod-network",
  "cniVersion": "0.4.0",
  "plugins": [
    {
      "type": "calico",
      "log_level": "info",
      "datastore_type": "kubernetes",
      "nodename": "127.0.0.1",
      "ipam": {
        "type": "host-local",
        "subnet": "usePodCidr"
      },
      "policy": {
        "type": "k8s"
      },
      "kubernetes": {
        "kubeconfig": "/etc/cni/net.d/calico-kubeconfig"
      }
    },
    {
      "type": "portmap",
      "capabilities": {"portMappings": true},
      "externalSetMarkChain": "KUBE-MARK-MASQ"
    }
  ]
}

Support traffic shaping

Experimental Feature

The CNI networking plugin also supports pod ingress and egress traffic shaping. You can use the official bandwidth plugin offered by the CNI plugin team or use your own plugin with bandwidth control functionality.

If you want to enable traffic shaping support, you must add the bandwidth plugin to your CNI configuration file (default /etc/cni/net.d) and ensure that the binary is included in your CNI bin dir (default /opt/cni/bin).

{
  "name": "k8s-pod-network",
  "cniVersion": "0.4.0",
  "plugins": [
    {
      "type": "calico",
      "log_level": "info",
      "datastore_type": "kubernetes",
      "nodename": "127.0.0.1",
      "ipam": {
        "type": "host-local",
        "subnet": "usePodCidr"
      },
      "policy": {
        "type": "k8s"
      },
      "kubernetes": {
        "kubeconfig": "/etc/cni/net.d/calico-kubeconfig"
      }
    },
    {
      "type": "bandwidth",
      "capabilities": {"bandwidth": true}
    }
  ]
}

Now you can add the kubernetes.io/ingress-bandwidth and kubernetes.io/egress-bandwidth annotations to your Pod. For example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress-bandwidth: 1M
    kubernetes.io/egress-bandwidth: 1M
...

What's next

13.1.2 - Device Plugins

Device plugins let you configure your cluster with support for devices or resources that require vendor-specific setup, such as GPUs, NICs, FPGAs, or non-volatile main memory.
FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [stable]

Kubernetes provides a device plugin framework that you can use to advertise system hardware resources to the Kubelet.

Instead of customizing the code for Kubernetes itself, vendors can implement a device plugin that you deploy either manually or as a DaemonSet. The targeted devices include GPUs, high-performance NICs, FPGAs, InfiniBand adapters, and other similar computing resources that may require vendor specific initialization and setup.

Device plugin registration

The kubelet exports a Registration gRPC service:

service Registration {
	rpc Register(RegisterRequest) returns (Empty) {}
}

A device plugin can register itself with the kubelet through this gRPC service. During the registration, the device plugin needs to send:

  • The name of its Unix socket.
  • The Device Plugin API version against which it was built.
  • The ResourceName it wants to advertise. Here ResourceName needs to follow the extended resource naming scheme as vendor-domain/resourcetype. (For example, an NVIDIA GPU is advertised as nvidia.com/gpu.)

Following a successful registration, the device plugin sends the kubelet the list of devices it manages, and the kubelet is then in charge of advertising those resources to the API server as part of the kubelet node status update. For example, after a device plugin registers hardware-vendor.example/foo with the kubelet and reports two healthy devices on a node, the node status is updated to advertise that the node has 2 "Foo" devices installed and available.

Then, users can request devices as part of a Pod specification (see container). Requesting extended resources is similar to how you manage requests and limits for other resources, with the following differences:

  • Extended resources are only supported as integer resources and cannot be overcommitted.
  • Devices cannot be shared between containers.

Example

Suppose a Kubernetes cluster is running a device plugin that advertises resource hardware-vendor.example/foo on certain nodes. Here is an example of a pod requesting this resource to run a demo workload:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: demo-pod
spec:
  containers:
    - name: demo-container-1
      image: registry.k8s.io/pause:2.0
      resources:
        limits:
          hardware-vendor.example/foo: 2
#
# This Pod needs 2 of the hardware-vendor.example/foo devices
# and can only schedule onto a Node that's able to satisfy
# that need.
#
# If the Node has more than 2 of those devices available, the
# remainder would be available for other Pods to use.

Device plugin implementation

The general workflow of a device plugin includes the following steps:

  1. Initialization. During this phase, the device plugin performs vendor-specific initialization and setup to make sure the devices are in a ready state.

