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Concepts
1: Overview
1.1: Objects In Kubernetes
1.1.1: Kubernetes Object Management
1.1.2: Object Names and IDs
1.1.3: Labels and Selectors
1.1.4: Namespaces
1.1.5: Annotations
1.1.6: Field Selectors
1.1.7: Finalizers
1.1.8: Owners and Dependents
1.1.9: Recommended Labels
1.2: Kubernetes Components
1.3: The Kubernetes API
2: Cluster Architecture
2.1: Nodes
2.2: Communication between Nodes and the Control Plane
2.3: Controllers
2.4: Leases
2.5: Cloud Controller Manager
2.6: About cgroup v2
2.7: Container Runtime Interface (CRI)
2.8: Garbage Collection
2.9: Mixed Version Proxy
3: Containers
3.1: Images
3.2: Container Environment
3.3: Runtime Class
3.4: Container Lifecycle Hooks
4: Workloads
4.1: Pods
4.1.1: Pod Lifecycle
4.1.2: Init Containers
4.1.3: Sidecar Containers
4.1.4: Ephemeral Containers
4.1.5: Disruptions
4.1.6: Pod Quality of Service Classes
4.1.7: User Namespaces
4.1.8: Downward API
4.2: Workload Management
4.2.1: Deployments
4.2.2: ReplicaSet
4.2.3: StatefulSets
4.2.4: DaemonSet
4.2.5: Jobs
4.2.6: Automatic Cleanup for Finished Jobs
4.2.7: CronJob
4.2.8: ReplicationController
4.3: Autoscaling Workloads
4.4: Managing Workloads
5: Services, Load Balancing, and Networking
5.1: Service
5.2: Ingress
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5.3: Ingress Controllers

5.4: Gateway API
5.5: EndpointSlices
5.6: Network Policies
5.7: DNS for Services and Pods
5.8: IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack
5.9: Topology Aware Routing
5.10: Networking on Windows
5.11: Service ClusterIP allocation
5.12: Service Internal Traffic Policy
6: Storage
6.1: Volumes
6.2: Persistent Volumes
6.3: Projected Volumes
6.4: Ephemeral Volumes
6.5: Storage Classes
6.6: Volume Attributes Classes
6.7: Dynamic Volume Provisioning
6.8: Volume Snapshots
6.9: Volume Snapshot Classes
6.10: CSI Volume Cloning
6.11: Storage Capacity
6.12: Node-specific Volume Limits
6.13: Volume Health Monitoring
6.14: Windows Storage
7: Configuration
7.1: Configuration Best Practices
7.2: ConfigMaps
7.3: Secrets
7.4: Resource Management for Pods and Containers
7.5: Organizing Cluster Access Using kubeconfig Files
7.6: Resource Management for Windows nodes
8: Security
8.1: Cloud Native Security and Kubernetes
8.2: Pod Security Standards
8.3: Pod Security Admission
8.4: Service Accounts
8.5: Pod Security Policies
8.6: Security For Windows Nodes
8.7: Controlling Access to the Kubernetes API
8.8: Role Based Access Control Good Practices
8.9: Good practices for Kubernetes Secrets
8.10: Multi-tenancy
8.11: Hardening Guide - Authentication Mechanisms
8.12: Kubernetes API Server Bypass Risks
8.13: Linux kernel security constraints for Pods and containers
8.14: Security Checklist
9: Policies
9.1: Limit Ranges
9.2: Resource Quotas
9.3: Process ID Limits And Reservations
9.4: Node Resource Managers
10: Scheduling, Preemption and Eviction
10.1: Kubernetes Scheduler
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10.2: Assigning Pods to Nodes

10.3: Pod Overhead
10.4: Pod Scheduling Readiness
10.5: Pod Topology Spread Constraints
10.6: Taints and Tolerations
10.7: Scheduling Framework
10.8: Dynamic Resource Allocation
10.9: Scheduler Performance Tuning
10.10: Resource Bin Packing
10.11: Pod Priority and Preemption
10.12: Node-pressure Eviction
10.13: API-initiated Eviction
11: Cluster Administration
11.1: Node Shutdowns
11.2: Certificates
11.3: Cluster Networking
11.4: Logging Architecture
11.5: Metrics For Kubernetes System Components
11.6: Metrics for Kubernetes Object States
11.7: System Logs
11.8: Traces For Kubernetes System Components
11.9: Proxies in Kubernetes
11.10: API Priority and Fairness
11.11: Cluster Autoscaling
11.12: Installing Addons
12: Windows in Kubernetes
12.1: Windows containers in Kubernetes
12.2: Guide for Running Windows Containers in Kubernetes
13: Extending Kubernetes
13.1: Compute, Storage, and Networking Extensions
13.1.1: Network Plugins
13.1.2: Device Plugins
13.2: Extending the Kubernetes API
13.2.1: Custom Resources
13.2.2: Kubernetes API Aggregation Layer
13.3: Operator pattern

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.

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.

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.

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Going back in time

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

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.

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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.

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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.

What's next
Take a look at the Kubernetes Components
Take a look at the The Kubernetes API
Take a look at the Cluster Architecture
Ready to Get Started?

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1.1 - 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

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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.

Note:
See Configuration Best Practices for additional information on writing YAML configuration files.

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.

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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:

Pods which are the most important basic Kubernetes objects.

Deployment objects.
Controllers in Kubernetes.
kubectl and kubectl commands.

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:

Kubernetes API overview

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

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1.1.1 - 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
Warning:
A Kubernetes object should be managed using only one technique. Mixing and matching techniques for the same object results
in undefined behavior.

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.

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Warning:
The imperative replace command replaces the existing spec with the newly provided one, dropping all changes to the object
missing from the configuration file. This approach should not be used with resource types whose specs are updated
independently of the configuration file. Services of type LoadBalancer, for example, have their externalIPs field updated
independently from the configuration by the cluster.

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.

Note:
Declarative object configuration retains changes made by other writers, even if the changes are not merged back to the object
configuration file. This is possible by using the patch API operation to write only observed differences, instead of using the
replace API operation to replace the entire object configuration.

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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
Managing Kubernetes Objects Using Imperative Commands
Imperative Management of Kubernetes Objects Using Configuration Files
Declarative Management of Kubernetes Objects Using Configuration Files
Declarative Management of Kubernetes Objects Using Kustomize
Kubectl Command Reference
Kubectl Book
Kubernetes API Reference

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1.1.2 - 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.

Note:
In cases when objects represent a physical entity, like a Node representing a physical host, when the host is re-created under
the same name without deleting and re-creating the Node, Kubernetes treats the new host as the old one, which may lead to
inconsistencies.

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

Note:
The only difference between the RFC 1035 and RFC 1123 label standards is that RFC 1123 labels are allowed to start with a digit,
whereas RFC 1035 labels can start with a lowercase alphabetic character only.

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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

Note:
Some resource types have additional restrictions on their names.

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
Read about labels and annotations in Kubernetes.
See the Identifiers and Names in Kubernetes design document.

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1.1.3 - 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 :

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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.

Note:
For some API types, such as ReplicaSets, the label selectors of two instances must not overlap within a namespace, or the
controller can see that as conflicting instructions and fail to determine how many replicas should be present.

Caution:
For both equality-based and set-based conditions there is no logical OR (||) operator. Ensure your filter statements are
structured accordingly.

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 with the label " accelerator=nvidia-tesla-p100 ".

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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
LIST and WATCH operations may specify label selectors to filter the sets of objects returned using a query parameter. 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:
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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.

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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

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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
Learn how to add a label to a node
Find Well-known labels, Annotations and Taints
See Recommended labels
Enforce Pod Security Standards with Namespace Labels
Read a blog on Writing a Controller for Pod Labels

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1.1.4 - 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.

Note:
For a production cluster, consider not using the default namespace. Instead, make other namespaces and use those.

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.

Note:
Avoid creating namespaces with the prefix `kube-`, since it is reserved for Kubernetes system namespaces.

Viewing namespaces
You can list the current namespaces in a cluster using:

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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.

Warning:
By creating namespaces with the same name as public top-level domains, Services in these namespaces can have short DNS
names that overlap with public DNS records. Workloads from any namespace performing a DNS lookup without a trailing dot
will be redirected to those services, taking precedence over public DNS.

To mitigate this, limit privileges for creating namespaces to trusted users. If required, you could additionally configure third-
party security controls, such as admission webhooks, to block creating any namespace with the name of public TLDs.

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:

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# 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
Learn more about creating a new namespace.
Learn more about deleting a namespace.

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1.1.5 - 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"
}
}

Note:
The keys and the values in the map must be strings. In other words, you cannot use numeric, boolean, list or other types for
either the keys or the values.

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.

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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
Learn more about Labels and Selectors.
Find Well-known labels, Annotations and Taints

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1.1.6 - 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

Note:
Field selectors are essentially resource filters. By default, no selectors/filters are applied, meaning that all resources of the
specified type are selected. This makes the kubectl queries kubectl get pods and kubectl get pods --field-selector ""
equivalent.

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.ba

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

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Kind Fields

Secret type

Namespace status.phase

ReplicaSet status.replicas

ReplicationController status.replicas

Job status.successful

Node spec.unschedulable

CertificateSigningRequest spec.signerName

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

Note:
Set-based operators (in, notin, exists) are not supported for field selectors.

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

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1.1.7 - 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.

Note:
When you DELETE an object, Kubernetes adds the deletion timestamp for that object and then immediately starts to
restrict changes to the .metadata.finalizers field for the object that is now pending deletion. You can remove existing
finalizers (deleting an entry from the finalizers list) but you cannot add a new finalizer. You also cannot modify the
deletionTimestamp for an object once it is set.

After the deletion is requested, you can not resurrect this object. The only way is to delete it and make a new similar object.

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.

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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.

Note:
In cases where objects are stuck in a deleting state, avoid manually removing finalizers to allow deletion to continue. Finalizers
are usually added to resources for a reason, so forcefully removing them can lead to issues in your cluster. This should only be
done when the purpose of the finalizer is understood and is accomplished in another way (for example, manually cleaning up
some dependent object).

What's next
Read Using Finalizers to Control Deletion on the Kubernetes blog.

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1.1.8 - 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.

Note:
Cross-namespace owner references are disallowed by design. Namespaced dependents can specify cluster-scoped or
namespaced owners. A namespaced owner must exist in the same namespace as the dependent. If it does not, the owner
reference is treated as absent, and the dependent is subject to deletion once all owners are verified absent.

Cluster-scoped dependents can only specify cluster-scoped owners. In v1.20+, if a cluster-scoped dependent specifies a
namespaced kind as an owner, it is treated as having an unresolvable owner reference, and is not able to be garbage collected.

In v1.20+, if the garbage collector detects an invalid cross-namespace ownerReference , or a cluster-scoped dependent with an
ownerReference referencing a namespaced kind, a warning Event with a reason of OwnerRefInvalidNamespace and an
involvedObject of the invalid dependent is reported. You can check for that kind of Event by running kubectl get events -A --
field-selector=reason=OwnerRefInvalidNamespace .

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
Learn more about Kubernetes finalizers.
Learn about garbage collection.
Read the API reference for object metadata.

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1.1.9 - 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.

Note:
These are recommended labels. They make it easier to manage applications but aren't required for any core tooling.

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- string

abcxyz

app.kubernetes.io/version The current version of the application (e.g., a SemVer 1.0, 5.7.21 string
revision hash, etc.)

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- The tool being used to manage the operation of an application Helm string
by

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.

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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:

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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.

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1.2 - Kubernetes Components

A Kubernetes cluster consists of the components that are a part of the control plane and a set of machines
called nodes.

When you deploy Kubernetes, you get a cluster.

A Kubernetes cluster consists of a set of worker machines, called nodes, that run containerized applications. Every cluster has at
least one worker node.

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.

Kubernetes cluster
API server
api

Cloud controller
c-m
c-m c-c-m manager
c-c-m
c-m c-c-m (optional) c-c-m

Controller
manager c-m

etcd
api
Node Node (persistence store) etcd
api Node
api

kubelet
kubelet

kubelet kubelet kubelet kube-proxy

etcd k-proxy

sched
sched
sched

Scheduler
sched

Control Plane k-proxy k-proxy k-proxy

Control plane

Node

The components of a Kubernetes cluster

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.

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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
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.

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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 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.

What's next
Learn more about the following:

Nodes and their communication with the control plane.

Kubernetes controllers.
kube-scheduler which is the default scheduler for Kubernetes.
Etcd's official documentation.
Several container runtimes in Kubernetes.
Integrating with cloud providers using cloud-controller-manager.
kubectl commands.

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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 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]

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.

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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:

Header Possible values Notes

Accept- gzip not supplying this header is also

Encoding acceptable

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Header Possible values Notes

Accept application/com.github.proto- mainly for intra-cluster use

openapi.spec.v2@v1.0+protobuf

application/json default

* serves application/json

OpenAPI V3

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [stable]

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=CC0E9BFD992D8C59AEC98A1E2336F899E8318D3CF4C68944C3DEC640AF5AB52D864A
},
"apis/admissionregistration.k8s.io/v1": {
"serverRelativeURL": "/openapi/v3/apis/admissionregistration.k8s.io/v1?hash=E19CC93A116982CE5422FC42B590A8AFAD92CD
},
....
}
}

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.

Header Possible values Notes

Accept- gzip not supplying this header is also

Encoding acceptable

Accept application/com.github.proto- mainly for intra-cluster use

openapi.spec.v3@v1.0+protobuf

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

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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.

Note:
Although Kubernetes also aims to maintain compatibility for alpha APIs versions, in some circumstances this is not possible. If
you use any alpha API versions, check the release notes for Kubernetes when upgrading your cluster, in case the API did change
in incompatible ways that require deleting all existing alpha objects prior to upgrade.

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.

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What's next
Learn how to extend the Kubernetes API by adding your own CustomResourceDefinition.
Controlling Access To The Kubernetes API describes how the cluster manages authentication and authorization for API access.
Learn about API endpoints, resource types and samples by reading API Reference.
Learn about what constitutes a compatible change, and how to change the API, from API changes.

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2 - Cluster Architecture
The architectural concepts behind Kubernetes.

CLUSTER
CONTROL PLANE

cloud-control-manager CLOUD PROVIDER API

Node 1 Node 2
etcd kube-api-server

kubelet kube-proxy kubelet kube-proxy

scheduler Controller Manager

pod pod
kube-scheduler kube-controller-manager
pod

pod

CRI CRI

Kubernetes cluster architecture

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:

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{
"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.

Note:
Kubernetes keeps the object for the invalid Node and continues checking to see whether it becomes healthy.

You, or a controller, must explicitly delete the Node object to stop that health checking.

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.

- Optional comma-separated list of the IP addresses for the node. You can only specify a single address for each
--node-ip
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.

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

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Note:
As mentioned in the Node name uniqueness section, when Node configuration needs to be updated, it is a good practice to re-
register the node with the API server. For example, if the kubelet is being restarted with a new set of --node-labels , but the
same Node name is used, the change will not take effect, as labels are only set (or modified) upon Node registration with the API
server.

Pods already scheduled on the Node may misbehave or cause issues if the Node configuration will be changed on kubelet
restart. For example, already running Pod may be tainted against the new labels assigned to the Node, while other Pods, that
are incompatible with that Pod will be scheduled based on this new label. Node re-registration ensures all Pods will be drained
and properly re-scheduled.

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.

Note:
Pods that are part of a DaemonSet tolerate being run on an unschedulable Node. DaemonSets typically provide node-local
services that should run on the Node even if it is being drained of workload applications.

Node status
A Node's status contains the following information:

Addresses
Conditions
Capacity and Allocatable
Info

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.
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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
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outside of the kubelet's control.

Note:
If you want to explicitly reserve resources for non-Pod processes, see reserve resources for system daemons.

Node topology
ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [stable]

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]

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.

Warning:
When the memory swap feature is turned on, Kubernetes data such as the content of Secret objects that were written to tmpfs
now could be swapped to disk.

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

memorySwap:
swapBehavior: LimitedSwap

(default): Kubernetes workloads will not use swap.

NoSwap

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:

: The total amount of physical memory available on the node.

nodeTotalMemory

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.

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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:

Components that make up a node.

API definition for Node.
Node section of the architecture design document.
Graceful/non-graceful node shutdown.
Cluster autoscaling to manage the number and size of nodes in your cluster.
Taints and Tolerations.
Node Resource Managers.
Resource Management for Windows nodes.

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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.

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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.

Note:
SSH tunnels are currently deprecated, so you shouldn't opt to use them unless you know what you are doing. The Konnectivity
service is a replacement for this communication channel.

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
Read about the Kubernetes control plane components
Learn more about Hubs and Spoke model
Learn how to Secure a Cluster
Learn more about the Kubernetes API
Set up Konnectivity service
Use Port Forwarding to Access Applications in a Cluster
Learn how to Fetch logs for Pods, use kubectl port-forward

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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.
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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.

Note:
There can be several controllers that create or update the same kind of object. Behind the scenes, Kubernetes controllers make
sure that they only pay attention to the resources linked to their controlling resource.

For example, you can have Deployments and Jobs; these both create Pods. The Job controller does not delete the Pods that your
Deployment created, because there is information (labels) the controllers can use to tell those Pods apart.

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
Read about the Kubernetes control plane
Discover some of the basic Kubernetes objects
Learn more about the Kubernetes API
If you want to write your own controller, see Kubernetes extension patterns and the sample-controller repository.

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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.

API server identity

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [beta]

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

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

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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.

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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 cluster
API server
api

Cloud controller
c-m
c-m c-c-m manager
c-c-m
c-m c-c-m (optional) c-c-m

Controller
manager c-m

etcd
api
Node Node (persistence store) etcd
api Node
api

kubelet
kubelet

kubelet kubelet kubelet kube-proxy

etcd k-proxy

sched
sched
sched

Scheduler
sched

Control Plane k-proxy k-proxy k-proxy

Control plane

Node

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.

Note:
You can also run the cloud controller manager as a Kubernetes addon rather than as part of the control plane.

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.
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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
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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:

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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.

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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.

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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:
containerd v1.4 and later
cri-o v1.20 and later
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.

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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:
OpenJDK / HotSpot: jdk8u372, 11.0.16, 15 and later
IBM Semeru Runtimes: 8.0.382.0, 11.0.20.0, 17.0.8.0, and later
IBM Java: 8.0.8.6 and later
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
Learn more about cgroups
Learn more about container runtime
Learn more about cgroup drivers

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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 v1.30, 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 v1.30 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
Learn more about the CRI protocol definition

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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:

Terminated pods
Completed Jobs
Objects without owner references
Unused containers and container images
Dynamically provisioned PersistentVolumes with a StorageClass reclaim policy of Delete
Stale or expired CertificateSigningRequests (CSRs)
Nodes deleted in the following scenarios:
On a cloud when the cluster uses a cloud controller manager
On-premises when the cluster uses an addon similar to a cloud controller manager
Node Lease objects

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.

Note:
Cross-namespace owner references are disallowed by design. Namespaced dependents can specify cluster-scoped or
namespaced owners. A namespaced owner must exist in the same namespace as the dependent. If it does not, the owner
reference is treated as absent, and the dependent is subject to deletion once all owners are verified absent.