  2. The plugin starts a gRPC service, with a Unix socket under the host path /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins/, that implements the following interfaces:

    service DevicePlugin {
      // GetDevicePluginOptions returns options to be communicated with Device Manager.
      rpc GetDevicePluginOptions(Empty) returns (DevicePluginOptions) {}

      // ListAndWatch returns a stream of List of Devices
      // Whenever a Device state change or a Device disappears, ListAndWatch
      // returns the new list
      rpc ListAndWatch(Empty) returns (stream ListAndWatchResponse) {}

      // Allocate is called during container creation so that the Device
      // Plugin can run device specific operations and instruct Kubelet
      // of the steps to make the Device available in the container
      rpc Allocate(AllocateRequest) returns (AllocateResponse) {}

      // GetPreferredAllocation returns a preferred set of devices to allocate
      // from a list of available ones. The resulting preferred allocation is not
      // guaranteed to be the allocation ultimately performed by the
      // devicemanager. It is only designed to help the devicemanager make a more
      // informed allocation decision when possible.
      rpc GetPreferredAllocation(PreferredAllocationRequest) returns (PreferredAllocationResponse) {}

      // PreStartContainer is called, if indicated by Device Plugin during registration phase,
      // before each container start. Device plugin can run device specific operations
      // such as resetting the device before making devices available to the container.
      rpc PreStartContainer(PreStartContainerRequest) returns (PreStartContainerResponse) {}
}

  3. The plugin registers itself with the kubelet through the Unix socket at host path /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins/kubelet.sock.

  4. After successfully registering itself, the device plugin runs in serving mode, during which it keeps monitoring device health and reports back to the kubelet upon any device state changes. It is also responsible for serving Allocate gRPC requests. During Allocate, the device plugin may do device-specific preparation; for example, GPU cleanup or QRNG initialization. If the operations succeed, the device plugin returns an AllocateResponse that contains container runtime configurations for accessing the allocated devices. The kubelet passes this information to the container runtime.

    An AllocateResponse contains zero or more ContainerAllocateResponse objects. In these, the device plugin defines modifications that must be made to a container's definition to provide access to the device. These modifications include:

    • Annotations
    • device nodes
    • environment variables
    • mounts
    • fully-qualified CDI device names

Handling kubelet restarts

A device plugin is expected to detect kubelet restarts and re-register itself with the new kubelet instance. A new kubelet instance deletes all the existing Unix sockets under /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins when it starts. A device plugin can monitor the deletion of its Unix socket and re-register itself upon such an event.

Device plugin and unhealthy devices

There are cases when devices fail or are shut down. The responsibility of the Device Plugin in this case is to notify the kubelet about the situation using the ListAndWatchResponse API.

Once a device is marked as unhealthy, the kubelet will decrease the allocatable count for this resource on the Node to reflect how many devices can be used for scheduling new pods. Capacity count for the resource will not change.

Pods that were assigned to the failed devices will continue be assigned to this device. It is typical that code relying on the device will start failing and Pod may get into Failed phase if restartPolicy for the Pod was not Always or enter the crash loop otherwise.

Before Kubernetes v1.31, the way to know whether or not a Pod is associated with the failed device is to use the PodResources API.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [alpha] (enabled by default: false)

By enabling the feature gate ResourceHealthStatus, the field allocatedResourcesStatus will be added to each container status, within the .status for each Pod. The allocatedResourcesStatus field reports health information for each device assigned to the container.

For a failed Pod, or or where you suspect a fault, you can use this status to understand whether the Pod behavior may be associated with device failure. For example, if an accelerator is reporting an over-temperature event, the allocatedResourcesStatus field may be able to report this.

Device plugin deployment

You can deploy a device plugin as a DaemonSet, as a package for your node's operating system, or manually.

The canonical directory /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins requires privileged access, so a device plugin must run in a privileged security context. If you're deploying a device plugin as a DaemonSet, /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins must be mounted as a Volume in the plugin's PodSpec.

If you choose the DaemonSet approach you can rely on Kubernetes to: place the device plugin's Pod onto Nodes, to restart the daemon Pod after failure, and to help automate upgrades.

API compatibility

Previously, the versioning scheme required the Device Plugin's API version to match exactly the Kubelet's version. Since the graduation of this feature to Beta in v1.12 this is no longer a hard requirement. The API is versioned and has been stable since Beta graduation of this feature. Because of this, kubelet upgrades should be seamless but there still may be changes in the API before stabilization making upgrades not guaranteed to be non-breaking.

As a project, Kubernetes recommends that device plugin developers:

  • Watch for Device Plugin API changes in the future releases.
  • Support multiple versions of the device plugin API for backward/forward compatibility.

To run device plugins on nodes that need to be upgraded to a Kubernetes release with a newer device plugin API version, upgrade your device plugins to support both versions before upgrading these nodes. Taking that approach will ensure the continuous functioning of the device allocations during the upgrade.

Monitoring device plugin resources

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.28 [stable]

In order to monitor resources provided by device plugins, monitoring agents need to be able to discover the set of devices that are in-use on the node and obtain metadata to describe which container the metric should be associated with. Prometheus metrics exposed by device monitoring agents should follow the Kubernetes Instrumentation Guidelines, identifying containers using pod, namespace, and container prometheus labels.

The kubelet provides a gRPC service to enable discovery of in-use devices, and to provide metadata for these devices:

// PodResourcesLister is a service provided by the kubelet that provides information about the
// node resources consumed by pods and containers on the node
service PodResourcesLister {
    rpc List(ListPodResourcesRequest) returns (ListPodResourcesResponse) {}
    rpc GetAllocatableResources(AllocatableResourcesRequest) returns (AllocatableResourcesResponse) {}
    rpc Get(GetPodResourcesRequest) returns (GetPodResourcesResponse) {}
}

List gRPC endpoint

The List endpoint provides information on resources of running pods, with details such as the id of exclusively allocated CPUs, device id as it was reported by device plugins and id of the NUMA node where these devices are allocated. Also, for NUMA-based machines, it contains the information about memory and hugepages reserved for a container.

Starting from Kubernetes v1.27, the List endpoint can provide information on resources of running pods allocated in ResourceClaims by the DynamicResourceAllocation API. To enable this feature kubelet must be started with the following flags:

--feature-gates=DynamicResourceAllocation=true,KubeletPodResourcesDynamicResources=true

// ListPodResourcesResponse is the response returned by List function
message ListPodResourcesResponse {
    repeated PodResources pod_resources = 1;
}

// PodResources contains information about the node resources assigned to a pod
message PodResources {
    string name = 1;
    string namespace = 2;
    repeated ContainerResources containers = 3;
}

// ContainerResources contains information about the resources assigned to a container
message ContainerResources {
    string name = 1;
    repeated ContainerDevices devices = 2;
    repeated int64 cpu_ids = 3;
    repeated ContainerMemory memory = 4;
    repeated DynamicResource dynamic_resources = 5;
}

// ContainerMemory contains information about memory and hugepages assigned to a container
message ContainerMemory {
    string memory_type = 1;
    uint64 size = 2;
    TopologyInfo topology = 3;
}

// Topology describes hardware topology of the resource
message TopologyInfo {
        repeated NUMANode nodes = 1;
}

// NUMA representation of NUMA node
message NUMANode {
        int64 ID = 1;
}

// ContainerDevices contains information about the devices assigned to a container
message ContainerDevices {
    string resource_name = 1;
    repeated string device_ids = 2;
    TopologyInfo topology = 3;
}

// DynamicResource contains information about the devices assigned to a container by Dynamic Resource Allocation
message DynamicResource {
    string class_name = 1;
    string claim_name = 2;
    string claim_namespace = 3;
    repeated ClaimResource claim_resources = 4;
}

// ClaimResource contains per-plugin resource information
message ClaimResource {
    repeated CDIDevice cdi_devices = 1 [(gogoproto.customname) = "CDIDevices"];
}

// CDIDevice specifies a CDI device information
message CDIDevice {
    // Fully qualified CDI device name
    // for example: vendor.com/gpu=gpudevice1
    // see more details in the CDI specification:
    // https://github.com/container-orchestrated-devices/container-device-interface/blob/main/SPEC.md
    string name = 1;
}

GetAllocatableResources gRPC endpoint

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.28 [stable]

GetAllocatableResources provides information on resources initially available on the worker node. It provides more information than kubelet exports to APIServer.

// AllocatableResourcesResponses contains information about all the devices known by the kubelet
message AllocatableResourcesResponse {
    repeated ContainerDevices devices = 1;
    repeated int64 cpu_ids = 2;
    repeated ContainerMemory memory = 3;
}

ContainerDevices do expose the topology information declaring to which NUMA cells the device is affine. The NUMA cells are identified using a opaque integer ID, which value is consistent to what device plugins report when they register themselves to the kubelet.