Cluster-scoped dependents can only specify cluster-scoped owners. In v1.20+, if a cluster-scoped dependent specifies a
namespaced kind as an owner, it is treated as having an unresolvable owner reference, and is not able to be garbage collected.

In v1.20+, if the garbage collector detects an invalid cross-namespace ownerReference , or a cluster-scoped dependent with an
ownerReference referencing a namespaced kind, a warning Event with a reason of OwnerRefInvalidNamespace and an
involvedObject of the invalid dependent is reported. You can check for that kind of Event by running kubectl get events -A --
field-selector=reason=OwnerRefInvalidNamespace .

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 .
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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 the dependents. After deleting all the dependent
objects, 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. 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 controller cleans up the
dependent objects in the background. 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 two 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]

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, enable the ImageMaximumGCAge feature gate for the kubelet, and also set a value for the imageMaximumGCAge
field in the kubelet configuration file.

The value is specified as a Kubernetes duration; Valid time units for the imageMaximumGCAge field in the kubelet configuration file are:

"ns" for nanoseconds

"us" or "µs" for microseconds
"ms" for milliseconds
"s" for seconds
"m" for minutes
"h" for hours

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

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Note:
This feature does not track image usage across kubelet restarts. If the kubelet is restarted, the tracked image age is reset,
causing the kubelet to wait the full imageMaximumGCAge duration before qualifying images for garbage collection based on image
age.

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 .

Note:
The kubelet only garbage collects the containers it manages.

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:

Configuring cascading deletion of Kubernetes objects

Configuring cleanup of finished Jobs

What's next
Learn more about ownership of Kubernetes objects.
Learn more about Kubernetes finalizers.
Learn about the TTL controller that cleans up finished Jobs.

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2.9 - Mixed Version Proxy

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.28 [alpha]

Kubernetes 1.30 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.
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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.

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3 - Containers
Technology for packaging an application along with its runtime dependencies.

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.

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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.

Note:
If you are looking for the container images for a Kubernetes release (such as v1.30, the latest minor release), visit Download
Kubernetes.

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

Some image name examples that Kubernetes can use are:

- Image name only, no tag or digest. Kubernetes will use Docker public registry and latest tag. (Same as
busybox
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:

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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.

Note:
You should avoid using the :latest tag when deploying containers in production as it is harder to track which version of the
image is running and more difficult to roll back properly.

Instead, specify a meaningful tag such as v1.42.0 and/or a digest.

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 .

Note:
The value of imagePullPolicy of the container is always set when the object is first created, and is not updated if the image's tag
or digest later changes.

For example, if you create a Deployment with an image whose tag is not :latest , and later update that Deployment's image to a
:latest tag, the imagePullPolicy field will not change to Always . You must manually change the pull policy of any object after
its initial creation.

Required image pull

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

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 v1.27 [alpha]

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.

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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 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

Note:
This approach is especially suitable when kubelet needs to fetch registry credentials dynamically. Most commonly used for
registries provided by cloud providers where auth tokens are short-lived.

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

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*.*.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

Note:
This approach is suitable if you can control node configuration. It will not work reliably if your cloud provider manages nodes
and replaces them automatically.

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.

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Specifying imagePullSecrets on a Pod

Note:
This is the recommended approach to run containers based on images in private registries.

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.

Note:
Pods can only reference image pull secrets in their own namespace, so this process needs to be done one time per namespace.

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.

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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 v1.30 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
Read the OCI Image Manifest Specification.
Learn about container image garbage collection.
Learn more about pulling an Image from a Private Registry.

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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
Learn more about Container lifecycle hooks.
Get hands-on experience attaching handlers to Container lifecycle events.

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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.

Note:
RuntimeClass assumes a homogeneous node configuration across the cluster by default (which means that all nodes are
configured the same way with respect to container runtimes). To support heterogeneous node configurations, see Scheduling
below.

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.

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Note:
It is recommended that RuntimeClass write operations (create/update/patch/delete) be restricted to the cluster administrator.
This is typically the default. See Authorization Overview for more details.

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.

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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
RuntimeClass Design
RuntimeClass Scheduling Design
Read about the Pod Overhead concept
PodOverhead Feature Design

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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.

Hook handler calls are synchronous within the context of the Pod containing the Container. This means that for a PostStart hook,
the Container ENTRYPOINT and hook fire asynchronously. However, if the hook takes too long to run or hangs, the Container cannot
reach 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.
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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
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 "lifecycl
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
Learn more about the Container environment.
Get hands-on experience attaching handlers to Container lifecycle events.

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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:

Run a stateless application using a Deployment

Run a stateful application either as a single instance or as a replicated set
Run automated tasks with a CronJob

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:

Garbage collection tidies up objects from your cluster after their owning resource has been removed.
The time-to-live after finished controller removes Jobs once a defined time has passed since they completed.

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.

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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?
Note:
You need to install a container runtime into each node in the cluster so that Pods can run there.

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:

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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.

Note:
Restarting a container in a Pod should not be confused with restarting a Pod. A Pod is not a process, but an environment for
running container(s). A Pod persists until it is deleted.

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 v1.30, the value of .spec.os.name does not affect how the kube-scheduler picks a Pod to run a node. 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:

Deployment
StatefulSet
DaemonSet

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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.
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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.

Caution:
You can also use the Pod securityContext to enable privileged mode in Linux containers. Privileged mode overrides many of the
other security settings in the securityContext. Avoid using this setting unless you can't grant the equivalent permissions by using
other fields in the securityContext. In Kubernetes 1.26 and later, you can 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.

To learn about kernel-level security constraints that you can use, see Linux kernel security constraints for Pods and containers.
To learn more about the Pod security context, see Configure a Security Context for a Pod or Container.

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.

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Note:
The spec of a static Pod cannot refer to other API objects (e.g., ServiceAccount, ConfigMap, Secret, etc).

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:

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.

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What's next
Learn about the lifecycle of a Pod.
Learn about RuntimeClass and how you can use it to configure different Pods with different container runtime configurations.
Read about PodDisruptionBudget and how you can use it to manage application availability during disruptions.
Pod is a top-level resource in the Kubernetes REST API. The Pod object definition describes the object in detail.
The Distributed System Toolkit: Patterns for Composite Containers explains common layouts for Pods with more than one
container.
Read about Pod topology spread constraints

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:

Aurora
Borg
Marathon
Omega
Tupperware.

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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 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.

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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.

Note:
When a Pod is being deleted, it is shown as Terminating by some kubectl commands. This Terminating status is not one of the
Pod phases. A Pod is granted a term to terminate gracefully, which defaults to 30 seconds. You can use the flag --force to
terminate a Pod by force.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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]

Note:
During its early development, this condition was named PodHasNetwork.

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

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enabled by default for Kubernetes 1.30), 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.

Caution:
Unlike the other mechanisms, exec probe's implementation involves the creation/forking of multiple processes each time when
executed. As a result, in case of the clusters having higher pod densities, lower intervals of initialDelaySeconds, periodSeconds,
configuring any probe with exec mechanism might introduce an overhead on the cpu usage of the node. In such scenarios,
consider using the alternative probe mechanisms to avoid the overhead.

Probe outcome
Each probe has one of three results:

Success

The container passed the diagnostic.

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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.

Note:
If you want to be able to drain requests when the Pod is deleted, you do not necessarily need a readiness probe; on deletion,
the Pod automatically puts itself into an unready state regardless of whether the readiness probe exists. The Pod remains in the
unready state while it waits for the containers in the Pod to stop.

When should you use a startup probe?

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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.

Note:
If the preStop hook needs longer to complete than the default grace period allows, you must modify
terminationGracePeriodSeconds to suit this.

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
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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

Caution:
Forced deletions can be potentially disruptive for some workloads and their Pods.

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.

Caution:
Immediate deletion does not wait for confirmation that the running resource has been terminated. The resource may continue
to run on the cluster indefinitely.

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:
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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, when the
NodeOutOfServiceVolumeDetach feature gate is enabled.

When the PodDisruptionConditions feature gate is enabled, 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
Get hands-on experience attaching handlers to container lifecycle events.

Get hands-on experience configuring Liveness, Readiness and Startup Probes.

Learn more about container lifecycle hooks.

Learn more about sidecar containers.

For detailed information about Pod and container status in the API, see the API reference documentation covering status for
Pod.

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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.
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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.$(cat /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/namespace).svc.cluster
- name: init-mydb
image: busybox:1.28
command: ['sh', '-c', "until nslookup mydb.$(cat /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/namespace).svc.cluster.loca

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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
--------- -------- ----- ---- ------------- -------- ------
16s 16s 1 {default-scheduler } Normal Scheduled
16s 16s 1 {kubelet 172.17.4.201} spec.initContainers{init-myservice} Normal Pulling
13s 13s 1 {kubelet 172.17.4.201} spec.initContainers{init-myservice} Normal Pulled
13s 13s 1 {kubelet 172.17.4.201} spec.initContainers{init-myservice} Normal Created
13s 13s 1 {kubelet 172.17.4.201} spec.initContainers{init-myservice} Normal Started

To see logs for the init containers in this Pod, run:

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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.

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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. Altering an init container image field is equivalent to
restarting the Pod.

Because init containers can be restarted, retried, or re-executed, init container code should be idempotent. In particular, code that
writes to files on EmptyDirs 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:

Creating a Pod that has an init container.

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Debug init containers.

Overview of kubelet and kubectl.
Types of probes: liveness, readiness, startup probe.
Sidecar containers.

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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:

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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
Read a blog post on native sidecar containers.
Read about creating a Pod that has an init container.
Learn about the types of probes: liveness, readiness, startup probe.
Learn about pod overhead.

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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.

Note:
Ephemeral containers are not supported by static pods.

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
Learn how to debug pods using ephemeral containers.

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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.

Caution:
Not all voluntary disruptions are constrained by Pod Disruption Budgets. For example, deleting deployments or pods bypasses
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

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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.

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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

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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 v1.26 [beta]

Note:
In order to use this behavior, you must have the PodDisruptionConditions feature gate enabled in your cluster.

When enabled, 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 or the graceful node shutdown.

Note:
A Pod disruption might be interrupted. The control plane might re-attempt to continue the disruption of the same Pod, but it is
not guaranteed. As a result, the DisruptionTarget condition might be added to a Pod, but that Pod might then not actually be
deleted. In such a situation, after some time, the Pod disruption condition will be cleared.

When the PodDisruptionConditions feature gate is enabled, 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.

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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
Follow steps to protect your application by configuring a Pod Disruption Budget.

Learn more about draining nodes

Learn about updating a deployment including steps to maintain its availability during the rollout.

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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
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as BestEffort .

Memory QoS with cgroup v2

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.22 [alpha]

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
Learn about resource management for Pods and Containers.
Learn about Node-pressure eviction.
Learn about Pod priority and preemption.
Learn about Pod disruptions.
Learn how to assign memory resources to containers and pods.
Learn how to assign CPU resources to containers and pods.
Learn how to configure Quality of Service for Pods.

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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

Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project
authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide
before submitting a change. More information.

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+).

Note:
Many OCI runtimes do not include the support needed for using user namespaces in Linux pods. If you use a managed
Kubernetes, or have downloaded it from packages and set it up, it's likely that nodes in your cluster use a runtime that doesn't
include this support. For example, the most widely used OCI runtime is runc , and version 1.1.z of runc doesn't support all the
features needed by the Kubernetes implementation of user namespaces.

If there is a newer release of runc than 1.1 available for use, check its documentation and release notes for compatibility (look
for idmap mounts support in particular, because that is the missing feature).

To use user namespaces with Kubernetes, you also need to use a CRI container runtime to use this feature with Kubernetes pods:

CRI-O: version 1.25 (and later) supports user namespaces for containers.

containerd v1.7 is not compatible with the userns support in Kubernetes v1.27 to v1.30. Kubernetes v1.25 and v1.26 used an earlier
implementation that is compatible with containerd v1.7, in terms of userns support. If you are using a version of Kubernetes other
than 1.30, check the documentation for that version of Kubernetes for the most relevant information. If there is a newer release of
containerd than v1.7 available for use, also check the containerd documentation for compatibility information.

You can see the status of user namespaces support in cri-dockerd tracked in an issue on GitHub.

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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.

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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:
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hostNetwork: true

hostIPC: true

hostPID: true

What's next
Take a look at Use a User Namespace With a Pod

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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:

as environment variables
as files in a downwardAPI volume

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
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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:

as environment variables
as files in downwardAPI volume

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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:

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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.

Note:
Do not manage ReplicaSets owned by a Deployment. Consider opening an issue in the main Kubernetes repository if your use
case is not covered below.

Use Case
The following are typical use cases for Deployments:

Create a Deployment to rollout a ReplicaSet. The ReplicaSet creates Pods in the background. Check the status of the rollout to
see if it succeeds or not.
Declare the new state of the Pods by updating the PodTemplateSpec of the Deployment. A new ReplicaSet is created and the
Deployment manages moving the Pods from the old ReplicaSet to the new one at a controlled rate. Each new ReplicaSet
updates the revision of the Deployment.
Rollback to an earlier Deployment revision if the current state of the Deployment is not stable. Each rollback updates the
revision of the Deployment.
Scale up the Deployment to facilitate more load.
Pause the rollout of a Deployment to apply multiple fixes to its PodTemplateSpec and then resume it to start a new rollout.
Use the status of the Deployment as an indicator that a rollout has stuck.
Clean up older ReplicaSets that you don't need anymore.

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

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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.

Note:
The .spec.selector.matchLabels field 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".
All of the requirements, from both matchLabels and matchExpressions, must be satisfied in order to match.

The template field contains the following sub-fields:

The Pods are labeled app: nginx using 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:

lists the names of the Deployments in the namespace.

NAME

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

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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:

lists the names of the ReplicaSets in the namespace.

NAME

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.

Note:
You must specify an appropriate selector and Pod template labels in a Deployment (in this case, app: nginx ).

Do not overlap labels or selectors with other controllers (including other Deployments and StatefulSets). Kubernetes doesn't
stop you from overlapping, and if multiple controllers have overlapping selectors those controllers might conflict and behave
unexpectedly.

Pod-template-hash label

Caution:
Do not change this 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
Note:
A Deployment's rollout is triggered if and only if the Deployment's Pod template (that is, .spec.template) is changed, for example
if the labels or container images of the template are updated. Other updates, such as scaling the Deployment, do not trigger a
rollout.

Follow the steps given below to update your Deployment:

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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:

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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:

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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.

Note:
Kubernetes doesn't count terminating Pods when calculating the number of availableReplicas, which must be between replicas
- maxUnavailable and replicas + maxSurge. As a result, you might notice that there are more Pods than expected during a rollout,
and that the total resources consumed by the Deployment is more than replicas + maxSurge until the
terminationGracePeriodSeconds of the terminating Pods expires.

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.

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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.

Note:
In API version apps/v1, a Deployment's label selector is immutable after it gets created.

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).

Note:
A Deployment's revision is created when a Deployment's rollout is triggered. This means that the new revision is created if and
only if the Deployment's Pod template (.spec.template) is changed, for example if you update the labels or container images of
the template. Other updates, such as scaling the Deployment, do not create a Deployment revision, so that you can facilitate
simultaneous manual- or auto-scaling. This means that when you roll back to an earlier revision, only the Deployment's Pod
template part is rolled back.

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.

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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

Note:
The Deployment controller stops the bad rollout automatically, and stops scaling up the new ReplicaSet. This depends on
the rollingUpdate parameters (maxUnavailable specifically) that you have specified. Kubernetes by default sets the value to
25%.

Get the description of the Deployment:

kubectl describe deployment

The output is similar to this:

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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
22s 22s 1 {deployment-controller } Normal ScalingReplicaSet Scaled up replica
22s 22s 1 {deployment-controller } Normal ScalingReplicaSet Scaled down repli
22s 22s 1 {deployment-controller } Normal ScalingReplicaSet Scaled up replica
21s 21s 1 {deployment-controller } Normal ScalingReplicaSet Scaled down repli
21s 21s 1 {deployment-controller } Normal ScalingReplicaSet Scaled up replica
13s 13s 1 {deployment-controller } Normal ScalingReplicaSet Scaled down repli
13s 13s 1 {deployment-controller } Normal ScalingReplicaSet Scaled up replica

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-CAUSEis copied from the Deployment annotation kubernetes.io/change-cause to its revisions upon creation. You can
specify the CHANGE-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:
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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:

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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.

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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:

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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:

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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.

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kubectl get rs -w

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

Note:
You cannot rollback a paused Deployment until you resume it.

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 .

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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 $?

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}}'

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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.

Note:
Kubernetes takes no action on a stalled Deployment other than to report a status condition with reason:
ProgressDeadlineExceeded. Higher level orchestrators can take advantage of it and act accordingly, for example, rollback the
Deployment to its previous version.

Note:
If you pause a Deployment rollout, Kubernetes does not check progress against your specified deadline. You can safely pause a
Deployment rollout in the middle of a rollout and resume without triggering the condition for exceeding the deadline.

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:

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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

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and the exit status from kubectl rollout is 1 (indicating an error):

echo $?

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.

Note:
Explicitly setting this field to 0, will result in cleaning up all the history of your Deployment thus that Deployment will not be able
to roll back.

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.

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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.

Note:
You should not create other Pods whose labels match this selector, either directly, by creating another Deployment, or by
creating another controller such as a ReplicaSet or a ReplicationController. If you do so, the first Deployment thinks that it
created these other Pods. Kubernetes does not stop you from doing this.

If you have multiple controllers that have overlapping selectors, the controllers will fight with each other and won't behave correctly.

Strategy
.spec.strategyspecifies 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 .

Note:
This will only guarantee Pod termination previous to creation for upgrades. If you upgrade a Deployment, all Pods of the old
revision will be terminated immediately. Successful removal is awaited before any Pod of the new revision is created. If you
manually delete a Pod, the lifecycle is controlled by the ReplicaSet and the replacement will be created immediately (even if the
old Pod is still in a Terminating state). If you need an "at most" guarantee for your Pods, you should consider using a StatefulSet.

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
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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 :

Max Unavailable Max Surge Hybrid

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

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.

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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
Learn more about Pods.
Run a stateless application using a Deployment.
Read the Deployment to understand the Deployment API.
Read about PodDisruptionBudget and how you can use it to manage application availability during disruptions.
Use kubectl to create a Deployment.

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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

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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:

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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

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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:

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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.

Note:
For 2 ReplicaSets specifying the same .spec.selector but different .spec.template.metadata.labels and .spec.template.spec fields,
each ReplicaSet ignores the Pods created by the other ReplicaSet.

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.

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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 when the LogarithmicScaleDown feature gate is enabled)

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.
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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.

Note:
This is honored on a best-effort basis, so it does not offer any guarantees on pod deletion order.
Users should avoid updating the annotation frequently, such as updating it based on a metric value, because doing so will
generate a significant number of pod updates on the apiserver.

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

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Alternatives to ReplicaSet
Deployment (recommended)
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
Learn about Pods.
Learn about Deployments.
Run a Stateless Application Using a Deployment, which relies on ReplicaSets to work.
ReplicaSet is a top-level resource in the Kubernetes REST API. Read the ReplicaSet object definition to understand the API for
replica sets.
Read about PodDisruptionBudget and how you can use it to manage application availability during disruptions.