The gRPC service is served over a unix socket at /var/lib/kubelet/pod-resources/kubelet.sock. Monitoring agents for device plugin resources can be deployed as a daemon, or as a DaemonSet. The canonical directory /var/lib/kubelet/pod-resources requires privileged access, so monitoring agents must run in a privileged security context. If a device monitoring agent is running as a DaemonSet, /var/lib/kubelet/pod-resources must be mounted as a Volume in the device monitoring agent's PodSpec.

Get gRPC endpoint

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [alpha]

The Get endpoint provides information on resources of a running Pod. It exposes information similar to those described in the List endpoint. The Get endpoint requires PodName and PodNamespace of the running Pod.

// GetPodResourcesRequest contains information about the pod
message GetPodResourcesRequest {
    string pod_name = 1;
    string pod_namespace = 2;
}

To enable this feature, you must start your kubelet services with the following flag:

--feature-gates=KubeletPodResourcesGet=true

The Get endpoint can provide Pod information related to dynamic resources allocated by the dynamic resource allocation API. To enable this feature, you must ensure your kubelet services are started with the following flags:

--feature-gates=KubeletPodResourcesGet=true,DynamicResourceAllocation=true,KubeletPodResourcesDynamicResources=true

Device plugin integration with the Topology Manager

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [stable]

The Topology Manager is a Kubelet component that allows resources to be co-ordinated in a Topology aligned manner. In order to do this, the Device Plugin API was extended to include a TopologyInfo struct.

message TopologyInfo {
    repeated NUMANode nodes = 1;
}

message NUMANode {
    int64 ID = 1;
}

Device Plugins that wish to leverage the Topology Manager can send back a populated TopologyInfo struct as part of the device registration, along with the device IDs and the health of the device. The device manager will then use this information to consult with the Topology Manager and make resource assignment decisions.

TopologyInfo supports setting a nodes field to either nil or a list of NUMA nodes. This allows the Device Plugin to advertise a device that spans multiple NUMA nodes.

Setting TopologyInfo to nil or providing an empty list of NUMA nodes for a given device indicates that the Device Plugin does not have a NUMA affinity preference for that device.

An example TopologyInfo struct populated for a device by a Device Plugin:

pluginapi.Device{ID: "25102017", Health: pluginapi.Healthy, Topology:&pluginapi.TopologyInfo{Nodes: []*pluginapi.NUMANode{&pluginapi.NUMANode{ID: 0,},}}}

Device plugin examples

Here are some examples of device plugin implementations:

What's next

13.2 - Extending the Kubernetes API

Custom resources are extensions of the Kubernetes API. Kubernetes provides two ways to add custom resources to your cluster:

  • The CustomResourceDefinition (CRD) mechanism allows you to declaratively define a new custom API with an API group, kind, and schema that you specify. The Kubernetes control plane serves and handles the storage of your custom resource. CRDs allow you to create new types of resources for your cluster without writing and running a custom API server.
  • The aggregation layer sits behind the primary API server, which acts as a proxy. This arrangement is called API Aggregation (AA), which allows you to provide specialized implementations for your custom resources by writing and deploying your own API server. The main API server delegates requests to your API server for the custom APIs that you specify, making them available to all of its clients.

13.2.1 - Custom Resources

Custom resources are extensions of the Kubernetes API. This page discusses when to add a custom resource to your Kubernetes cluster and when to use a standalone service. It describes the two methods for adding custom resources and how to choose between them.

Custom resources

A resource is an endpoint in the Kubernetes API that stores a collection of API objects of a certain kind; for example, the built-in pods resource contains a collection of Pod objects.

A custom resource is an extension of the Kubernetes API that is not necessarily available in a default Kubernetes installation. It represents a customization of a particular Kubernetes installation. However, many core Kubernetes functions are now built using custom resources, making Kubernetes more modular.

Custom resources can appear and disappear in a running cluster through dynamic registration, and cluster admins can update custom resources independently of the cluster itself. Once a custom resource is installed, users can create and access its objects using kubectl, just as they do for built-in resources like Pods.

Custom controllers

On their own, custom resources let you store and retrieve structured data. When you combine a custom resource with a custom controller, custom resources provide a true declarative API.

The Kubernetes declarative API enforces a separation of responsibilities. You declare the desired state of your resource. The Kubernetes controller keeps the current state of Kubernetes objects in sync with your declared desired state. This is in contrast to an imperative API, where you instruct a server what to do.

You can deploy and update a custom controller on a running cluster, independently of the cluster's lifecycle. Custom controllers can work with any kind of resource, but they are especially effective when combined with custom resources. The Operator pattern combines custom resources and custom controllers. You can use custom controllers to encode domain knowledge for specific applications into an extension of the Kubernetes API.

Should I add a custom resource to my Kubernetes cluster?

When creating a new API, consider whether to aggregate your API with the Kubernetes cluster APIs or let your API stand alone.

Consider API aggregation if: Prefer a stand-alone API if:
Your API is Declarative. Your API does not fit the Declarative model.
You want your new types to be readable and writable using kubectl. kubectl support is not required
You want to view your new types in a Kubernetes UI, such as dashboard, alongside built-in types. Kubernetes UI support is not required.
You are developing a new API. You already have a program that serves your API and works well.
You are willing to accept the format restriction that Kubernetes puts on REST resource paths, such as API Groups and Namespaces. (See the API Overview.) You need to have specific REST paths to be compatible with an already defined REST API.
Your resources are naturally scoped to a cluster or namespaces of a cluster. Cluster or namespace scoped resources are a poor fit; you need control over the specifics of resource paths.
You want to reuse Kubernetes API support features. You don't need those features.

Declarative APIs

In a Declarative API, typically:

  • Your API consists of a relatively small number of relatively small objects (resources).
  • The objects define configuration of applications or infrastructure.
  • The objects are updated relatively infrequently.
  • Humans often need to read and write the objects.
  • The main operations on the objects are CRUD-y (creating, reading, updating and deleting).
  • Transactions across objects are not required: the API represents a desired state, not an exact state.

Imperative APIs are not declarative. Signs that your API might not be declarative include:

  • The client says "do this", and then gets a synchronous response back when it is done.
  • The client says "do this", and then gets an operation ID back, and has to check a separate Operation object to determine completion of the request.
  • You talk about Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs).
  • Directly storing large amounts of data; for example, > a few kB per object, or > 1000s of objects.
  • High bandwidth access (10s of requests per second sustained) needed.
  • Store end-user data (such as images, PII, etc.) or other large-scale data processed by applications.
  • The natural operations on the objects are not CRUD-y.
  • The API is not easily modeled as objects.
  • You chose to represent pending operations with an operation ID or an operation object.

Should I use a ConfigMap or a custom resource?

Use a ConfigMap if any of the following apply:

  • There is an existing, well-documented configuration file format, such as a mysql.cnf or pom.xml.
  • You want to put the entire configuration into one key of a ConfigMap.
  • The main use of the configuration file is for a program running in a Pod on your cluster to consume the file to configure itself.
  • Consumers of the file prefer to consume via file in a Pod or environment variable in a pod, rather than the Kubernetes API.
  • You want to perform rolling updates via Deployment, etc., when the file is updated.

Use a custom resource (CRD or Aggregated API) if most of the following apply:

  • You want to use Kubernetes client libraries and CLIs to create and update the new resource.
  • You want top-level support from kubectl; for example, kubectl get my-object object-name.
  • You want to build new automation that watches for updates on the new object, and then CRUD other objects, or vice versa.
  • You want to write automation that handles updates to the object.
  • You want to use Kubernetes API conventions like .spec, .status, and .metadata.
  • You want the object to be an abstraction over a collection of controlled resources, or a summarization of other resources.

Adding custom resources

Kubernetes provides two ways to add custom resources to your cluster:

  • CRDs are simple and can be created without any programming.
  • API Aggregation requires programming, but allows more control over API behaviors like how data is stored and conversion between API versions.

Kubernetes provides these two options to meet the needs of different users, so that neither ease of use nor flexibility is compromised.

Aggregated APIs are subordinate API servers that sit behind the primary API server, which acts as a proxy. This arrangement is called API Aggregation(AA). To users, the Kubernetes API appears extended.

CRDs allow users to create new types of resources without adding another API server. You do not need to understand API Aggregation to use CRDs.

Regardless of how they are installed, the new resources are referred to as Custom Resources to distinguish them from built-in Kubernetes resources (like pods).