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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.

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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

Note:
This example uses the ReadWriteOnce access mode, for simplicity. For production use, the Kubernetes project recommends using
the ReadWriteOncePod access mode instead.

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.

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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 v1.27 [beta]

.spec.ordinalsis an optional field that allows you to configure the integer ordinals assigned to each Pod. It defaults to nil. You must
enable the StatefulSetStartOrdinal feature gate to use this field. Once enabled, 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:

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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 Service StatefulSet Pod

Domain (ns/name) (ns/name) StatefulSet Domain Pod DNS Hostname

cluster.local default/nginx default/web nginx.default.svc.cluster.local web-{0..N- web-{0..N-

1}.nginx.default.svc.cluster.local 1}

cluster.local foo/nginx foo/web nginx.foo.svc.cluster.local web-{0..N- web-{0..N-

1}.nginx.foo.svc.cluster.local 1}

kube.local foo/nginx foo/web nginx.foo.svc.kube.local web-{0..N- web-{0..N-

1}.nginx.foo.svc.kube.local 1}

Note:
Cluster Domain will be set to cluster.local unless otherwise configured.

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.

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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.

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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 .

Note:
The maxUnavailable field is in Alpha stage and it is honored only by API servers that are running with the
MaxUnavailableStatefulSet feature gate enabled.

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 v1.27 [beta]

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
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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
Learn about Pods.
Find out how to use StatefulSets
Follow an example of deploying a stateful application.
Follow an example of deploying Cassandra with Stateful Sets.
Follow an example of running a replicated stateful application.
Learn how to scale a StatefulSet.
Learn what's involved when you delete a StatefulSet.
Learn how to configure a Pod to use a volume for storage.
Learn how to configure a Pod to use a PersistentVolume for storage.
StatefulSet is a top-level resource in the Kubernetes REST API. Read the StatefulSet object definition to understand the API for
stateful sets.
Read about PodDisruptionBudget and how you can use it to manage application availability during disruptions.

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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

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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 .
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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:

- works the same as the .spec.selector of a ReplicationController.

matchLabels

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.

Note:
If it's important that the DaemonSet pod run on each node, it's often desirable to set the .spec.template.spec.priorityClassName
of the DaemonSet to a PriorityClass with a higher priority to ensure that this eviction occurs.

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

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Taints and tolerations

The DaemonSet controller automatically adds a set of tolerations to 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- NoSchedule DaemonSet Pods can be scheduled onto nodes with memory
pressure 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- NoSchedule Only added for DaemonSet Pods that request host networking,
unavailable 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.
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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
Learn about Pods.
Learn about static Pods, which are useful for running Kubernetes control plane components.
Find out how to use DaemonSets
Perform a rolling update on a DaemonSet
Perform a rollback on a DaemonSet (for example, if a roll out didn't work how you expected).
Understand how Kubernetes assigns Pods to Nodes.
Learn about device plugins and add ons, which often run as DaemonSets.
DaemonSet is a top-level resource in the Kubernetes REST API. Read the DaemonSet object definition to understand the API for
daemon sets.

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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 :

kubectl describe job pi kubectl get job pi -o yaml

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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

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:

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3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470938

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.

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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 .

: the Pods of a Job get an associated completion index from 0 to

Indexed .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.

Note:
Although rare, more than one Pod could be started for the same index (due to various reasons such as node failures, kubelet
restarts, or Pod evictions). In this case, only the first Pod that completes successfully will count towards the completion count
and update the status of the Job. The other Pods that are running or completed for the same index will be deleted by the Job
controller once they are detected.

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
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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.

When the feature gates PodDisruptionConditions and JobPodFailurePolicy are both enabled, and the .spec.podFailurePolicy field is
set, 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.

Note:
If your job has restartPolicy = "OnFailure", keep in mind that your Pod running the Job will be terminated once the job backoff
limit has been reached. This can make debugging the Job's executable more difficult. We suggest setting restartPolicy = "Never"
when debugging the Job or using a logging system to ensure output from failed Jobs is not lost inadvertently.

Backoff limit per index

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [beta]

Note:
You can only configure the backoff limit per index for an Indexed Job, if you have the JobBackoffLimitPerIndex feature gate
enabled in your cluster.

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.

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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

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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: Failed

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 v1.26 [beta]

Note:
You can only configure a Pod failure policy for a Job if you have the JobPodFailurePolicy feature gate enabled in your cluster.
Additionally, it is recommended to enable the PodDisruptionConditions feature gate in order to be able to detect and handle Pod
disruption conditions in the Pod failure policy (see also: Pod disruption conditions). Both feature gates are available in
Kubernetes 1.30.

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

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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.

Note:
Because the Pod template specifies a restartPolicy: Never, the kubelet does not restart the main container in that particular Pod.

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.

Note:
If the Job failed, either by the Pod failure policy or Pod backoff failure policy, and the Job is running multiple Pods, Kubernetes
terminates all the Pods in that Job that are still Pending or Running.

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.restartPolicyset 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
in spec.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:
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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.

Note:
When you use a podFailurePolicy, the job controller only matches Pods in the Failed phase. Pods with a deletion timestamp that
are not in a terminal phase (Failed or Succeeded) are considered still terminating. This implies that terminating pods retain a
tracking finalizer until they reach a terminal phase. Since Kubernetes 1.27, Kubelet transitions deleted pods to a terminal phase
(see: Pod Phase). This ensures that deleted pods have their finalizers removed by the Job controller.

Note:
Starting with Kubernetes v1.28, when Pod failure policy is used, the Job controller recreates terminating Pods only once these
Pods reach the terminal Failed phase. This behavior is similar to podReplacementPolicy: Failed. For more information, see Pod
replacement policy.

Success policy
ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.30 [alpha]

Note:
You can only configure a success policy for an Indexed Job if you have the JobSuccessPolicy feature gate enabled in your cluster.

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

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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. 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.

Note:
When you specify both a success policy and some terminating policies such as .spec.backoffLimit and .spec.podFailurePolicy,
once the Job meets either policy, the job controller respects the terminating policy and ignores the success policy.

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 .

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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.

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

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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.

Note:
It is recommended to set ttlSecondsAfterFinished field because unmanaged jobs (Jobs that you created directly, and not
indirectly through other workload APIs such as CronJob) have a default deletion policy of orphanDependents causing Pods created
by an unmanaged Job to be left around after that Job is fully deleted. Even though the control plane eventually garbage collects
the Pods from a deleted Job after they either fail or complete, sometimes those lingering pods may cause cluster performance
degradation or in worst case cause the cluster to go offline due to this degradation.

You can use LimitRanges and ResourceQuotas to place a cap on the amount of resources that a particular namespace can
consume.

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.

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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:

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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.

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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 and you explicitly specify the same selector. Since the existing Pods have label
new
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.

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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.

Note:
See My pod stays terminating if you observe that pods from a Job are stuck with the tracking finalizer.

Elastic Indexed Jobs

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [beta]

You can scale Indexed Jobs up or down by mutating both .spec.parallelism and .spec.completions together such that
.spec.parallelism == .spec.completions . When the ElasticIndexedJob feature gate on the API server is disabled, .spec.completions is
immutable.

Use cases for elastic Indexed Jobs include batch workloads which require scaling an indexed Job, such as MPI, Horovord, Ray, and
PyTorch training jobs.

Delayed creation of replacement pods

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [beta]

Note:
You can only set podReplacementPolicy on Jobs if you enable the JobPodReplacementPolicy feature gate (enabled by default).

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

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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 v1.30 [alpha]

Note:
You can only set the managedBy field on Jobs if you enable the JobManagedBy feature gate (disabled by default).

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.

Note:
When using this feature, make sure the controller indicated by the field is installed, otherwise the Job may not be reconciled at
all.

Note:
When developing an external Job controller be aware that your controller needs to operate in a fashion conformant with the
definitions of the API spec and status fields of the Job object.

Please review these in detail in the Job API. We also recommend that you run the e2e conformance tests for the Job object to
verify your implementation.

Finally, when developing an external Job controller make sure it does not use the batch.kubernetes.io/job-tracking finalizer,
reserved for the built-in controller.

Warning:
If you are considering to disable the JobManagedBy feature gate, or to downgrade the cluster to a version without the feature gate
enabled, check if there are jobs with a custom value of the spec.managedBy field. If there are such jobs, there is a risk that they
might be reconciled by two controllers after the operation: the built-in Job controller and the external controller indicated by the
field value.

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).

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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
Learn about Pods.
Read about different ways of running Jobs:
Coarse Parallel Processing Using a Work Queue
Fine Parallel Processing Using a Work Queue
Use an indexed Job for parallel processing with static work assignment
Create multiple Jobs based on a template: Parallel Processing using Expansions
Follow the links within Clean up finished jobs automatically to learn more about how your cluster can clean up completed and /
or failed tasks.
Job is part of the Kubernetes REST API. Read the Job object definition to understand the API for jobs.

Read about CronJob, which you can use to define a series of Jobs that will run based on a schedule, similar to the UNIX tool
cron .

Practice how to configure handling of retriable and non-retriable pod failures using podFailurePolicy , based on the step-by-
step examples.

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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-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
Read Clean up Jobs automatically

Refer to the Kubernetes Enhancement Proposal (KEP) for adding this mechanism.

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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:

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# ┌───────────── 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 0 13 * 5 states that the task must be started every Friday at midnight, as well as on the 13th of each month at
midnight.

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 .

Note:
A question mark (?) in the schedule has the same meaning as an asterisk *, that is, it stands for any of available value for a given
field.

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 0011*

@monthly Run once a month at midnight of the first day of the month 001**

@weekly Run once a week at midnight on Sunday morning 00**0

@daily (or @midnight) Run once a day at midnight 00***

@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.

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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:

(default): The CronJob allows concurrently running Jobs

Allow

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.

Caution:
Executions that are suspended during their scheduled time count as missed Jobs. When .spec.suspend changes from true to
false on an existing CronJob without a starting deadline, the missed Jobs are scheduled immediately.

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).

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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.

Caution:
If startingDeadlineSeconds is set to a value less than 10 seconds, the CronJob may not be scheduled. This is because the CronJob
controller checks things every 10 seconds.

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

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.

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4.2.8 - ReplicationController
Legacy API for managing workloads that can scale horizontally. Superseded by the Deployment and ReplicaSet
APIs.

Note:
A Deployment that configures a ReplicaSet is now the recommended way to set up replication.

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:

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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
20s 20s 1 {replication-controller } Normal SuccessfulCreate Created pod
20s 20s 1 {replication-controller } Normal SuccessfulCreate Created pod

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.

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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).

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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.

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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 (Recommended)
Deploymentis 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.
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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.

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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.

Horizontal scaling: Running multiple instances of your app

Vertical scaling: Resizing CPU and memory resources assigned to containers

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.

Note:
You will need to have the Metrics Server installed to your cluster for the HPA to work.

At the moment, the VPA can operate in four different modes:

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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.

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What's next
Learn more about scaling horizontally
Scale a StatefulSet
HorizontalPodAutoscaler Walkthrough
Resize Container Resources In-Place
Autoscale the DNS Service in a Cluster
Learn about cluster autoscaling

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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.
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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

🛇 This item links to a third party project or product that is not part of Kubernetes itself. More information

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

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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

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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 :

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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:

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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

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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.
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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
Learn about how to use kubectl for application introspection and debugging.

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5 - Services, Load Balancing, and Networking

Concepts and resources behind networking in Kubernetes.

The Kubernetes network model

Every Pod in a cluster gets its own unique cluster-wide IP address (one address per IP address family). This means you do not need
to explicitly create links between Pods and you almost never need to deal with mapping container ports to host ports.
This creates a clean, backwards-compatible model where 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.

Kubernetes imposes the following fundamental requirements on any networking implementation (barring any intentional network
segmentation policies):

pods can communicate with all other pods on any other node without NAT
agents on a node (e.g. system daemons, kubelet) can communicate with all pods on that node

Note:
For those platforms that support Pods running in the host network (such as Linux), when pods are attached to the host network
of a node they can still communicate with all pods on all nodes without NAT.

This model is not only less complex overall, but it is principally compatible with the desire for Kubernetes to enable low-friction
porting of apps from VMs to containers. If your job previously ran in a VM, your VM had an IP and could talk to other VMs in your
project. This is the same basic model.

Kubernetes IP addresses exist at the Pod scope - containers within a Pod share their network namespaces - including their IP
address and MAC address. This means that containers within a Pod can all reach each other's ports on localhost . This also means
that containers within a Pod must coordinate port usage, but this is no different from processes in a VM. This is called the "IP-per-
pod" model.

How this is implemented is a detail of the particular container runtime in use.

It is possible to request ports on the Node itself which forward to your Pod (called host ports), but this is a very niche operation.
How that forwarding is implemented is also a detail of the container runtime. The Pod itself is blind to the existence or non-
existence of host ports.

Kubernetes networking addresses four concerns:

Containers within a Pod use networking to communicate via loopback.

Cluster networking provides communication between different Pods.
The Service API lets you expose an application running in Pods to be reachable from outside your cluster.
Ingress provides extra functionality specifically for exposing HTTP applications, websites and APIs.
Gateway API is an add-on that provides an expressive, extensible, and role-oriented family of API kinds for modeling
service networking.
You can also use Services to publish services only for consumption inside your cluster.

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.

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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.

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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.

Note:
A Service can map any incoming port to a targetPort. By default and for convenience, the targetPort is set to the same value as
the port field.

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:

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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

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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.

Note:
The endpoint IPs must not be: loopback (127.0.0.0/8 for IPv4, ::1/128 for IPv6), or link-local (169.254.0.0/16 and 224.0.0.0/24 for
IPv4, fe80::/64 for IPv6).

The endpoint IP addresses cannot be the cluster IPs of other Kubernetes Services, because kube-proxy doesn't support virtual
IPs as a destination.

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.

Note:
The Kubernetes API server does not allow proxying to endpoints that are not mapped to pods. Actions such as kubectl port-
forward service/<service-name> forwardedPort:servicePort where the service has no selector will fail due to this constraint. This
prevents the Kubernetes API server from being used as a proxy to endpoints the caller may not be authorized to access.

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.

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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

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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

Note:
As with Kubernetes names in general, names for ports must only contain lowercase alphanumeric characters and - . Port
names must also start and end with an alphanumeric character.

For example, the names 123-abc and web are valid, but 123_abc and -web are not.

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.

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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

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ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [stable]

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.)

Note:
This Service is visible as <NodeIP>:spec.ports[*].nodePort and .spec.clusterIP:spec.ports[*].port. If the --nodeport-addresses flag
for kube-proxy or the equivalent field in the kube-proxy configuration file is set, <NodeIP> would be a filtered node IP address (or
possibly IP addresses).

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.

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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.

Note:
The .spec.loadBalancerIP field for a Service was deprecated in Kubernetes v1.24.

This field was under-specified and its meaning varies across implementations. It also cannot support dual-stack networking. This
field may be removed in a future API version.

If you're integrating with a provider that supports specifying the load balancer IP address(es) for a Service via a (provider
specific) annotation, you should switch to doing that.

If you are writing code for a load balancer integration with Kubernetes, avoid using this field. You can integrate with Gateway
rather than Service, or you can define your own (provider specific) annotations on the Service that specify the equivalent detail.

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]

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.

Note:
The set of protocols that can be used for load balanced Services is defined by your cloud provider; they may impose restrictions
beyond what the Kubernetes API enforces.

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]

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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.

Specifying IPMode of load balancer status

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.30 [beta]

As a Beta feature in Kubernetes 1.30, a feature gate named LoadBalancerIPMode allows you to set the
.status.loadBalancer.ingress.ipMode for a Service with type set to LoadBalancer . 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:

Default GCP AWS Azure IBM Cloud OpenStack Baidu Cloud Tencent Cloud Alibaba Cloud OCI

Select one of the tabs.

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

Note:
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A Service of type: ExternalName accepts an IPv4 address string, but treats that string as a DNS name comprised of digits, not as
an IP address (the internet does not however allow such names in DNS). Services with external names that resemble IPv4
addresses are not resolved by DNS servers.

If you want to map a Service directly to a specific IP address, consider using headless Services.

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 .

Caution:
You may have trouble using ExternalName for some common protocols, including HTTP and HTTPS. If you use ExternalName
then the hostname used by clients inside your cluster is different from the name that the ExternalName references.

For protocols that use hostnames this difference may lead to errors or unexpected responses. HTTP requests will have a Host:
header that the origin server does not recognize; TLS servers will not be able to provide a certificate matching the hostname that
the client connected to.

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 .

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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

Note:
When you have a Pod that needs to access a Service, and you are using the environment variable method to publish the port
and cluster IP to the client Pods, you must create the Service before the client Pods come into existence. Otherwise, those client
Pods won't have their environment variables populated.

If you only use DNS to discover the cluster IP for a Service, you don't need to worry about this ordering issue.

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.
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See Traffic Policies for more details.

Traffic distribution

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.30 [alpha]

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 1.30, 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

Note:
Kubernetes does not manage allocation of externalIPs; these are the responsibility of the cluster administrator.

API Object
Service is a top-level resource in the Kubernetes REST API. You can find more details about the Service API object.
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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:

Virtual IPs and Service Proxies

EndpointSlices
Service API reference
EndpointSlice API reference
Endpoint API reference (legacy)

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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.

Note:
Ingress is frozen. New features are being added to the Gateway API.

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:

cluster

Pod

Ingress-managed
client load balancer Ingress routing rule Service

Pod

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.

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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.

Note:
Make sure you review your Ingress controller's documentation to understand the caveats of choosing it.

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.

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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

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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.

: Matches based on a URL path prefix split by / . Matching is case sensitive and done on a path element by element
Prefix
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.

Note:
If the last element of the path is a substring of the last element in request path, it is not a match (for example: /foo/bar
matches /foo/bar/baz, but does not match /foo/barbaz).

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

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Kind Path(s) Request path(s) Matches?

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

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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.

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Cluster Namespaced

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

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.

Caution:
If you have more than one IngressClass marked as the default for your cluster, the admission controller prevents creating new
Ingress objects that don't have an ingressClassName specified. You can resolve this by ensuring that at most 1 IngressClass is
marked as default in your cluster.

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

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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.

Note:
Ingress controllers and load balancers may take a minute or two to allocate an IP address. Until that time, you often see the
address listed as <pending>.

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:

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cluster

Pod

/foo Service service1:4200

Pod

Ingress-managed
client load balancer Ingress, 178.91.123.132

Pod

/bar Service service2:8080

Pod

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

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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.

Note:
Depending on the Ingress controller you are using, you may need to create a default-http-backend Service.

Name based virtual hosting

Name-based virtual hosts support routing HTTP traffic to multiple host names at the same IP address.

cluster

Pod

Host: foo.bar.com Service service1:80

Pod

Ingress-managed
client load balancer Ingress, 178.91.123.132

Pod

Host: bar.foo.com Service service2:80

Pod

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

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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

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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 .

Note:

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Keep in mind that TLS will not work on the default rule because the certificates would have to be issued for all the possible sub-
domains. Therefore, hosts in the tls section need to explicitly match the host in the rules section.