CustomResourceDefinitions

The CustomResourceDefinition API resource allows you to define custom resources. Defining a CRD object creates a new custom resource with a name and schema that you specify. The Kubernetes API serves and handles the storage of your custom resource. The name of the CRD object itself must be a valid DNS subdomain name derived from the defined resource name and its API group; see how to create a CRD for more details. Further, the name of an object whose kind/resource is defined by a CRD must also be a valid DNS subdomain name.

This frees you from writing your own API server to handle the custom resource, but the generic nature of the implementation means you have less flexibility than with API server aggregation.

Refer to the custom controller example for an example of how to register a new custom resource, work with instances of your new resource type, and use a controller to handle events.

API server aggregation

Usually, each resource in the Kubernetes API requires code that handles REST requests and manages persistent storage of objects. The main Kubernetes API server handles built-in resources like pods and services, and can also generically handle custom resources through CRDs.

The aggregation layer allows you to provide specialized implementations for your custom resources by writing and deploying your own API server. The main API server delegates requests to your API server for the custom resources that you handle, making them available to all of its clients.

Choosing a method for adding custom resources

CRDs are easier to use. Aggregated APIs are more flexible. Choose the method that best meets your needs.

Typically, CRDs are a good fit if:

  • You have a handful of fields
  • You are using the resource within your company, or as part of a small open-source project (as opposed to a commercial product)

Comparing ease of use

CRDs are easier to create than Aggregated APIs.

CRDs Aggregated API
Do not require programming. Users can choose any language for a CRD controller. Requires programming and building binary and image.
No additional service to run; CRDs are handled by API server. An additional service to create and that could fail.
No ongoing support once the CRD is created. Any bug fixes are picked up as part of normal Kubernetes Master upgrades. May need to periodically pickup bug fixes from upstream and rebuild and update the Aggregated API server.
No need to handle multiple versions of your API; for example, when you control the client for this resource, you can upgrade it in sync with the API. You need to handle multiple versions of your API; for example, when developing an extension to share with the world.

Advanced features and flexibility

Aggregated APIs offer more advanced API features and customization of other features; for example, the storage layer.

Feature Description CRDs Aggregated API
Validation Help users prevent errors and allow you to evolve your API independently of your clients. These features are most useful when there are many clients who can't all update at the same time. Yes. Most validation can be specified in the CRD using OpenAPI v3.0 validation. CRDValidationRatcheting feature gate allows failing validations specified using OpenAPI also can be ignored if the failing part of the resource was unchanged. Any other validations supported by addition of a Validating Webhook. Yes, arbitrary validation checks
Defaulting See above Yes, either via OpenAPI v3.0 validation default keyword (GA in 1.17), or via a Mutating Webhook (though this will not be run when reading from etcd for old objects). Yes
Multi-versioning Allows serving the same object through two API versions. Can help ease API changes like renaming fields. Less important if you control your client versions. Yes Yes
Custom Storage If you need storage with a different performance mode (for example, a time-series database instead of key-value store) or isolation for security (for example, encryption of sensitive information, etc.) No Yes
Custom Business Logic Perform arbitrary checks or actions when creating, reading, updating or deleting an object Yes, using Webhooks. Yes
Scale Subresource Allows systems like HorizontalPodAutoscaler and PodDisruptionBudget interact with your new resource Yes Yes
Status Subresource Allows fine-grained access control where user writes the spec section and the controller writes the status section. Allows incrementing object Generation on custom resource data mutation (requires separate spec and status sections in the resource) Yes Yes
Other Subresources Add operations other than CRUD, such as "logs" or "exec". No Yes
strategic-merge-patch The new endpoints support PATCH with Content-Type: application/strategic-merge-patch+json. Useful for updating objects that may be modified both locally, and by the server. For more information, see "Update API Objects in Place Using kubectl patch" No Yes
Protocol Buffers The new resource supports clients that want to use Protocol Buffers No Yes
OpenAPI Schema Is there an OpenAPI (swagger) schema for the types that can be dynamically fetched from the server? Is the user protected from misspelling field names by ensuring only allowed fields are set? Are types enforced (in other words, don't put an int in a string field?) Yes, based on the OpenAPI v3.0 validation schema (GA in 1.16). Yes
Instance Name Does this extension mechanism impose any constraints on the names of objects whose kind/resource is defined this way? Yes, such an object's name must be a valid DNS subdomain name. No

Common Features

When you create a custom resource, either via a CRD or an AA, you get many features for your API, compared to implementing it outside the Kubernetes platform:

Feature What it does
CRUD The new endpoints support CRUD basic operations via HTTP and kubectl
Watch The new endpoints support Kubernetes Watch operations via HTTP
Discovery Clients like kubectl and dashboard automatically offer list, display, and field edit operations on your resources
json-patch The new endpoints support PATCH with Content-Type: application/json-patch+json
merge-patch The new endpoints support PATCH with Content-Type: application/merge-patch+json
HTTPS The new endpoints uses HTTPS
Built-in Authentication Access to the extension uses the core API server (aggregation layer) for authentication
Built-in Authorization Access to the extension can reuse the authorization used by the core API server; for example, RBAC.
Finalizers Block deletion of extension resources until external cleanup happens.
Admission Webhooks Set default values and validate extension resources during any create/update/delete operation.
UI/CLI Display Kubectl, dashboard can display extension resources.
Unset versus Empty Clients can distinguish unset fields from zero-valued fields.
Client Libraries Generation Kubernetes provides generic client libraries, as well as tools to generate type-specific client libraries.
Labels and annotations Common metadata across objects that tools know how to edit for core and custom resources.

Preparing to install a custom resource

There are several points to be aware of before adding a custom resource to your cluster.

Third party code and new points of failure

While creating a CRD does not automatically add any new points of failure (for example, by causing third party code to run on your API server), packages (for example, Charts) or other installation bundles often include CRDs as well as a Deployment of third-party code that implements the business logic for a new custom resource.

Installing an Aggregated API server always involves running a new Deployment.

Storage

Custom resources consume storage space in the same way that ConfigMaps do. Creating too many custom resources may overload your API server's storage space.

Aggregated API servers may use the same storage as the main API server, in which case the same warning applies.

Authentication, authorization, and auditing

CRDs always use the same authentication, authorization, and audit logging as the built-in resources of your API server.

If you use RBAC for authorization, most RBAC roles will not grant access to the new resources (except the cluster-admin role or any role created with wildcard rules). You'll need to explicitly grant access to the new resources. CRDs and Aggregated APIs often come bundled with new role definitions for the types they add.

Aggregated API servers may or may not use the same authentication, authorization, and auditing as the primary API server.

Accessing a custom resource

Kubernetes client libraries can be used to access custom resources. Not all client libraries support custom resources. The Go and Python client libraries do.

When you add a custom resource, you can access it using:

  • kubectl
  • The Kubernetes dynamic client.
  • A REST client that you write.
  • A client generated using Kubernetes client generation tools (generating one is an advanced undertaking, but some projects may provide a client along with the CRD or AA).

Custom resource field selectors

Field Selectors let clients select custom resources based on the value of one or more resource fields.

All custom resources support the metadata.name and metadata.namespace field selectors.

Fields declared in a CustomResourceDefinition may also be used with field selectors when included in the spec.versions[*].selectableFields field of the CustomResourceDefinition.

Selectable fields for custom resources

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.32 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

The spec.versions[*].selectableFields field of a CustomResourceDefinition may be used to declare which other fields in a custom resource may be used in field selectors.

The following example adds the .spec.color and .spec.size fields as selectable fields.

customresourcedefinition/shirt-resource-definition.yaml 
apiVersion: apiextensions.k8s.io/v1
kind: CustomResourceDefinition
metadata:
  name: shirts.stable.example.com
spec:
  group: stable.example.com
  scope: Namespaced
  names:
    plural: shirts
    singular: shirt
    kind: Shirt
  versions:
  - name: v1
    served: true
    storage: true
    schema:
      openAPIV3Schema:
        type: object
        properties:
          spec:
            type: object
            properties:
              color:
                type: string
              size:
                type: string
    selectableFields:
    - jsonPath: .spec.color
    - jsonPath: .spec.size
    additionalPrinterColumns:
    - jsonPath: .spec.color
      name: Color
      type: string
    - jsonPath: .spec.size
      name: Size
      type: string

Field selectors can then be used to get only resources with a color of blue:

kubectl get shirts.stable.example.com --field-selector spec.color=blue

The output should be:

NAME       COLOR  SIZE
example1   blue   S
example2   blue   M

What's next

13.2.2 - Kubernetes API Aggregation Layer

The aggregation layer allows Kubernetes to be extended with additional APIs, beyond what is offered by the core Kubernetes APIs. The additional APIs can either be ready-made solutions such as a metrics server, or APIs that you develop yourself.