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

Note:
There is a gap between TLS features supported by various Ingress controllers. Please refer to documentation on nginx, GCE, or
any other platform specific Ingress controller to understand how TLS works in your environment.

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

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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

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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:

Use Service.Type=LoadBalancer
Use Service.Type=NodePort

What's next
Learn about the Ingress API
Learn about Ingress controllers
Set up Ingress on Minikube with the NGINX Controller

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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
Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project
authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide
before submitting a change. More information.

AKS Application Gateway Ingress Controller is an ingress controller that configures the Azure Application Gateway.
Alibaba Cloud MSE Ingress is an ingress controller that configures the Alibaba Cloud Native Gateway, which is also the
commercial version of Higress.
Apache APISIX ingress controller is an Apache APISIX-based ingress controller.
Avi Kubernetes Operator provides L4-L7 load-balancing using VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer.
BFE Ingress Controller is a BFE-based ingress controller.
Cilium Ingress Controller is an ingress controller powered by Cilium.
The Citrix ingress controller works with Citrix Application Delivery Controller.
Contour is an Envoy based ingress controller.
Emissary-Ingress API Gateway is an Envoy-based ingress controller.
EnRoute is an Envoy based API gateway that can run as an ingress controller.
Easegress IngressController is an Easegress based API gateway that can run as an ingress controller.
F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services for Kubernetes lets you use an Ingress to configure F5 BIG-IP virtual servers.
FortiADC Ingress Controller support the Kubernetes Ingress resources and allows you to manage FortiADC objects from
Kubernetes
Gloo is an open-source ingress controller based on Envoy, which offers API gateway functionality.
HAProxy Ingress is an ingress controller for HAProxy.
Higress is an Envoy based API gateway that can run as an ingress controller.
The HAProxy Ingress Controller for Kubernetes is also an ingress controller for HAProxy.
Istio Ingress is an Istio based ingress controller.
The Kong Ingress Controller for Kubernetes is an ingress controller driving Kong Gateway.
Kusk Gateway is an OpenAPI-driven ingress controller based on Envoy.
The NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes works with the NGINX webserver (as a proxy).
The ngrok Kubernetes Ingress Controller is an open source controller for adding secure public access to your K8s services using
the ngrok platform.
The OCI Native Ingress Controller is an Ingress controller for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure which allows you to manage the OCI
Load Balancer.
OpenNJet Ingress Controller is a OpenNJet-based ingress controller.
The Pomerium Ingress Controller is based on Pomerium, which offers context-aware access policy.
Skipper HTTP router and reverse proxy for service composition, including use cases like Kubernetes Ingress, designed as a
library to build your custom proxy.
The Traefik Kubernetes Ingress provider is an ingress controller for the Traefik proxy.
Tyk Operator extends Ingress with Custom Resources to bring API Management capabilities to Ingress. Tyk Operator works
with the Open Source Tyk Gateway & Tyk Cloud control plane.
Voyager is an ingress controller for HAProxy.
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Wallarm Ingress Controller is an Ingress Controller that provides WAAP (WAF) and API Security capabilities.

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.

Note:
Make sure you review your ingress controller's documentation to understand the caveats of choosing it.

What's next
Learn more about Ingress.
Set up Ingress on Minikube with the NGINX Controller.

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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:

cluster

HTTPRoute Gateway GatewayClass

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:

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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:

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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:

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.
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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.

Note:
Make sure to review the documentation of your selected implementation to understand any caveats.

Refer to the API specification for additional details of all Gateway API kinds.

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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).

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Conditions
The EndpointSlice API stores conditions about endpoints that may be useful for consumers. The three conditions are ready ,
serving , and terminating .

Ready
readyis 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.

Note:
Although serving is almost identical to ready, it was added to prevent breaking the existing meaning of ready. It may be
unexpected for existing clients if ready could be true for terminating endpoints, since historically terminating endpoints were
never included in the Endpoints or EndpointSlice API to begin with. For this reason, ready is always false for terminating
endpoints, and a new condition serving was added in v1.20 so that clients can track readiness for terminating pods independent
of the existing semantics for ready.

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.

Note:
In the v1 API, the per endpoint topology was effectively removed in favor of the dedicated fields nodeName and zone .

Setting arbitrary topology fields on the endpoint field of an EndpointSlice resource has been deprecated and is not supported
in the v1 API. Instead, the v1 API supports setting individual nodeName and zone fields. These fields are automatically translated
between API versions. For example, the value of the "topology.kubernetes.io/zone" key in the topology field in the v1beta1 API
is accessible as the zone field in the v1 API.

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.

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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.

Note:
Clients of the EndpointSlice API must iterate through all the existing EndpointSlices associated to a Service and build a complete
list of unique network endpoints. It is important to mention that endpoints may be duplicated in different EndpointSlices.
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You can find a reference implementation for how to perform this endpoint aggregation and deduplication as part of the
EndpointSliceCache code within kube-proxy .

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
Follow the Connecting Applications with Services tutorial
Read the API reference for the EndpointSlice API
Read the API reference for the Endpoints API

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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:

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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

Note:
POSTing this to the API server for your cluster will have no effect unless your chosen networking solution supports network
policy.

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 .

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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.

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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

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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

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---
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.

Note:
You must be using a CNI plugin that supports SCTP protocol NetworkPolicies.

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

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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 field must be equal to or greater than the

endPort port field.
endPort can only be defined if port is also defined.

Both ports must be numeric.

Note:
Your cluster must be using a CNI plugin that supports the endPort field in NetworkPolicy specifications. If your network plugin
does not support the endPort field and you specify a NetworkPolicy with that, the policy will be applied only for the single port
field.

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:

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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"]

Note:
It is not possible to directly specify the name of the namespaces in a NetworkPolicy. You must use a namespaceSelector with
matchLabels or matchExpressions to select the namespaces based on their labels.

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
Note:
The following applies to clusters with a conformant networking plugin and a conformant implementation of NetworkPolicy.

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.

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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 1.30, 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.
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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
See the Declare Network Policy walkthrough for further examples.
See more recipes for common scenarios enabled by the NetworkPolicy resource.

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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 .

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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:

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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.

Note:
Because A and AAAA records are not created for Pod names, hostname is required for the Pod's A or AAAA record to be created. A
Pod with no hostname but with subdomain will only create the A or AAAA record for the headless Service (busybox-subdomain.my-
namespace.svc.cluster-domain.example), pointing to the Pods' IP addresses. Also, the Pod needs to be ready in order to have a
record unless publishNotReadyAddresses=True is set on the Service.

Pod's setHostnameAsFQDN field

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.22 [stable]

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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.

Note:
In Linux, the hostname field of the kernel (the nodename field of struct utsname ) is limited to 64 characters.

If a Pod enables this feature and its FQDN is longer than 64 character, it will fail to start. The Pod will remain in Pending status
( ContainerCreating as seen by kubectl ) generating error events, such as Failed to construct FQDN from Pod hostname and
cluster domain, FQDN long-FQDN is too long (64 characters is the max, 70 characters requested). One way of improving user
experience for this scenario is to create an admission webhook controller to control FQDN size when users create top level
objects, for example, Deployment.

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.

Note:
"Default" is not the default DNS policy. If dnsPolicy is not explicitly specified, then "ClusterFirst" is used.

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

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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

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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.

Note:
Some container runtimes of earlier versions may have their own restrictions on the number of DNS search domains. Depending
on the container runtime environment, the pods with a large number of DNS search domains may get stuck in the pending
state.

It is known that containerd v1.5.5 or earlier and CRI-O v1.21 or earlier have this problem.

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

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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 .)

Note:
An example of an IPv4 CIDR: 10.244.0.0/16 (though you would supply your own address range)

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An example of an IPv6 CIDR: fdXY:IJKL:MNOP:15::/64 (this shows the format but is not a valid address - see RFC 4193)

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.

Note:
The .spec.ipFamilies field is conditionally mutable: you can add or remove a secondary IP address family, but you cannot
change the primary IP address family of an existing 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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To use a dual-stack LoadBalancer type Service, your cloud provider must support IPv4 and IPv6 load balancers.

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.

Note:
Ensure your CNI provider supports IPv6.

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.

Note:
Overlay (VXLAN) networks on Windows do not support dual-stack networking.

You can read more about the different network modes for Windows within the Networking on Windows topic.

What's next
Validate IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack networking
Enable dual-stack networking using kubeadm

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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]

Note:
Prior to Kubernetes 1.27, this feature was known as Topology Aware Hints.

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

Note:
Prior to Kubernetes 1.27, this behavior was controlled using the service.kubernetes.io/topology-aware-hints annotation.

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.

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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.

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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
Follow the Connecting Applications with Services tutorial
Learn about the trafficDistribution field, which is closely related to the service.kubernetes.io/topology-mode annotation and
provides flexible options for traffic routing within Kubernetes.

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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 Container Packet Network

Driver Description Modifications Plugins Network Plugin Characteristics

L2bridge Containers are attached to MAC is rewritten to win-bridge, win-bridge uses L2bridge network
an external vSwitch. host MAC, IP may be Azure-CNI, mode, connects containers to the
Containers are attached to rewritten to host IP Flannel host- underlay of hosts, offering best
the underlay network, using HNS gateway uses performance. Requires user-defined
although the physical OutboundNAT policy. win-bridge routes (UDR) for inter-node
network doesn't need to connectivity.
learn the container MACs
because they are rewritten
on ingress/egress.

L2Tunnel This is a special case of MAC rewritten, IP Azure-CNI Azure-CNI allows integration of
l2bridge, but only used on visible on the containers with Azure vNET, and
Azure. All packets are sent underlay network allows them to leverage the set of
to the virtualization host capabilities that Azure Virtual
where SDN policy is applied. Network provides. For example,
securely connect to Azure services
or use Azure NSGs. See azure-cni for
some examples

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Network Container Packet Network

Driver Description Modifications Plugins Network Plugin Characteristics

Overlay Containers are given a vNIC Encapsulated with an win-overlay, win-overlay should be used when
connected to an external outer header. Flannel VXLAN virtual container networks are
vSwitch. Each overlay (uses win- desired to be isolated from underlay
network gets its own IP overlay) of hosts (e.g. for security reasons).
subnet, defined by a custom Allows for IPs to be re-used for
IP prefix.The overlay different overlay networks (which
network driver uses VXLAN have different VNID tags) if you are
encapsulation. restricted on IPs in your datacenter.
This option requires KB4489899 on
Windows Server 2019.

Transparent Requires an external Packet is ovn- Deploy via ansible. Distributed ACLs
(special use vSwitch. Containers are encapsulated either kubernetes can be applied via Kubernetes
case for ovn- attached to an external via GENEVE or STT policies. IPAM support. Load-
kubernetes) vSwitch which enables intra- tunneling to reach balancing can be achieved without
pod communication via pods which are not kube-proxy. NATing is done without
logical networks (logical on the same host. using iptables/netsh.
switches and routers). Packets are
forwarded or
dropped via the
tunnel metadata
information supplied
by the ovn network
controller.
NAT is done for north-
south
communication.

NAT (not used Containers are given a vNIC MAC and IP is nat Included here for completeness
in Kubernetes) connected to an internal rewritten to host
vSwitch. DNS/DHCP is MAC/IP.
provided using an internal
component called WinNAT

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

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IP address management (IPAM)

The following IPAM options are supported on Windows:

host-local
azure-vnet-ipam (for azure-cni only)
Windows Server IPAM (fallback option if no IPAM is set)

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:

Minimum
Supported
Windows OS
Feature Description build How to enable

Session affinity Ensures that connections from a Windows Set service.spec.sessionAffinity to

particular client are passed to the same Server 2022 "ClientIP"
Pod each time.

Direct Server Load balancing mode where the IP Windows Set the following flags in kube-proxy: --
Return (DSR) address fixups and the LBNAT occurs Server 2019 feature-gates="WinDSR=true" --enable-
at the container vSwitch port directly; dsr=true
service traffic arrives with the source IP
set as the originating pod IP.

Preserve- Skips DNAT of service traffic, thereby Windows Set "preserve-destination": "true" in
Destination preserving the virtual IP of the target Server, version service annotations and enable DSR in kube-
service in packets reaching the 1903 proxy.
backend Pod. Also disables node-node
forwarding.

IPv4/IPv6 dual- Native IPv4-to-IPv4 in parallel with IPv6- Windows See IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack
stack to-IPv6 communications to, from, and Server 2019
networking within a cluster

Client IP Ensures that source IP of incoming Windows Set service.spec.externalTrafficPolicy to

preservation ingress traffic gets preserved. Also Server 2019 "Local" and enable DSR in kube-proxy
disables node-node forwarding.

Warning:
There are known issue with NodePort Services on overlay networking, if the destination node is running Windows Server 2022.
To avoid the issue entirely, you can configure the service with externalTrafficPolicy: Local .

There are known issues with Pod to Pod connectivity on l2bridge network on Windows Server 2022 with KB5005619 or higher
installed. To workaround the issue and restore Pod to Pod connectivity, you can disable the WinDSR feature in kube-proxy.

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These issues require OS fixes. Please follow https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-Containers/issues/204 for updates.

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.

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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.

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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
Read about Service External Traffic Policy
Read about Connecting Applications with Services
Read about Services

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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.

Note:
For pods on nodes with no endpoints for a given Service, the Service behaves as if it has zero endpoints (for Pods on this node)
even if the service does have endpoints on other nodes.

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
Read about Topology Aware Routing
Read about Service External Traffic Policy
Follow the Connecting Applications with Services tutorial

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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 1.30, 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 1.30, 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.
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For more details, see the azureFile volume plugin.

azureFile CSI migration

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [stable]

The feature for azureFile , when enabled, redirects all plugin operations from the existing in-tree plugin to the
CSIMigration
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 storage plugin from being loaded by the controller manager and the kubelet, set the
azureFile
InTreePluginAzureFileUnregister flag to true .

cephfs (deprecated)

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.28 [deprecated]

Note:
The Kubernetes project suggests that you use the CephFS CSI third party storage driver instead.

A cephfs volume allows an existing CephFS volume to be mounted into your Pod. Unlike emptyDir , which is erased when a pod is
removed, the contents of a cephfs volume are preserved and the volume is merely unmounted. This means that a cephfs volume
can be pre-populated with data, and that data can be shared between pods. The cephfs volume can be mounted by multiple writers
simultaneously.

Note:
You must have your own Ceph server running with the share exported before you can use it.

See the CephFS example for more details.

cinder (deprecated)
In Kubernetes 1.30, 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 :

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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 ConfigMap is mounted as a volume, and all contents stored in its log_level entry are mounted into the Pod at path
log-config
/etc/config/log_level . Note that this path is derived from the volume's mountPath and the path keyed with log_level .

Note:
You must create a ConfigMap before you can use it.

A ConfigMap is always mounted as readOnly .

A container using a ConfigMap as a subPath volume mount will not receive ConfigMap updates.

Text data is exposed as files using the UTF-8 character encoding. For other character encodings, use binaryData .

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.

Note:
A container using the downward API as a subPath volume mount does not receive updates when field values change.

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.

Note:
A container crashing does not remove a Pod from a node. The data in an emptyDir volume is safe across container crashes.

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

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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.

Note:
If the SizeMemoryBackedVolumes feature gate is enabled, you can specify a size for memory backed volumes. 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

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.

Note:
You must configure FC SAN Zoning to allocate and mask those LUNs (volumes) to the target WWNs beforehand so that
Kubernetes hosts can access them.

See the fibre channel example for more details.

gcePersistentDisk (deprecated)
In Kubernetes 1.30, 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)

Warning:
The gitRepo volume type is deprecated.

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To provision a Pod that has a Git repository mounted, you can mount an emptyDir volume into an init container that clones the
repo using Git, then mount the EmptyDir into the Pod's container.

You can restrict the use of gitRepo volumes in your cluster using policies such as ValidatingAdmissionPolicy. You can use the
following Common Expression Language (CEL) expression as part of a policy to reject use of gitRepo volumes:
has(object.spec.volumes) || !object.spec.volumes.exists(v, has(v.gitRepo)) .

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 1.30 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.

Warning:
Using the hostPath volume type presents many security risks. If you can avoid using a hostPath volume, you should. For
example, define a local PersistentVolume, and use that instead.

If you are restricting access to specific directories on the node using admission-time validation, that restriction is only effective
when you additionally require that any mounts of that hostPath volume are read only. If you allow a read-write mount of any
host path by an untrusted Pod, the containers in that Pod may be able to subvert the read-write host mount.

Take care when using hostPath volumes, whether these are mounted as read-only or as read-write, because:

Access to the host filesystem can expose privileged system credentials (such as for the kubelet) or privileged APIs (such as
the container runtime socket), that can be used for container escape or to attack other parts of the cluster.
Pods with identical configuration (such as created from a PodTemplate) may behave differently on different nodes due to
different files on the nodes.

Some uses for a hostPath are:

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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

Caution:
The FileOrCreate mode does not create the parent directory of the file. If the parent directory of the mounted file does not exist,
the pod fails to start. To ensure that this mode works, you can try to mount directories and files separately, as shown in the
FileOrCreate example for hostPath.

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

Linux node Windows node

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---
# 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

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 already exists but is not a directory, the Pod fails. Additionally, the kubelet attempts to make a file named
/var/local/aaa
/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:

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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

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.

Note:
You must have your own iSCSI server running with the volume created before you can use it.

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 :

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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.

Note:
The local PersistentVolume requires manual cleanup and deletion by the user if the external static provisioner is not used to
manage the volume lifecycle.

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.

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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

Note:
You must have your own NFS server running with the share exported before you can use it.

Also note that you can't specify NFS mount options in a Pod spec. You can either set mount options server-side or use
/etc/nfsmount.conf. You can also mount NFS volumes via PersistentVolumes which do allow you to set mount options.

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:

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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>"

Note:
Make sure you have an existing PortworxVolume with name pxvol before using it in the Pod.

For more details, see the Portworx volume examples.

Portworx CSI migration

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [beta]

The CSIMigration feature for Portworx has been added but disabled by default in Kubernetes 1.23 since it's in alpha state. It has
been beta now since v1.25 but it is still turned off by default. 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. To enable the
feature, set CSIMigrationPortworx=true in kube-controller-manager and kubelet.

projected
A projected volume maps several existing volume sources into the same directory. For more details, see projected volumes.

rbd

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.28 [deprecated]

Note:
The Kubernetes project suggests that you use the Ceph CSI third party storage driver instead, in RBD mode.

An rbd volume allows a Rados Block Device (RBD) volume to mount into your Pod. Unlike emptyDir , which is erased when a pod is
removed, the contents of an rbd volume are preserved and the volume is unmounted. This means that a RBD volume can be pre-
populated with data, and that data can be shared between pods.

Note:
You must have a Ceph installation running before you can use RBD.

A feature of RBD 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, RBD volumes can
only be mounted by a single consumer in read-write mode. Simultaneous writers are not allowed.

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See the RBD example for more details.