The aggregation layer is different from Custom Resource Definitions, which are a way to make the kube-apiserver recognise new kinds of object.

Aggregation layer

The aggregation layer runs in-process with the kube-apiserver. Until an extension resource is registered, the aggregation layer will do nothing. To register an API, you add an APIService object, which "claims" the URL path in the Kubernetes API. At that point, the aggregation layer will proxy anything sent to that API path (e.g. /apis/myextension.mycompany.io/v1/…) to the registered APIService.

The most common way to implement the APIService is to run an extension API server in Pod(s) that run in your cluster. If you're using the extension API server to manage resources in your cluster, the extension API server (also written as "extension-apiserver") is typically paired with one or more controllers. The apiserver-builder library provides a skeleton for both extension API servers and the associated controller(s).

Response latency

Extension API servers should have low latency networking to and from the kube-apiserver. Discovery requests are required to round-trip from the kube-apiserver in five seconds or less.

If your extension API server cannot achieve that latency requirement, consider making changes that let you meet it.

What's next

Alternatively: learn how to extend the Kubernetes API using Custom Resource Definitions.

13.3 - Operator pattern

Operators are software extensions to Kubernetes that make use of custom resources to manage applications and their components. Operators follow Kubernetes principles, notably the control loop.

Motivation

The operator pattern aims to capture the key aim of a human operator who is managing a service or set of services. Human operators who look after specific applications and services have deep knowledge of how the system ought to behave, how to deploy it, and how to react if there are problems.

People who run workloads on Kubernetes often like to use automation to take care of repeatable tasks. The operator pattern captures how you can write code to automate a task beyond what Kubernetes itself provides.

Operators in Kubernetes

Kubernetes is designed for automation. Out of the box, you get lots of built-in automation from the core of Kubernetes. You can use Kubernetes to automate deploying and running workloads, and you can automate how Kubernetes does that.

Kubernetes' operator pattern concept lets you extend the cluster's behaviour without modifying the code of Kubernetes itself by linking controllers to one or more custom resources. Operators are clients of the Kubernetes API that act as controllers for a Custom Resource.

An example operator

Some of the things that you can use an operator to automate include:

  • deploying an application on demand
  • taking and restoring backups of that application's state
  • handling upgrades of the application code alongside related changes such as database schemas or extra configuration settings
  • publishing a Service to applications that don't support Kubernetes APIs to discover them
  • simulating failure in all or part of your cluster to test its resilience
  • choosing a leader for a distributed application without an internal member election process

What might an operator look like in more detail? Here's an example:

  1. A custom resource named SampleDB, that you can configure into the cluster.
  2. A Deployment that makes sure a Pod is running that contains the controller part of the operator.
  3. A container image of the operator code.
  4. Controller code that queries the control plane to find out what SampleDB resources are configured.
  5. The core of the operator is code to tell the API server how to make reality match the configured resources.
    • If you add a new SampleDB, the operator sets up PersistentVolumeClaims to provide durable database storage, a StatefulSet to run SampleDB and a Job to handle initial configuration.
    • If you delete it, the operator takes a snapshot, then makes sure that the StatefulSet and Volumes are also removed.
  6. The operator also manages regular database backups. For each SampleDB resource, the operator determines when to create a Pod that can connect to the database and take backups. These Pods would rely on a ConfigMap and / or a Secret that has database connection details and credentials.
  7. Because the operator aims to provide robust automation for the resource it manages, there would be additional supporting code. For this example, code checks to see if the database is running an old version and, if so, creates Job objects that upgrade it for you.

Deploying operators

The most common way to deploy an operator is to add the Custom Resource Definition and its associated Controller to your cluster. The Controller will normally run outside of the control plane, much as you would run any containerized application. For example, you can run the controller in your cluster as a Deployment.

Using an operator

Once you have an operator deployed, you'd use it by adding, modifying or deleting the kind of resource that the operator uses. Following the above example, you would set up a Deployment for the operator itself, and then:

kubectl get SampleDB                   # find configured databases

kubectl edit SampleDB/example-database # manually change some settings

…and that's it! The operator will take care of applying the changes as well as keeping the existing service in good shape.

Writing your own operator

If there isn't an operator in the ecosystem that implements the behavior you want, you can code your own.

You also implement an operator (that is, a Controller) using any language / runtime that can act as a client for the Kubernetes API.

Following are a few libraries and tools you can use to write your own cloud native operator.

What's next