RBD CSI migration

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.28 [deprecated]

The feature for RBD , when enabled, redirects all plugin operations from the existing in-tree plugin to the
CSIMigration
rbd.csi.ceph.com CSI driver. In order to use this feature, the Ceph CSI driver must be installed on the cluster and the
CSIMigrationRBD feature gate must be enabled. (Note that the csiMigrationRBD flag has been removed and replaced with
CSIMigrationRBD in release v1.24)

Note:
As a Kubernetes cluster operator that administers storage, here are the prerequisites that you must complete before you
attempt migration to the RBD CSI driver:

You must install the Ceph CSI driver ( rbd.csi.ceph.com ), v3.5.0 or above, into your Kubernetes cluster.
considering the clusterID field is a required parameter for CSI driver for its operations, but in-tree StorageClass has
monitors field as a required parameter, a Kubernetes storage admin has to create a clusterID based on the monitors hash
( ex: #echo -n '<monitors_string>' | md5sum ) in the CSI config map and keep the monitors under this clusterID configuration.
Also, if the value of adminId in the in-tree Storageclass is different from admin , the adminSecretName mentioned in the in-
tree Storageclass has to be patched with the base64 value of the adminId parameter value, otherwise this step can be
skipped.

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.

Note:
You must create a Secret in the Kubernetes API before you can use it.

A Secret is always mounted as readOnly .

A container using a Secret as a subPath volume mount will not receive Secret updates.

For more details, see Configuring Secrets.

vsphereVolume (deprecated)

Note:
The Kubernetes project recommends using the vSphere CSI out-of-tree storage driver instead.

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 1.30, all operations for the in-tree vsphereVolume type are redirected to the csi.vsphere.vmware.com CSI driver.

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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 lug-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 v1.30, consult the documentation for that version of Kubernetes.

Note:
The following StorageClass parameters from the built-in vsphereVolume plugin are not supported by the vSphere CSI driver:

diskformat
hostfailurestotolerate
forceprovisioning
cachereservation
diskstripes
objectspacereservation
iopslimit

Existing volumes created using these parameters will be migrated to the vSphere CSI driver, but new volumes created by the
vSphere CSI driver will not be honoring these parameters.

vSphere CSI migration complete

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.19 [beta]

To turn off the plugin from being loaded by the controller manager and the kubelet, you need to set
vsphereVolume
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:

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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

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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.

Note:
Support for CSI spec versions 0.2 and 0.3 are deprecated in Kubernetes v1.13 and will be removed in a future release.

Note:
CSI drivers may not be compatible across all Kubernetes releases. Please check the specific CSI driver's documentation for
supported deployments steps for each Kubernetes release and a compatibility matrix.

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:

through a reference to a PersistentVolumeClaim

with a generic ephemeral volume
with a CSI ephemeral volume if the driver supports that

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 .

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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. In order to use the nodeExpandSecretRef field, your cluster should be
running Kubernetes version 1.25 or later.
If you are running Kubernetes Version 1.25 or 1.26, you must enable the feature gate named CSINodeExpandSecret for each
kube-apiserver and for the kubelet on every node. In 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]

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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.

Note:
Existing PVs created by a in-tree volume plugin can still be used in the future without any configuration changes, even after the
migration to CSI is completed for that volume type, and even after you upgrade to a version of Kubernetes that doesn't have
compiled-in support for that kind of storage.

As part of that migration, you - or another cluster administrator - must have installed and configured the appropriate CSI driver
for that storage. The core of Kubernetes does not install that software for you.

After that migration, you can also define new PVCs and PVs that refer to the legacy, built-in storage integrations. Provided you
have the appropriate CSI driver installed and configured, the PV creation continues to work, even for brand new volumes. The
actual storage management now happens through the CSI driver.

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:

azureFile

gcePersistentDisk
vsphereVolume

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:

SMB
iSCSI

Note:
FlexVolume is deprecated. Using an out-of-tree CSI driver is the recommended way to integrate external storage with
Kubernetes.

Maintainers of FlexVolume driver should implement a CSI Driver and help to migrate users of FlexVolume drivers to CSI. Users of
FlexVolume should move their workloads to use the equivalent CSI Driver.

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:

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- This volume mount will not receive any subsequent mounts that are mounted to this volume or any of its subdirectories
None
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)

- This volume mount behaves the same the HostToContainer mount. In addition, all volume mounts created by
Bidirectional
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)

Warning:
Bidirectional mount propagation can be dangerous. It can damage the host operating system and therefore it is allowed
only in privileged containers. Familiarity with Linux kernel behavior is strongly recommended. In addition, any volume
mounts created by containers in pods must be destroyed (unmounted) by the containers on termination.

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 v1.30 [alpha]

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

is unset, or, set to None

mountPropagation

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.
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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

Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project
authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide
before submitting a change. More information.

The following container runtimes are known to support recursive read-only mounts.

CRI-level:

containerd, since v2.0

OCI-level:

runc, since v1.1

crun, since v1.8.6

What's next
Follow an example of deploying WordPress and MySQL with Persistent Volumes.

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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.
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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.

Note:
PVC is in active use by a Pod when a Pod object exists that is using the PVC.

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>

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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

Warning:
The Recycle reclaim policy is deprecated. Instead, the recommended approach is to use dynamic provisioning.

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)\" ||
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.

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PersistentVolume deletion protection finalizer

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.23 [alpha]

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 newly introduced finalizers kubernetes.io/pv-controller and external-provisioner.volume.kubernetes.io/finalizer are only

added to dynamically provisioned volumes.

The finalizer kubernetes.io/pv-controller is added to in-tree plugin volumes. The following is an example

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-74a498d6-3929-47e8-8c02-07
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.
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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.

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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.

Warning:
Directly editing the size of a PersistentVolume can prevent an automatic resize of that volume. If you edit the capacity of a
PersistentVolume, and then edit the .spec of a matching PersistentVolumeClaim to make the size of the PersistentVolumeClaim
match the PersistentVolume, then no storage resize happens. The Kubernetes control plane will see that the desired state of
both resources matches, conclude that the backing volume size has been manually increased and that no resize is necessary.

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.

Note:
FlexVolume resize is possible only when the underlying driver supports resize.

Recovering from Failure when Expanding Volumes

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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.

Manually with Cluster Administrator access By requesting expansion to smaller size

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.

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)

cephfs - CephFS volume (deprecated starting v1.28, no migration plan, support will be removed in a future release)

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 (deprecated starting v1.25)

rbd - Rados Block Device (RBD) volume (deprecated starting v1.28, no migration plan, support will be removed in a future
release)
vsphereVolume - vSphere VMDK volume (migration on by default starting v1.25)

Older versions of Kubernetes also supported the following in-tree PersistentVolume types:

photonPersistentDisk - Photon controller persistent disk. (not available starting v1.15)

scaleIO - ScaleIO volume. (not available starting v1.21)

flocker - Flocker storage. (not available starting v1.25)

quobyte - Quobyte volume. (not available starting v1.25)

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.

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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

Note:
Helper programs relating to the volume type may be required for consumption of a PersistentVolume within a cluster. In this
example, the PersistentVolume is of type NFS and the helper program /sbin/mount.nfs is required to support the mounting of
NFS filesystems.

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

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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.

Note:
The ReadWriteOncePod access mode is only supported for CSI volumes and Kubernetes version 1.22+. To use this feature you will
need to update the following CSI sidecars to these versions or greater:

csi-provisioner:v3.0.0+
csi-attacher:v3.3.0+
csi-resizer:v1.3.0+

In the CLI, the access modes are abbreviated to:

RWO - ReadWriteOnce
ROX - ReadOnlyMany
RWX - ReadWriteMany
RWOP - ReadWriteOncePod

Note:
Kubernetes uses volume access modes to match PersistentVolumeClaims and PersistentVolumes. In some cases, the volume
access modes also constrain where the PersistentVolume can be mounted. Volume access modes do not enforce write
protection once the storage has been mounted. Even if the access modes are specified as ReadWriteOnce, ReadOnlyMany, or
ReadWriteMany, they don't set any constraints on the volume. For example, even if a PersistentVolume is created as
ReadOnlyMany, it is no guarantee that it will be read-only. If the access modes are specified as ReadWriteOncePod, the volume
is constrained and can be mounted on only a single Pod.

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 depends on the depends on the driver depends on the
driver driver driver

FC ✓ ✓ - -

FlexVolume ✓ ✓ depends on the driver -

HostPath ✓ - - -

iSCSI ✓ ✓ - -

NFS ✓ ✓ ✓ -

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Volume Plugin ReadWriteOnce ReadOnlyMany ReadWriteMany ReadWriteOncePod

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 1.30, 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.

Note:
Not all Persistent Volume types support mount options.

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

Note:
For most volume types, you do not need to set this field. You need to explicitly set this for local volumes.

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.
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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 v1.29 [beta]

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.

Note:
You need to enable the PersistentVolumeLastPhaseTransitionTime feature gate to use or see the lastPhaseTransitionTime field.

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.

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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:

- the volume must have a label with this value

matchLabels

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.

Note:
Currently, a PVC with a non-empty selector can't have a PV dynamically provisioned for it.

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]

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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
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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

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Note:
When adding a raw block device for a Pod, you specify the device path in the container instead of a mount path.

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

Note:
Only statically provisioned volumes are supported for alpha release. Administrators should take care to consider these values
when working with raw block devices.

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

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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]

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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.

Note:
When you specify a namespace for a volume data source, Kubernetes checks for a ReferenceGrant in the other namespace
before accepting the reference. ReferenceGrant is part of the gateway.networking.k8s.io extension APIs. See ReferenceGrant in
the Gateway API documentation for details. This means that you must extend your Kubernetes cluster with at least
ReferenceGrant from the Gateway API before you can use this mechanism.

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.

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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.

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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
Learn more about Creating a PersistentVolume.
Learn more about Creating a PersistentVolumeClaim.
Read the Persistent Storage design document.

API references
Read about the APIs described in this page:

PersistentVolume

PersistentVolumeClaim

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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:

secret

downwardAPI
configMap

serviceAccountToken

clusterTrustBundle

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

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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

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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.

Note:
A container using a projected volume source as a subPath volume mount will not receive updates for those volume sources.

clusterTrustBundle projected volumes

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [alpha]

Note:
To use this feature in Kubernetes 1.30, you must enable support for ClusterTrustBundle objects with the ClusterTrustBundle
feature gate and --runtime-config=certificates.k8s.io/v1alpha1/clustertrustbundles=true kube-apiserver flag, then enable the
ClusterTrustBundleProjection feature gate.

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.
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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 .

Note:
Ephemeral containers added to a Pod after it is created do not change volume permissions that were set when the pod was
created.

If a Pod's volume permissions were set to 0600 because all other containers in the Pod have the same
serviceAccountToken
runAsUser , ephemeral containers must use the same runAsUser to be able to read the token.

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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
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.

Note:
In general, granting the container access to the host is discouraged as it can open the door for potential security exploits.

Creating a Windows Pod with RunAsUser in it's SecurityContext will result in the Pod being stuck at ContainerCreating forever.
So it is advised to not use the Linux only RunAsUser option with Windows Pods.

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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: empty at Pod startup, with storage coming locally from the kubelet base directory (usually the root disk) or RAM
configMap, downwardAPI, secret: inject different kinds of Kubernetes data into a Pod
CSI ephemeral volumes: similar to the previous volume kinds, but provided by special CSI drivers which specifically support this
feature
generic ephemeral volumes, which can be provided by all storage drivers that also support persistent volumes

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]

Note:
CSI ephemeral volumes are only supported by a subset of CSI drivers. The Kubernetes CSI Drivers list shows which drivers
support ephemeral volumes.

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:

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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:

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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.

Caution:
Take care when naming Pods and volumes inside the same namespace, so that these conflicts can't occur.
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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

For more information on the design, see the Ephemeral Inline CSI volumes KEP.
For more information on further development of this feature, see the enhancement tracking issue #596.

Generic ephemeral volumes

For more information on the design, see the Generic ephemeral inline volumes KEP.

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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.

Note:
You should try to only have one StorageClass in your cluster that is marked as the default. The reason that Kubernetes allows
you to have multiple default StorageClasses is to allow for seamless migration.

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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.

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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.

Volume type Required Kubernetes version for volume expansion

Azure File 1.11

CSI 1.24

FlexVolume 1.13

Portworx 1.11

rbd 1.11

Note:
You can only use the volume expansion feature to grow a Volume, not to shrink it.

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

Note:
If you choose to use WaitForFirstConsumer , do not use nodeName in the Pod spec to specify node affinity. If nodeName is used in
this case, the scheduler will be bypassed and PVC will remain in pending state.

Instead, you can use node selector for kubernetes.io/hostname :

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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.

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
name: standard
provisioner: kubernetes.io/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 1.30 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.
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Here is an example StorageClass for the AWS EBS CSI driver:

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"
allowedTopologies:
- matchLabelExpressions:
- key: topology.ebs.csi.aws.com/zone
values:
- us-east-2c

NFS
To configure NFS storage, you can use the in-tree driver or the NFS CSI driver for Kubernetes (recommended).

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:

NFS Ganesha server and external provisioner

NFS subdir external provisioner

vSphere
There are two types of provisioners for vSphere storage classes:

CSI provisioner: csi.vsphere.vmware.com

vCP provisioner: kubernetes.io/vsphere-volume

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

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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

: The user can also specify the datastore in the StorageClass. The volume will be created on the datastore specified in
datastore
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)

Note:

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.28 [deprecated]

This internal provisioner of Ceph RBD is deprecated. Please use CephFS RBD CSI driver.

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apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
name: fast
provisioner: kubernetes.io/rbd
parameters:
monitors: 10.16.153.105:6789
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".

: Secret Name for

adminSecretName 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 .

: The name of Ceph Secret for userId to map RBD image. It must exist in the same namespace as PVCs. This
userSecretName
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 1.30 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)

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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

: Azure storage account SKU tier. Default is empty.

skuName

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

: a flag indicating whether the storage will be mounted as read only. Defaults to false which means a read/write
readOnly
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)

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
name: portworx-io-priority-high
provisioner: kubernetes.io/portworx-volume
parameters:
repl: "1"
snap_interval: "70"
priority_io: "high"

: filesystem to be laid out: none/xfs/ext4 (default: ext4 ).

fs

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

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apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
name: local-storage
provisioner: kubernetes.io/no-provisioner
volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer

Local volumes do not support dynamic provisioning in Kubernetes 1.30; 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.

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6.6 - Volume Attributes Classes

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [alpha]

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 unopinionated about what these classes represent.

This is an alpha feature and disabled by default.

If you want to test the feature whilst it's alpha, you need to enable the VolumeAttributesClass feature gate for the kube-controller-
manager and the kube-apiserver. You use the --feature-gates command line argument:

--feature-gates="...,VolumeAttributesClass=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/v1alpha1
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, a existing PersistentVolumeClaim is using a VolumeAttributesClass named silver:

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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/v1alpha1
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 apply the PVC with a
different VolumeAttributesClass with omitted parameters, the default value of the parameters may be used depends 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.

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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:

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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:

Marking one StorageClass object as default;

Making sure that the DefaultStorageClass admission controller is enabled on the API server.

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.

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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.
VolumeSnapshotsupport 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.

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.

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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:

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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

volumeHandleis 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

snapshotHandleis 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 .

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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.

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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.

Note:
Installation of the CRDs is the responsibility of the Kubernetes distribution. Without the required CRDs present, the creation of a
VolumeSnapshotClass fails.

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.

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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 .

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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

Note:
You must specify a capacity value for spec.resources.requests.storage, and the value you specify must be the same or larger
than the capacity of the source volume.

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 .

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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.

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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 v1.30 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 v1.30, 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.

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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
For more information on the design, see the Storage Capacity Constraints for Pod Scheduling KEP.

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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 service Maximum volumes per Node

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) 39

Google Persistent Disk 16

Microsoft Azure Disk Storage 16

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.

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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.

Note:
You need to enable the CSIVolumeHealth feature gate to use this feature from the node side.

What's next
See the CSI driver documentation to find out which CSI drivers have implemented this feature.

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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:

FlexVolume plugins
Please note that FlexVolumes have been deprecated as of 1.23
CSI Plugins

In-tree volume plugins

The following in-tree plugins support persistent storage on Windows nodes:

azureFile

vsphereVolume

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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.

Note:
There is a breaking change introduced in the YAML 1.2 boolean values specification with respect to YAML 1.1. This is a known
issue in Kubernetes. YAML 1.2 only recognizes true and false as valid booleans, while YAML 1.1 also accepts yes, no, on, and off
as booleans. However, Kubernetes uses YAML parsers that are mostly compatible with YAML 1.1, which means that using yes or
no instead of true or false in a YAML manifest may cause unexpected errors or behaviors. To avoid this issue, it is
recommended to always use true or false for boolean values in YAML manifests, and to quote any strings that may be confused
with booleans, such as "yes" or "no".

Besides booleans, there are additional specifications changes between YAML versions. Please refer to the YAML Specification
Changes documentation for a comprehensive list.

"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:

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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.

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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.

Caution:
ConfigMap does not provide secrecy or encryption. If the data you want to store are confidential, use a Secret rather than a
ConfigMap, or use additional (third party) tools to keep your data private.

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.

Note:
A ConfigMap is not designed to hold large chunks of data. The data stored in a ConfigMap cannot exceed 1 MiB. If you need to
store settings that are larger than this limit, you may want to consider mounting a volume or use a separate database or file
service.

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.

Note:
The spec of a static Pod cannot refer to a ConfigMap or any other API objects.

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.

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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

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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:

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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.

Note:
A container using a ConfigMap as a subPath volume mount will not receive ConfigMap updates.

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:

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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

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
Read about Secrets.
Read Configure a Pod to Use a ConfigMap.
Read about changing a ConfigMap (or any other Kubernetes object)
Read The Twelve-Factor App to understand the motivation for separating code from configuration.

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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.

Caution:
Kubernetes Secrets are, by default, stored unencrypted in the API server's underlying data store (etcd). Anyone with API access
can retrieve or modify a Secret, and so can anyone with access to etcd. Additionally, anyone who is authorized to create a Pod in
a namespace can use that access to read any Secret in that namespace; this includes indirect access such as the ability to create
a Deployment.

In order to safely use Secrets, take at least the following steps:

1. Enable Encryption at Rest for Secrets.

2. Enable or configure RBAC rules with least-privilege access to Secrets.
3. Restrict Secret access to specific containers.
4. Consider using external Secret store providers.

For more guidelines to manage and improve the security of your Secrets, refer to Good practices for Kubernetes Secrets.

See Information security for Secrets for more details.

Uses for Secrets

You can use Secrets for purposes such as the following:

Set environment variables for a container.

Provide credentials such as SSH keys or passwords to Pods.
Allow the kubelet to pull container images from private registries.

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 .

Note:
Files beginning with dot characters are hidden from the output of ls -l; you must use ls -la to see them when listing directory
contents.

secret/dotfile-secret.yaml

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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.
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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:

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Call the TokenRequest API either directly or by using an API client like kubectl . For example, you can use the kubectl create
token command.

Request a mounted token in a projected volume in your Pod manifest. Kubernetes creates the token and mounts it in the Pod.
The token is automatically invalidated when the Pod that it's mounted in is deleted. For details, see Launch a Pod using service
account token projection.

Note:
You should only create a ServiceAccount token Secret if you can't use the TokenRequest API to obtain a token, and the security
exposure of persisting a non-expiring token credential in a readable API object is acceptable to you. For instructions, see
Manually create a long-lived API token for a ServiceAccount.

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:

: store a serialized ~/.dockercfg which is the legacy format for configuring Docker command line. The
kubernetes.io/dockercfg
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

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apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
name: secret-dockercfg
type: kubernetes.io/dockercfg
data:
.dockercfg: |
eyJhdXRocyI6eyJodHRwczovL2V4YW1wbGUvdjEvIjp7ImF1dGgiOiJvcGVuc2VzYW1lIn19fQo=

Note:
If you do not want to perform the base64 encoding, you can choose to use the stringData field instead.

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="
}
}
}

Caution:
The auth value there is base64 encoded; it is obscured but not secret. Anyone who can read that Secret can learn the registry
access bearer token.

It is suggested to use credential providers to dynamically and securely provide pull secrets on-demand.

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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

Note:
The stringData field for a Secret does not work well with server-side apply.

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.

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Caution:
SSH private keys do not establish trusted communication between an SSH client and host server on their own. A secondary
means of establishing trust is needed to mitigate "man in the middle" attacks, such as a known_hosts file added to a ConfigMap.

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: |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# 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

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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

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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"

Note:
The stringData field for a Secret does not work well with server-side apply.

Working with Secrets

Creating a Secret
There are several options to create a Secret:

Use kubectl
Use a configuration file
Use the Kustomize tool

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:

Use kubectl
Use a configuration file

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.

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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 Distribute credentials securely using Secrets.

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.

Note:
A container using a Secret as a subPath volume mount does not receive automated Secret updates.

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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.
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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.

Note:
Once a Secret or ConfigMap is marked as immutable, it is not possible to revert this change nor to mutate the contents of the
data field. You can only delete and recreate the Secret. Existing Pods maintain a mount point to the deleted Secret - it is
recommended to recreate these pods.

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.

Warning:
Any containers that run with privileged: true on a node can access all Secrets used on that node.

What's next
For guidelines to manage and improve the security of your Secrets, refer to Good practices for Kubernetes Secrets.
Learn how to manage Secrets using kubectl
Learn how to manage Secrets using config file
Learn how to manage Secrets using kustomize
Read the API reference for Secret

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7.4 - 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. However, a container is not allowed to use more than its resource limit .

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.

If you set a memory limit of 4GiB for that container, the kubelet (and container runtime) enforce the limit. The runtime prevents the
container from using more than the configured resource limit. For example: when a process in the container tries to consume more
than the allowed amount of memory, the system kernel terminates the process that attempted the allocation, with an out of
memory (OOM) error.

Limits can be implemented either reactively (the system intervenes once it sees a violation) or by enforcement (the system prevents
the container from ever exceeding the limit). Different runtimes can have different ways to implement the same restrictions.

Note:
If you specify a limit for a resource, but do not specify any request, and no admission-time mechanism has applied a default
request for that resource, then Kubernetes copies the limit you specified and uses it as the requested value for the resource.

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.

Note:
You cannot overcommit hugepages-* resources. This is different from the memory and cpu resources.

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>

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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.

Note:
Kubernetes doesn't allow you to specify CPU resources with a precision finer than 1m or 0.001 CPU. To avoid accidentally using
an invalid CPU quantity, it's useful to specify CPU units using the milliCPU form instead of the decimal form when using less than
1 CPU unit.

For example, you have a Pod that uses 5m or 0.005 CPU and would like to decrease its CPU resources. By using the decimal
form, it's harder to spot that 0.0005 CPU is an invalid value, while by using the milliCPU form, it's easier to spot that 0.5m is an
invalid value.

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.

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---
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 that 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.

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.
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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.

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.

Caution:
If a node fails, the data in its ephemeral storage can be lost. Your applications cannot expect any performance SLAs (disk IOPS
for example) from local ephemeral storage.

Note:
To make the resource quota work on ephemeral-storage, two things need to be done:

An admin sets the resource quota for ephemeral-storage in a namespace.

A user needs to specify limits for the ephemeral-storage resource in the Pod spec.

If the user doesn't specify the ephemeral-storage resource limit in the Pod spec, the resource quota is not enforced on
ephemeral-storage.

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:

Single filesystem Two filesystems

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.

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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.

Note:
The kubelet tracks tmpfs emptyDir volumes as container memory use, rather than as local ephemeral storage.

Note:
The kubelet will only track the root filesystem for ephemeral storage. OS layouts that mount a separate disk to /var/lib/kubelet
or /var/lib/containers will not report ephemeral storage correctly.

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.

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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:

volumes, except tmpfs emptyDir volumes

emptyDir

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.

Caution:
If the kubelet is not measuring local ephemeral storage, then a Pod that exceeds its local storage limit will not be evicted for
breaching local storage resource limits.

However, if the filesystem space for writeable container layers, node-level logs, or emptyDir volumes falls low, the node taints
itself as short on local storage and this taint triggers eviction for any Pods that don't specifically tolerate the taint.

See the supported configurations for ephemeral local storage.

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The kubelet supports different ways to measure Pod storage use:

Periodic scanning Filesystem project quota

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.

Note:
In this mode, the kubelet does not track open file descriptors for deleted files.

If you (or a container) create a file inside an emptyDir volume, something then opens that file, and you delete the file while
it is still open, then the inode for the deleted file stays until you close that file but the kubelet does not categorize the space
as in use.

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

Note:

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In the preceding request, ~1 is the encoding for the character / in the patch path. The operation path value in JSON-Patch is
interpreted as a JSON-Pointer. For more details, see IETF RFC 6901, section 3.

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 ).

Note:
Extended resources replace Opaque Integer Resources. Users can use any domain name prefix other than kubernetes.io which
is reserved.

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.

Note:
Extended resources cannot be overcommitted, so request and limit must be equal if both are present in a 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).

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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

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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:

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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
Get hands-on experience assigning Memory resources to containers and Pods.
Get hands-on experience assigning CPU resources to containers and Pods.
Read how the API reference defines a container and its resource requirements
Read about project quotas in XFS
Read more about the kube-scheduler configuration reference (v1)
Read more about Quality of Service classes for Pods

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7.5 - 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.

Note:
A file that is used to configure access to clusters is called a kubeconfig file. This is a generic way of referring to configuration files.
It does not mean that there is a file named kubeconfig.

Warning:
Only use kubeconfig files from trusted sources. Using a specially-crafted kubeconfig file could result in malicious code execution
or file exposure. If you must use an untrusted kubeconfig file, inspect it carefully first, much as you would a shell script.

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:

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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:

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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
Configure Access to Multiple Clusters
kubectl config

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7.6 - 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.

Caution:
As you deploy workloads, set resource memory and CPU limits on containers. This also subtracts from NodeAllocatable and
helps the cluster-wide scheduler in determining which pods to place on which nodes.

Scheduling pods without limits may over-provision the Windows nodes and in extreme cases can cause the nodes to become
unhealthy.

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.

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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

Note: Items on this page refer to vendors external to Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project authors aren't responsible for those
third-party products or projects. To add a vendor, product or project to this list, read the content guide before submitting a
change. More information.

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:

IaaS Provider Link

Alibaba Cloud https://www.alibabacloud.com/trust-center

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IaaS Provider Link

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:

Securing your cluster

Known vulnerabilities in Kubernetes (and links to further information)
Data encryption in transit for the control plane
Data encryption at rest
Controlling Access to the Kubernetes API
Network policies for Pods
Secrets in Kubernetes
Pod security standards
RuntimeClasses

Learn the context:

Cloud Native Security and Kubernetes

Get certified:

Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist certification and official training course.

Read more in this section:

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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: compute, access, and storage.

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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 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.

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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
CNCF white paper on cloud native security.
CNCF white paper on good practices for securing a software supply chain.
Fixing the Kubernetes clusterf**k: Understanding security from the kernel up (FOSDEM 2020)
Kubernetes Security Best Practices (Kubernetes Forum Seoul 2019)
Towards Measured Boot Out of the Box (Linux Security Summit 2016)

Kubernetes and information security

Kubernetes security
Securing your cluster
Data encryption in transit for the control plane
Data encryption at rest
Secrets in Kubernetes
Controlling Access to the Kubernetes API
Network policies for Pods
Pod security standards
RuntimeClasses

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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. Allow-by-default mechanisms (such as gatekeeper) may be Privileged
by default. In contrast, for a deny-by-default mechanism (such as Pod Security Policy) the Privileged policy should disable all
restrictions.

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:

Note:
In this table, wildcards (*) indicate all elements in a list. For example, spec.containers[*].securityContext refers to the Security
Context object for all defined containers. If any of the listed containers fails to meet the requirements, the entire pod will fail
validation.

Control Policy

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HostProcess Windows pods offer the ability to run HostProcess containers which enables privileged access to the
Windows node. 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

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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

Undefined/nil
Known list (not supported by the built-in Pod Security Admission controller)
0

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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

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/""

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/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:

Note:
In this table, wildcards (*) indicate all elements in a list. For example, spec.containers[*].securityContext refers to the Security
Context object for all defined containers. If any of the listed containers fails to meet the requirements, the entire pod will fail
validation.

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Control Policy

Everything from the baseline profile.

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 .

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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.

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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

Privileged namespace
Baseline namespace
Restricted namespace

Alternatives

Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project
authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide
before submitting a change. More information.

Other alternatives for enforcing policies are being developed in the Kubernetes ecosystem, such as:

Kubewarden
Kyverno
OPA Gatekeeper

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.

Note:
Kubelets prior to v1.24 don't enforce the pod OS field, and if a cluster has nodes on versions earlier than v1.24 the restricted
policies should be pinned to a version prior to v1.25.

Restricted Pod Security Standard changes

Another important change, made in Kubernetes v1.25 is that the restricted Pod security 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
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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.

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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 v1.30. 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:

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 v1.30).
#
# 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>

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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.

Caution:
Most pods are created by a controller in response to a workload resource, meaning that exempting an end user will only exempt
them from enforcement when creating pods directly, but not when creating a workload resource. Controller service accounts
(such as system:serviceaccount:kube-system:replicaset-controller) should generally not be exempted, as doing so would
implicitly exempt any user that can create the corresponding workload resource.

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
Pod Security Standards
Enforcing Pod Security Standards
Enforce Pod Security Standards by Configuring the Built-in Admission Controller
Enforce Pod Security Standards with Namespace Labels
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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.

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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.

Description ServiceAccount User or group

Location Kubernetes API (ServiceAccount object) External

Access Kubernetes RBAC or other authorization Kubernetes RBAC or other identity and access management
control mechanisms 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.
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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.

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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.

Note:
For applications running outside your Kubernetes cluster, you might be considering creating a long-lived ServiceAccount token
that is stored in a Secret. This allows authentication, but the Kubernetes project recommends you avoid this approach. Long-
lived bearer tokens represent a security risk as, once disclosed, the token can be misused. Instead, consider using an alternative.
For example, your external application can authenticate using a well-protected private key and a certificate, or using a custom
mechanism such as an authentication webhook that you implement yourself.

You can also use TokenRequest to obtain short-lived tokens for your external application.

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.
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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:

TokenReview API (recommended)

OIDC discovery

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
Issue your own tokens using another mechanism, and then use Webhook Token Authentication to validate bearer tokens using
your own validation service.
Provide your own identities to Pods.
Use the SPIFFE CSI driver plugin to provide SPIFFE SVIDs as X.509 certificate pairs to Pods.

🛇 This item links to a third party project or product that is not part of Kubernetes itself. More information

Use a service mesh such as Istio to provide certificates to Pods.

Authenticate from outside the cluster to the API server without using service account tokens:
Configure the API server to accept OpenID Connect (OIDC) tokens from your identity provider.
Use service accounts or user accounts created using an external Identity and Access Management (IAM) service, such as
from a cloud provider, to authenticate to your cluster.
Use the CertificateSigningRequest API with client certificates.
Configure the kubelet to retrieve credentials from an image registry.
Use a Device Plugin to access a virtual Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which then allows authentication using a private key.

What's next
Learn how to manage your ServiceAccounts as a cluster administrator.
Learn how to assign a ServiceAccount to a Pod.
Read the ServiceAccount API reference.

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8.5 - Pod Security Policies

Removed feature
PodSecurityPolicy was deprecated in Kubernetes v1.21, and removed from Kubernetes in v1.25.

Instead of using PodSecurityPolicy, you can enforce similar restrictions on Pods using either or both:

Pod Security Admission

a 3rd party admission plugin, that you deploy and configure yourself

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 v1.30, check the documentation for your version of Kubernetes.

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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.

Note:
Nano Server based images run as ContainerUser by default
Server Core based images run as ContainerAdministrator by default

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.

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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:

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.

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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.

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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:

Authenticating
Authenticating with Bootstrap Tokens
Admission Controllers
Dynamic Admission Control
Authorization
Role Based Access Control
Attribute Based Access Control
Node Authorization
Webhook Authorization
Certificate Signing Requests
including CSR approval and certificate signing
Service accounts
Developer guide
Administration

You can learn about:

how Pods can use Secrets to obtain API credentials.

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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.

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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.

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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
To learn more about RBAC, see the RBAC documentation.

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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.

Caution:
Granting list access to Secrets implicitly lets the subject fetch the contents of the Secrets.

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.

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Configure access to external Secrets

Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project
authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide
before submitting a change. More information.

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.

Caution:
Base64 encoding is not an encryption method, it provides no additional confidentiality over plain text.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Warning:
Network policies require a CNI plugin that supports the implementation of network policies. Otherwise, NetworkPolicy resources
will be ignored.

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

Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project
authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide
before submitting a change. More information.

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.
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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 2 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.

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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
Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project
authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide
before submitting a change. More information.

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.
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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
Capsule
Kiosk

Multi-customer tenancy
Kubeplus

Policy engines
Policy engines provide features to validate and generate tenant configurations:

Kyverno
OPA/Gatekeeper

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.

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The Kubernetes Cluster API - Nested (CAPN) project provides an implementation of virtual control planes.

Other implementations
Kamaji
vcluster

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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 with no 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.

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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 for 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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

Caution:
Ensure that the user or group that you assign to the workload has the permissions required for the application to function
correctly. Changing the user or group to one that doesn't have the correct permissions could lead to file access issues or failed
operations.

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 field in your Pod specification to define the constraints that apply to those processes. The
securityContext
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.

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Note:
Kubernetes also has the allowPrivilegeEscalation setting for Pods and containers. When set to false, this prevents processes
from gaining new capabilities and restricts unprivileged users from changing the applied seccomp profile to a more permissive
profile.

To learn how to implement seccomp in Kubernetes, refer to Restrict a Container's Syscalls with seccomp.

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.

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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.

Security
feature Description How to use Example

seccomp Restrict individual kernel calls in the Specify a loaded seccomp profile in the Reject the unshare
userspace. Reduces the likelihood that a Pod or container specification to apply syscall, which was used
vulnerability that uses a restricted syscall its constraints to the processes in the in CVE-2022-0185.
would compromise the system. Pod.

AppArmor Restrict program access to specific Specify a loaded AppArmor profile in Restrict a read-only
resources. Reduces the attack surface of the container specification. program from writing to
the program. Improves audit logging. any file path in the
system.

SELinux Restrict access to resources such as files, Specify access restrictions for specific Restrict a container
applications, ports, and processes using labels. Tag processes with those labels from accessing files
labels and security policies. to enforce the access restrictions outside its own
related to the label. filesystem.

Summary of Linux kernel security features

Note:
Mechanisms like AppArmor and SELinux can provide protection that extends beyond the container. For example, you can use
SELinux to help mitigate CVE-2019-5736.

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
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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
Learn how to use AppArmor
Learn how to use seccomp
Learn how to use SELinux

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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.

Caution:
Checklists are not sufficient for attaining a good security posture on their own. A good security posture requires constant
attention and improvement, but a checklist can be the first step on the never-ending journey towards security preparedness.
Some of the recommendations in this checklist may be too restrictive or too lax for your specific security needs. Since
Kubernetes security is not "one size fits all", each category of checklist items should be evaluated on its merits.

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.
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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.

Caution:
Memory limit superior to request can expose the whole node to OOM issues.

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.

Note:
Seccomp is only available on Linux nodes.

Enabling AppArmor or SELinux

AppArmor

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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.

Note:
AppArmor is only available on Linux nodes, and enabled in some Linux distributions.

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.

Note:
SELinux is only available on Linux nodes, and enabled in some Linux distributions.

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.

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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

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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
Privilege escalation via Pod creation warns you about a specific access control risk; check how you're managing that threat.
If you use Kubernetes RBAC, read RBAC Good Practices for further information on authorization.
Securing a Cluster for information on protecting a cluster from accidental or malicious access.
Cluster Multi-tenancy guide for configuration options recommendations and best practices on multi-tenancy.
Blog post "A Closer Look at NSA/CISA Kubernetes Hardening Guidance" for complementary resource on hardening Kubernetes
clusters.

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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:

NetworkPolicies can be used to restrict ingress and egress traffic for a workload.
LimitRanges manage resource allocation constraints across different object kinds.
ResourceQuotas limit resource consumption for a namespace.

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:

Admission Controllers

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:

Validating Admission Policy

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:

Dynamic Admission Control

Implementations

Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project
authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide
before submitting a change. More information.

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Dynamic Admission Controllers that act as flexible policy engines are being developed in the Kubernetes ecosystem, such as:

Kubewarden
Kyverno
OPA Gatekeeper
Polaris

Apply policies using Kubelet configurations

Kubernetes allows configuring the Kubelet on each worker node. Some Kubelet configurations act as policies:

Process ID limits and reservations are used to limit and reserve allocatable PIDs.
Node Resource Managers can manage compute, memory, and device resources for latency-critical and high-throughput
workloads.

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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

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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 l

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

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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:

how to configure minimum and maximum CPU constraints per namespace.

how to configure minimum and maximum Memory constraints per namespace.
how to configure default CPU Requests and Limits per namespace.
how to configure default Memory Requests and Limits per namespace.
how to configure minimum and maximum Storage consumption per namespace.
a detailed example on configuring quota per namespace.

Refer to the LimitRanger design document for context and historical information.

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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.

Note:
For cpu and memory resources, ResourceQuotas enforce that every (new) pod in that namespace sets a limit for that
resource. If you enforce a resource quota in a namespace for either cpu or memory , you, and other clients, must specify
either requests or limits for that resource, for every new Pod you submit. If you don't, the control plane may reject
admission for that Pod.
For other resources: ResourceQuota works and will ignore pods in the namespace without setting a limit or request for
that resource. It means that you can create a new pod without limit/request ephemeral storage if the resource quota limits
the ephemeral storage of this namespace. You can use a LimitRange to automatically set a default request for these
resources.

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.
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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- Across all pods in a non-terminal state, the number of huge page requests of the specified size cannot
<size> 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- Across all persistent volume claims associated with the

name>.storageclass.storage.k8s.io/requests.storage <storage-class-name> , the sum of storage requests
cannot exceed this value.

<storage-class- Across all persistent volume claims associated with the

name>.storageclass.storage.k8s.io/persistentvolumeclaims <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

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In release 1.8, quota support for local ephemeral storage is added as an alpha feature:

Resource Name Description

requests.ephemeral- Across all pods in the namespace, the sum of local ephemeral storage requests cannot exceed
storage 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 .

Note:
When using a CRI container runtime, container logs will count against the ephemeral storage quota. This can result in the
unexpected eviction of pods that have exhausted their storage quotas. Refer to Logging Architecture for details.

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.

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Resource Name Description

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.

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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 .

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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

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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

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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:

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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

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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> :

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kubectl create namespace myspace

kubectl create quota test --hard=count/deployments.apps=2,count/replicasets.apps=4,count/pods=3,count/secrets=4 --namespace=my

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:

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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
See ResourceQuota design doc for more information.
See a detailed example for how to use resource quota.
Read Quota support for priority class design doc.
See LimitedResources

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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.

Note:
On certain Linux installations, the operating system sets the PIDs limit to a low default, such as 32768. Consider raising the value
of /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max.

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.

Caution:
This means that the limit that applies to a Pod may be different depending on where the Pod is scheduled. To make things
simple, it's easiest if all Nodes use the same PID resource limits and reservations.

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.

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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
Refer to the PID Limiting enhancement document for more information.
For historical context, read Process ID Limiting for Stability Improvements in Kubernetes 1.14.
Read Managing Resources for Containers.
Learn how to Configure Out of Resource Handling.

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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:

CPU Manager Policies

Device Manager
Memory Manager Policies

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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 proactively terminating one or more Pods on resource-starved
Nodes.

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
Kubernetes Scheduler
Assigning Pods to Nodes
Pod Overhead
Pod Topology Spread Constraints
Taints and Tolerations
Scheduling Framework
Dynamic Resource Allocation
Scheduler Performance Tuning
Resource Bin Packing for Extended Resources
Pod Scheduling Readiness
Descheduler

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.

Pod Priority and Preemption

Node-pressure Eviction
API-initiated Eviction

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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
Read about scheduler performance tuning
Read about Pod topology spread constraints
Read the reference documentation for kube-scheduler
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Read the kube-scheduler config (v1) reference

Learn about configuring multiple schedulers
Learn about topology management policies
Learn about Pod Overhead
Learn about scheduling of Pods that use volumes in:
Volume Topology Support
Storage Capacity Tracking
Node-specific Volume Limits

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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:

nodeSelector field matching against node labels

Affinity and anti-affinity
nodeName field
Pod topology spread constraints

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.

Note:
The value of these labels is cloud provider specific and is not guaranteed to be reliable. For example, the value of
kubernetes.io/hostname may be the same as the node name in some environments and a different value in other environments.

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.
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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.

Note:
In the preceding types, IgnoredDuringExecution means that if the node labels change after Kubernetes schedules the Pod, the
Pod continues to run.

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 .

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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.

Note:
If you specify both nodeSelector and nodeAffinity , both must be satisfied for the Pod to be scheduled onto a node.

If you specify multiple terms in nodeSelectorTerms associated with nodeAffinity types, then the Pod can be scheduled onto a
node if one of the specified terms can be satisfied (terms are ORed).

If you specify multiple expressions in a single matchExpressions field associated with a term in nodeSelectorTerms , then the Pod
can be scheduled onto a node only if all the expressions are satisfied (expressions are ANDed).

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

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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.

Note:
If you want Kubernetes to successfully schedule the Pods in this example, you must have existing nodes with the
kubernetes.io/os=linux label.

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:

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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.

Note:
The DaemonSet controller, which creates Pods for DaemonSets, does not support scheduling profiles. When the DaemonSet
controller creates Pods, the default Kubernetes scheduler places those Pods and honors any nodeAffinity rules in the
DaemonSet controller.

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.

Note:
Inter-pod affinity and anti-affinity require substantial amounts of processing which can slow down scheduling in large clusters
significantly. We do not recommend using them in clusters larger than several hundred nodes.

Note:
Pod anti-affinity requires nodes to be consistently labeled, in other words, every node in the cluster must have an appropriate
label matching topologyKey. If some or all nodes are missing the specified topologyKey label, it can lead to unintended behavior.

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

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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.

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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 Pod anti-affinity rules, the admission controller
requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution
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 v1.29 [alpha]

Note:
The matchLabelKeys field is an alpha-level field and is disabled by default in Kubernetes 1.30. When you want to use it, you have
to enable it via the MatchLabelKeysInPodAffinity feature gate.

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.

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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 v1.29 [alpha]

Note:
The mismatchLabelKeys field is an alpha-level field and is disabled by default in Kubernetes 1.30. When you want to use it, you
have to enable it via the MatchLabelKeysInPodAffinity feature gate.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Warning:
nodeName is intended for use by custom schedulers or advanced use cases where you need to bypass any configured schedulers.
Bypassing the schedulers might lead to failed Pods if the assigned Nodes get oversubscribed. You can use node affinity or the
nodeSelector field to assign a Pod to a specific Node without bypassing the schedulers.

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

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Note:
Gt and Lt operators will not work with non-integer values. If the given value doesn't parse as an integer, the pod will fail to get
scheduled. Also, Gt and Lt are not available for podAffinity.

What's next
Read more about taints and tolerations.
Read the design docs for node affinity and for inter-pod affinity/anti-affinity.
Learn about how the topology manager takes part in node-level resource allocation decisions.
Learn how to use nodeSelector.
Learn how to use affinity and anti-affinity.

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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:

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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

Note:
If only limits are specified in the pod definition, kubelet will deduce requests from those limits and set them to be the same as
the defined limits.

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}'

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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-d1087c92a5b2/7ccf55aee35dd16aca4189c952d83487297f3cd760f1bbf09620e206e7

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.

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What's next
Learn more about RuntimeClass
Read the PodOverhead Design enhancement proposal for extra context

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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 created

empty scheduling gates?

no scheduling gate removed yes

pod scheduling gated pod scheduling ready

pod running

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

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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:

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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 NodeSelectorTermswas 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
Read the PodSchedulingReadiness KEP for more details

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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 :
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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.

Note:
Before Kubernetes v1.30, the minDomains field was only available if the MinDomainsInPodTopologySpread feature gate was
enabled (default since v1.28). In older Kubernetes clusters it might be explicitly disabled or the field might not be available.

The value of must be greater than 0, when specified. You can only specify minDomains in conjunction with
minDomains
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:

(default) tells the scheduler not to schedule it.

DoNotSchedule

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

Note:
The matchLabelKeys field is a beta-level field and enabled by default in 1.27. You can disable it by disabling the
MatchLabelKeysInPodTopologySpread feature gate.

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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.

Note:
The nodeAffinityPolicy is a beta-level field and enabled by default in 1.26. You can disable it by disabling the
NodeInclusionPolicyInPodTopologySpread feature gate.

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.

Note:
The nodeTaintsPolicy is a beta-level field and enabled by default in 1.26. You can disable it by disabling the
NodeInclusionPolicyInPodTopologySpread feature gate.

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

Note:
For brevity, this example doesn't use the well-known label keys topology.kubernetes.io/zone and topology.kubernetes.io/region .
However, those registered label keys are nonetheless recommended rather than the private (unqualified) label keys region and
zone that are used here.

You can't make a reliable assumption about the meaning of a private label key between different contexts.

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;

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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

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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 to a bigger value - such as 2 - so that the incoming Pod can be placed into zone A as well.
maxSkew

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

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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

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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 bypasses any nodes that don't have any topologySpreadConstraints[*].topologyKey present. 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:

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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.

Note:
The PodTopologySpread plugin does not score the nodes that don't have the topology keys specified in the spreading constraints.
This might result in a different default behavior compared to the legacy SelectorSpread plugin when using the default topology
constraints.

If your nodes are not expected to have both kubernetes.io/hostname and topology.kubernetes.io/zone labels set, define your
own constraints instead of using the Kubernetes defaults.

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

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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
The blog article Introducing PodTopologySpread explains maxSkew in some detail, as well as covering some advanced usage
examples.
Read the scheduling section of the API reference for Pod.

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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

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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.

Note:
There are two special cases:

An empty key with operator Exists matches all keys, values and effects which means this will tolerate everything.

An empty effect matches all effects with key key1 .

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).

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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
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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 is not ready. This corresponds to the NodeCondition Ready being " False ".
node.kubernetes.io/not-ready

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.

Note:
The control plane limits the rate of adding new taints to nodes. This rate limiting manages the number of evictions that are
triggered when many nodes become unreachable at once (for example: if there is a network disruption).

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

Note:
Kubernetes automatically adds a toleration for node.kubernetes.io/not-ready and node.kubernetes.io/unreachable with
tolerationSeconds=300 , unless you, or a controller, set those tolerations explicitly.

These automatically-added tolerations mean that Pods remain bound to Nodes for 5 minutes after one of these problems is
detected.

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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
Read about Node-pressure Eviction and how you can configure it
Read about Pod Priority

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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.
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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 v1.28 [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.

Note:
QueueingHint evaluation during scheduling is a beta-level feature. The v1.28 release series initially enabled the associated
feature gate; however, after the discovery of an excessive memory footprint, the Kubernetes project set that feature gate to be
disabled by default. In Kubernetes 1.30, this feature gate is disabled and you need to enable it manually. You can enable it via
the SchedulerQueueingHints feature gate.

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.
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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.

Note:
Plugins wishing to perform "pre-reserve" work should use the NormalizeScore extension point.

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.

Caution:
The implementation of the Unreserve method in Reserve plugins must be idempotent and may not fail.

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

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queue, triggering the Unreserve phase in Reserve plugins.

Note:
While any plugin can access the list of "waiting" Pods and approve them (see FrameworkHandle), we expect only the permit plugins
to approve binding of reserved Pods that are in "waiting" state. Once a Pod is approved, it is sent to the PreBind phase.

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.

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10.8 - Dynamic Resource Allocation

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [alpha]

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. Third-party resource drivers are responsible for tracking and
allocating resources, with additional support provided by Kubernetes via structured parameters (introduced in Kubernetes 1.30).
When a driver uses structured parameters, Kubernetes handles scheduling and resource allocation without having to communicate
with the driver. Different kinds of resources support arbitrary parameters for defining requirements and initialization.

Before you begin

Kubernetes v1.30 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
v1.30, check the documentation for that version of Kubernetes.

API
The resource.k8s.io/v1alpha2 API group provides these types:

ResourceClass
Defines which resource driver handles a certain kind of resource and provides common parameters for it. ResourceClasses are
created by a cluster administrator when installing a resource driver.

ResourceClaim
Defines a particular resource instance that is required by a workload. Created by a user (lifecycle managed manually, can be
shared between different Pods) or for individual Pods by the control plane based on a ResourceClaimTemplate (automatic
lifecycle, typically used by just one Pod).

ResourceClaimTemplate
Defines the spec and some metadata for creating ResourceClaims. Created by a user when deploying a workload.

PodSchedulingContext
Used internally by the control plane and resource drivers to coordinate pod scheduling when ResourceClaims need to be
allocated for a Pod.

ResourceSlice
Used with structured parameters to publish information about resources that are available in the cluster.

ResourceClaimParameters
Contain the parameters for a ResourceClaim which influence scheduling, in a format that is understood by Kubernetes (the
"structured parameter model"). Additional parameters may be embedded in an opaque extension, for use by the vendor driver
when setting up the underlying resource.

ResourceClassParameters
Similar to ResourceClaimParameters, the ResourceClassParameters provides a type for ResourceClass parameters which is
understood by Kubernetes.

Parameters for ResourceClass and ResourceClaim are stored in separate objects, typically using the type defined by a CRD that was
created when installing a resource driver.

The developer of a resource driver decides whether they want to handle these parameters in their own external controller or instead
rely on Kubernetes to handle them through the use of structured parameters. A custom controller provides more flexibility, but
cluster autoscaling is not going to work reliably for node-local resources. Structured parameters enable cluster autoscaling, but
might not satisfy all use-cases.

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When a driver uses structured parameters, it is still possible to let the end-user specify parameters with vendor-specific CRDs. When
doing so, the driver needs to translate those custom parameters into the in-tree types. Alternatively, a driver may also document
how to use the in-tree types directly.

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/v1alpha2
kind: ResourceClass
name: resource.example.com
driverName: resource-driver.example.com
---
apiVersion: cats.resource.example.com/v1
kind: ClaimParameters
name: large-black-cat-claim-parameters
spec:
color: black
size: large
---
apiVersion: resource.k8s.io/v1alpha2
kind: ResourceClaimTemplate
metadata:
name: large-black-cat-claim-template
spec:
spec:
resourceClassName: resource.example.com
parametersRef:
apiGroup: cats.resource.example.com
kind: ClaimParameters
name: large-black-cat-claim-parameters
–--
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
source:
resourceClaimTemplateName: large-black-cat-claim-template
- name: cat-1
source:
resourceClaimTemplateName: large-black-cat-claim-template

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Scheduling
Without structured parameters
In contrast to native resources (CPU, RAM) and extended resources (managed by a device plugin, advertised by kubelet), without
structured parameters the scheduler has no knowledge of what dynamic resources are available in a cluster or how they could be
split up to satisfy the requirements of a specific ResourceClaim. Resource drivers are responsible for that. They mark
ResourceClaims as "allocated" once resources for it are reserved. This also then tells the scheduler where in the cluster a
ResourceClaim is available.

ResourceClaims can get allocated as soon as they are created ("immediate allocation"), without considering which Pods will use
them. The default is to delay allocation until a Pod gets scheduled which needs the ResourceClaim (i.e. "wait for first consumer").

In that mode, the scheduler checks all ResourceClaims needed by a Pod and creates a PodScheduling object where it informs the
resource drivers responsible for those ResourceClaims about nodes that the scheduler considers suitable for the Pod. The resource
drivers respond by excluding nodes that don't have enough of the driver's resources left. Once the scheduler has that information, it
selects one node and stores that choice in the PodScheduling object. The resource drivers then allocate their ResourceClaims so that
the resources will be available on that node. Once that is complete, the Pod gets scheduled.

As part of this process, ResourceClaims also get reserved for the Pod. Currently ResourceClaims can either be used exclusively by a
single Pod or an unlimited number of Pods.

One key feature is that Pods do not get scheduled to a node unless all of their resources are allocated and reserved. This avoids the
scenario where a Pod gets scheduled onto one node and then cannot run there, which is bad because such a pending Pod also
blocks all other resources like RAM or CPU that were set aside for it.

Note:
Scheduling of pods which use ResourceClaims is going to be slower because of the additional communication that is required.
Beware that this may also impact pods that don't use ResourceClaims because only one pod at a time gets scheduled, blocking
API calls are made while handling a pod with ResourceClaims, and thus scheduling the next pod gets delayed.

With structured parameters

When a driver uses structured parameters, the scheduler takes over the responsibility of 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
exact resources selected are subject to the constraints provided in any ResourceClaimParameters or ResourceClassParameters
associated with the ResourceClaim.

The chosen resource is recorded in the ResourceClaim status together with any vendor-specific parameters, 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 triggering allocation and/or reserving the required ResourceClaims.

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Note:
This only works with resource drivers that don't use structured parameters.

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/v1alpha2 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 ResourceClass objects with:

kubectl get resourceclasses

If your cluster supports dynamic resource allocation, the response is either a list of ResourceClass objects or:

No resources found

If not supported, this error is printed instead:

error: the server doesn't have a resource type "resourceclasses"

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
For more information on the design, see the Dynamic Resource Allocation KEP and the Structured Parameters KEP.

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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%.

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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.

Note:
In clusters with less than 100 feasible nodes, the scheduler still checks all the nodes because there are not enough feasible
nodes to stop the scheduler's search early.

In a small cluster, if you set a low value for percentageOfNodesToScore , your change will have no or little effect, for a similar
reason.

If your cluster has several hundred Nodes or fewer, leave this configuration option at its default value. Making changes is
unlikely to improve the scheduler's performance significantly.

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
Check the kube-scheduler configuration reference (v1)
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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.

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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:

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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:

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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
Read more about the scheduling framework
Read more about scheduler configuration

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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.

Warning:
In a cluster where not all users are trusted, a malicious user could create Pods at the highest possible priorities, causing other
Pods to be evicted/not get scheduled. An administrator can use ResourceQuota to prevent users from creating pods at high
priorities.

See limit Priority Class consumption by default for details.

How to use priority and preemption

To use priority and preemption:

1. Add one or more PriorityClasses.

2. Create Pods with priorityClassName 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.

Note:
Kubernetes already ships with two PriorityClasses: system-cluster-critical and system-node-critical. These are common classes
and are used to ensure that critical components are always scheduled first.

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.

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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.

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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

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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?"

Note:
Preemption does not necessarily remove all lower-priority Pods. If the pending Pod can be scheduled by removing fewer than all
lower-priority Pods, then only a portion of the lower-priority Pods are removed. Even so, the answer to the preceding question
must be yes. If the answer is no, the Node is not considered for preemption.

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.
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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
Read about using ResourceQuotas in connection with PriorityClasses: limit Priority Class consumption by default
Learn about Pod Disruption
Learn about API-initiated Eviction
Learn about Node-pressure Eviction

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10.12 - Node-pressure Eviction

Node-pressure eviction is the process by which the kubelet proactively terminates pods to reclaim resources on nodes.

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. 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.

On Linux, the kubelet uses the following eviction signals:

Eviction Signal Description

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

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Eviction Signal Description

imagefs.inodesFree imagefs.inodesFree := node.stats.runtime.imagefs.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. Kubelet calculates the percentage value relative to the total capacity associated with the signal.

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.

The kubelet recognizes two specific filesystem identifiers:

1. : The node's main filesystem, used for local disk volumes, emptyDir volumes not backed by memory, log storage, and
nodefs
more. For example, nodefs contains /var/lib/kubelet/ .
2. imagefs : An optional filesystem that container runtimes use to store container images and container writable layers.

Kubelet auto-discovers these filesystems and ignores other node local filesystems. Kubelet does not support other configurations.

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.

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: A set of eviction grace periods like memory.available=1m30s that define how long a soft eviction
eviction-soft-grace-period
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

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.

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 , Available disk space and inodes on either the node's
imagefs.available , or imagefs.inodesFree root filesystem or image 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 .

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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.

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.

Without imagefs
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

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. or Burstable pods where the usage exceeds requests. These pods are evicted based on their Priority and then by
BestEffort
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.

Note:
The kubelet does not use the pod's QoS class to determine the eviction order. You can use the QoS class to estimate the most
likely pod eviction order when reclaiming resources like memory. QoS classification does not apply to EphemeralStorage
requests, so the above scenario will not apply if the node is, for example, under DiskPressure.

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 filesystem:

With imagefs
If nodefs is triggering evictions, the kubelet sorts pods based on nodefs usage ( local volumes + logs of all containers ).

If imagefs is triggering evictions, the kubelet sorts pods based on the writable layer usage of all containers.

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Without imagefs
If is triggering evictions, the kubelet sorts pods based on their total disk usage ( local
nodefs volumes + logs & writable layer of all
containers )

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)

Note:
The kubelet also sets an oom_score_adj value of -997 for any containers in Pods that have system-node-critical Priority.

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.

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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

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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
Learn about API-initiated Eviction
Learn about Pod Priority and Preemption
Learn about PodDisruptionBudgets
Learn about Quality of Service (QoS)
Check out the Eviction API

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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:

policy/v1 policy/v1beta1

Note:
policy/v1 Eviction is available in v1.22+. Use policy/v1beta1 with prior releases.

{
"apiVersion": "policy/v1",
"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/evic

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:

: the eviction is allowed, the Eviction subresource is created, and the Pod is deleted, similar to sending a DELETE
200 OK
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.

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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
Learn how to protect your applications with a Pod Disruption Budget.
Learn about Node-pressure Eviction.
Learn about Pod Priority and Preemption.

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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.

Note:
Not all distros are actively maintained. Choose distros which have been tested with a recent version of Kubernetes.

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
Learn how to manage nodes.

Read about cluster autoscaling.

Learn how to set up and manage the resource quota for shared clusters.

Securing a cluster
Generate Certificates describes the steps to generate certificates using different tool chains.

Kubernetes Container Environment describes the environment for Kubelet managed containers on a Kubernetes node.

Controlling Access to the Kubernetes API describes how Kubernetes implements access control for its own API.

Authenticating explains authentication in Kubernetes, including the various authentication options.

Authorization is separate from authentication, and controls how HTTP calls are handled.

Using Admission Controllers explains plug-ins which intercepts requests to the Kubernetes API server after authentication and
authorization.

Using Sysctls in a Kubernetes Cluster describes to an administrator how to use the sysctl command-line tool to set kernel
parameters .

Auditing describes how to interact with Kubernetes' audit logs.

Securing the kubelet

Control Plane-Node communication
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TLS bootstrapping
Kubelet authentication/authorization

Optional Cluster Services

DNS Integration describes how to resolve a DNS name directly to a Kubernetes service.

Logging and Monitoring Cluster Activity explains how logging in Kubernetes works and how to implement it.

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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]

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 .

Note:
There are cases when Node termination was cancelled by the system (or perhaps manually by an administrator). In either of
those situations the Node will return to the Ready state. However, Pods which already started the process of termination will not
be restored by kubelet and will need to be re-scheduled.

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.

Note:

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When pods were evicted during the graceful node shutdown, they are marked as shutdown. Running kubectl get pods shows
the status of the evicted pods as Terminated . And kubectl describe pod indicates that the pod was evicted because of node
shutdown:

Reason: Terminated
Message: Pod was terminated in response to imminent node shutdown.

Pod Priority based graceful node shutdown

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.24 [beta]

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

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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.

Note:
The ability to take Pod priority into account during graceful node shutdown was introduced as an Alpha feature in Kubernetes
v1.23. In Kubernetes 1.30 the feature is Beta and is enabled by default.

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]

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 the NodeOutOfServiceVolumeDetach feature gate is enabled on
kube-controller-manager, and 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.
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Note:
Before adding the taint node.kubernetes.io/out-of-service , it should be verified that the node is already in shutdown or
power off state (not in the middle of restarting).
The user is required to manually remove the out-of-service taint after the pods are moved to a new node and the user has
checked that the shutdown node has been recovered since the user was the one who originally added the taint.

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.

Note:
Caution must be taken while using the Non-Graceful Node Shutdown procedure.
Deviation from the steps documented above can result in data corruption.

What's next
Learn more about the following:

Blog: Non-Graceful Node Shutdown.

Cluster Architecture: Nodes.

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11.2 - Certificates
To learn how to generate certificates for your cluster, see Certificates.

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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.

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
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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.

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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:

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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

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.

Note:
Only the contents of the latest log file are available through kubectl logs .
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For example, if a Pod writes 40 MiB of logs and the kubelet rotates logs after 10 MiB, running kubectl logs returns at most
10MiB of data.

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:

Linux Windows

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.

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.

Caution:
It's important to note that the default location /var/log/pods has been in use for an extended period and certain processes
might implicitly assume this path. Therefore, altering this parameter must be approached with caution and at your own risk.

Another caveat to keep in mind is that the kubelet supports the location being on the same disk as /var . Otherwise, if the logs
are on a separate filesystem from /var , then the kubelet will not track that filesystem's usage, potentially leading to issues if it
fills up.

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.

Note:
If you deploy Kubernetes cluster components (such as the scheduler) to log to a volume shared from the parent node, you need
to consider and ensure that those logs are rotated. Kubernetes does not manage that log rotation.

Your operating system may automatically implement some log rotation - for example, if you share the directory /var/log into a
static Pod for a component, node-level log rotation treats a file in that directory the same as a file written by any component
outside Kubernetes.

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Some deploy tools account for that log rotation and automate it; others leave this as your responsibility.

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

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

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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.

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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

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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

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.

Note:
Using a logging agent in a sidecar container can lead to significant resource consumption. Moreover, you won't be able to access
those logs using kubectl logs because they are not controlled by the kubelet.

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

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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>

Note:
In the sample configurations, you can replace fluentd with any logging agent, reading from any source inside an application
container.

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

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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

Cluster-logging that exposes or pushes logs directly from every application is outside the scope of Kubernetes.

What's next
Read about Kubernetes system logs
Learn about Traces For Kubernetes System Components
Learn how to customise the termination message that Kubernetes records when a Pod fails

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11.5 - 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:

kube-controller-manager
kube-proxy
kube-apiserver
kube-scheduler
kubelet

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

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# 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"}

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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-label-value 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-label-value <metric_name>,<label_name>='<allow_value1>, <allow_value2>...', <metric_name2>,<label_name>='<allow_value1

Here is an example:

--allow-label-value number_count_metric,odd_number='1,3,5', number_count_metric,even_number='2,4,6', date_gauge_metric,weekend

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:

allow-list:
- "metric1,label2": "v1,v2,v3"
- "metric2,label1": "v1,v2,v3"

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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
Read about the Prometheus text format for metrics
See the list of stable Kubernetes metrics
Read about the Kubernetes deprecation policy

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11.6 - 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.

🛇 This item links to a third party project or product that is not part of Kubernetes itself. More information

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 (n
for: 5m
labels:
severity: page
annotations:
summary: Pod {{$labels.namespace}}/{{$labels.pod}} blocked in Terminating state.

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11.7 - 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).

Warning:
In contrast to the command line flags described here, the log output itself does not fall under the Kubernetes API stability
guarantees: individual log entries and their formatting may change from one release to the next!

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:

POSIX shell (such as

Usage bash) kube-log-runner <options> <cmd>

Merge stderr and stdout, write to 2>&1 kube-log-runner (default behavior)

stdout

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 kube-log-runner -log-file=/tmp/log -also-stdout
/tmp/log

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:

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I1025 00:15:15.525108 1 httplog.go:79] GET /api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/pods/metrics-server-v0.3.1-57c75779f-9p8wg: (1

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]

Warning:
Migration to structured log messages is an ongoing process. Not all log messages are structured in this version. When parsing
log files, you must also handle unstructured log messages.

Log formatting and value serialization are subject to change.

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\"." someIn
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 1.30, 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.

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$ 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. Opt
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]

Warning:
JSON output does not support many standard klog flags. For list of unsupported klog flags, see the Command line tool
reference.

Not all logs are guaranteed to be written in JSON format (for example, during process start). If you intend to parse logs, make
sure you can handle log lines that are not JSON as well.

Field names and JSON serialization are subject to change.

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)

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msg - message (required, string)

List of components currently supporting JSON format:

kube-controller-manager
kube-apiserver
kube-scheduler
kubelet

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]

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:

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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
Read about the Kubernetes Logging Architecture
Read about Structured Logging
Read about Contextual Logging
Read about deprecation of klog flags
Read about the Conventions for logging severity
Read about Log Query

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11.8 - 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:

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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]

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 v1.30 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
Read about Getting Started with the OpenTelemetry Collector
Read about OTLP Exporter Configuration

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11.9 - 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.

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11.10 - 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.

Caution:
Some requests classified as "long-running"—such as remote command execution or log tailing—are not subject to the API
Priority and Fairness filter. This is also true for the --max-requests-inflight flag without the API Priority and Fairness feature
enabled. API Priority and Fairness does apply to watch requests. When API Priority and Fairness is disabled, watch requests are
not subject to the --max-requests-inflight limit.

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.
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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.

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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.

Caution:
In the versions before v1beta3 the relevant PriorityLevelConfiguration field is named "assured concurrency shares" rather than
"nominal concurrency shares". Also, in Kubernetes release 1.25 and earlier there were no periodic adjustments: the
nominal/assured limits were always applied without adjustment.

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.

Caution:
With the Priority and Fairness feature enabled, the total concurrency limit for the server is set to the sum of --max-requests-
inflight and --max-mutating-requests-inflight. There is no longer any distinction made between mutating and non-mutating
requests; if you want to treat them separately for a given resource, make separate FlowSchemas that match the mutating and
non-mutating verbs respectively.

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.
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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.

Note:
A larger handSize makes it less likely for two individual flows to collide (and therefore for one to be able to starve the other),
but more likely that a small number of flows can dominate the apiserver. A larger handSize also potentially increases the
amount of latency that a single high-traffic flow can cause. The maximum number of queued requests possible from a
single flow is handSize * queueLengthLimit.

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.

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.

Caution:
Only the first matching FlowSchema for a given request matters. If multiple FlowSchemas match a single inbound request, it will
be assigned based on the one with the highest matchingPrecedence. If multiple FlowSchemas with equal matchingPrecedence match
the same request, the one with lexicographically smaller name will win, but it's better not to rely on this, and instead to ensure
that no two FlowSchemas have the same matchingPrecedence.

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

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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-electionpriority 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.
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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.

Caution:
Making this change also allows any hostile party to then send health-check requests that match this FlowSchema, at any volume
they like. If you have a web traffic filter or similar external security mechanism to protect your cluster's API server from general
internet traffic, you can configure rules to block any health check requests that originate from outside your cluster.

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"

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Observability
Metrics

Note:
In versions of Kubernetes before v1.20, the labels flow_schema and priority_level were inconsistently named flowSchema and
priorityLevel, respectively. If you're running Kubernetes versions v1.19 and earlier, you should refer to the documentation for
your version.

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

is a counter vector (cumulative since server start) of requests that were
apiserver_flowcontrol_rejected_requests_total
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:

, indicating that too many requests were already queued.

queue-full

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 .

is a gauge vector holding the instantaneous number of executing (not

apiserver_flowcontrol_current_executing_requests
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_secondsis 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.

Note:
Since each FlowSchema always assigns requests to a single PriorityLevelConfiguration, you can add the histograms for all
the FlowSchemas for one priority level to get the effective histogram for requests assigned to that priority level.

apiserver_flowcontrol_nominal_limit_seatsis 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

is a gauge vector of recent high water marks of the number of queued requests, grouped
apiserver_current_inqueue_requests
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.

is a gauge vector of the sum over queued requests of the largest number of seats each will
apiserver_current_inqueue_seats
occupy, grouped by labels named flow_schema and priority_level .

is a histogram vector of observations, made at the end of every

apiserver_flowcontrol_read_vs_write_current_requests
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

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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 .

is a histogram vector of observations, made at the end of each

apiserver_flowcontrol_priority_level_request_utilization
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).

is a histogram vector of queue lengths for the queues, broken down

apiserver_flowcontrol_request_queue_length_after_enqueue
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.

Note:
An outlier value in a histogram here means it is likely that a single flow (i.e., requests by one user or for one namespace,
depending on configuration) is flooding the API server, and being throttled. By contrast, if one priority level's histogram
shows that all queues for that priority level are longer than those for other priority levels, it may be appropriate to increase
that PriorityLevelConfiguration's concurrency shares.

is the same as apiserver_flowcontrol_nominal_limit_seats . Before the

apiserver_flowcontrol_request_concurrency_limit
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.

is a gauge vector holding, for each priority level, the maximum seat demand
apiserver_flowcontrol_demand_seats_high_watermark
seen during the last concurrency borrowing adjustment period.

is a gauge vector holding, for each priority level, the time-weighted average seat
apiserver_flowcontrol_demand_seats_average
demand seen during the last concurrency borrowing adjustment period.

is a gauge vector holding, for each priority level, the time-weighted population
apiserver_flowcontrol_demand_seats_stdev
standard deviation of seat demand seen during the last concurrency borrowing adjustment period.

is a gauge vector holding, for each priority level, the smoothed enveloped seat
apiserver_flowcontrol_demand_seats_smoothed
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.

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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_seatsis 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 .

is a counter vector of the number of events that in principle

apiserver_flowcontrol_request_dispatch_no_accommodation_total
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 .

is a counter vector of the number of attempts to jump a priority level's progress

apiserver_flowcontrol_epoch_advance_total
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

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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.

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What's next
You can visit flow control reference doc to learn more about troubleshooting.
For background information on design details for API priority and fairness, see the enhancement proposal.
You can make suggestions and feature requests via SIG API Machinery or the feature's slack channel.

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11.11 - 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

Note: Items on this page refer to vendors external to Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project authors aren't responsible for those
third-party products or projects. To add a vendor, product or project to this list, read the content guide before submitting a
change. More information.

There are integrations available between Karpenter's core and the following cloud providers:

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Amazon Web Services

Azure

Related components
Descheduler
The descheduler can help you consolidate Pods onto a smaller number of nodes, to help with automatic scale down when the
cluster has space 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
Read about workload-level autoscaling

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11.12 - Installing Addons

Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project
authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide
before submitting a change. More information.

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.

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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.
Weave Scope is a tool for visualizing your containers, Pods, Services and more.

Infrastructure
KubeVirt is an add-on to run virtual machines on Kubernetes. Usually run on bare-metal clusters.
The node problem detector runs on Linux nodes and reports system issues as either Events or Node conditions.

Instrumentation
kube-state-metrics

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!

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12 - Windows in Kubernetes
Kubernetes supports nodes that run Microsoft Windows.

Kubernetes supports worker nodes running either Linux or Microsoft Windows.

🛇 This item links to a third party project or product that is not part of Kubernetes itself. More information

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:

Networking On Windows
Windows Storage In Kubernetes
Resource Management for Windows Nodes
Configure RunAsUserName for Windows Pods and Containers
Create A Windows HostProcess Pod
Configure Group Managed Service Accounts for Windows Pods and Containers
Security For Windows Nodes
Windows Debugging Tips
Guide for Scheduling Windows Containers in Kubernetes

or, for an overview, read:

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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
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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.

kubectl exec

Pod and container metrics

Horizontal pod autoscaling
Resource quotas
Scheduler preemption

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
Eviction by using --eviction-hard and --eviction-soft are 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
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Management for Windows nodes for more information.

The MemoryPressure 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 - host namespace sharing is not possible on Windows

hostpid

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

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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.

Note:
This functionality requires a container runtime that supports this functionality.

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 v1.30.0 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:

Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project
authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide
before submitting a change. More information.

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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.

Note:
There is a known limitation when using GMSA with containerd to access Windows network shares, which requires a kernel
patch.

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 v1.30, 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

Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project
authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide
before submitting a change. More information.

Note:
The following hardware specifications outlined here should be regarded as sensible default values. They are not intended to
represent minimum requirements or specific recommendations for production environments. Depending on the requirements
for your workload these values may need to be adjusted.

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.

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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.

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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:

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---
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#> ; $$listener = New-Object System.Net.HttpListener ; $$li
nodeSelector:
kubernetes.io/os: windows

Note:
Port mapping is also supported, but for simplicity this example exposes port 80 of the container directly to the Service.

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:

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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

Note:
Windows container hosts are not able to access the IP of services scheduled on them due to current platform limitations of the
Windows networking stack. Only Windows pods are able to access service IPs.

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 .

Note:

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If you are running a version of Kubernetes older than 1.24, you may need to enable the IdentifyPodOS feature gate to be able to
set a value for .spec.pod.os.

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 1.30 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 1.30 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

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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:

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---
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

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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:

kube-apiserver

kube-controller-manager
kube-scheduler

kubelet

kube-proxy

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.

Note:
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Outside of Kubernetes, the term “webhook” typically refers to a mechanism for asynchronous notifications, where the webhook
call serves as a one-way notification to another system or component. In the Kubernetes ecosystem, even synchronous HTTP
callouts are often described as “webhooks”.

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.

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.

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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.

Do you want to
add entirely new
YES NO
types to the
Kubernetes API?

Go to "API Extensions"

Do you want to restrict or

YES automatically edit fields in
some or all API types?

Go to "API Access
Extensions" NO

Do you want to change the

YES underlying implementation of
the built-in API types?

Do you want to change

YES Volumes, Services, Ingresses, NO NO
PersistentVolumes?

Go to "Infrastructure" Go to "Automation"

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.

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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.

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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.

Note:
You can only affect node filtering and node prioritization with a scheduler extender webhook; other extension points are not
available through the webhook integration.

What's next
Learn more about infrastructure extensions
Device Plugins
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Network Plugins
CSI storage plugins
Learn about kubectl plugins
Learn more about Custom Resources
Learn more about Extension API Servers
Learn about Dynamic admission control
Learn about the Operator pattern

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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

A network plugin 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 1.30 is compatible with CNI network plugins.

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13.1.1 - Network Plugins

Kubernetes 1.30 supports 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.

Note:
Prior to Kubernetes 1.24, the CNI plugins could also be managed by the kubelet using the cni-bin-dir and network-plugin
command-line parameters. These command-line parameters were removed in Kubernetes 1.24, with management of the CNI no
longer in scope for kubelet.

See Troubleshooting CNI plugin-related errors if you are facing issues following the removal of dockershim.

For specific information about how a Container Runtime manages the CNI plugins, see the documentation for that Container
Runtime, for example:

containerd
CRI-O

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:

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{
"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:
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apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
annotations:
kubernetes.io/ingress-bandwidth: 1M
kubernetes.io/egress-bandwidth: 1M
...

What's next
Learn more about Cluster Networking
Learn more about Network Policies
Learn about the Troubleshooting CNI plugin-related errors

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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:

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---
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) {}
}

Note:
Plugins are not required to provide useful implementations for GetPreferredAllocation() or PreStartContainer(). Flags
indicating the availability of these calls, if any, should be set in the DevicePluginOptions message sent back by a call to
GetDevicePluginOptions(). The kubelet will always call GetDevicePluginOptions() to see which optional functions are
available, before calling any of them directly.

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3. The plugin registers itself with the kubelet through the Unix socket at host path /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins/kubelet.sock .

Note:
The ordering of the workflow is important. A plugin MUST start serving gRPC service before registering itself with kubelet
for successful registration.

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

Note:
The processing of the fully-qualified CDI device names by the Device Manager requires that the DevicePluginCDIDevices
feature gate is enabled for both the kubelet and the kube-apiserver. This was added as an alpha feature in Kubernetes
v1.28 and graduated to beta in v1.29.

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 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.

Note:
Although the Device Manager component of Kubernetes is a generally available feature, the device plugin API is not stable. For
information on the device plugin API and version compatibility, read Device Plugin API versions.

As a project, Kubernetes recommends that device plugin developers:

Watch for Device Plugin API changes in the future releases.

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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

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// 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;
}

Note:

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cpu_ids in the ContainerResources in the List endpoint correspond to exclusive CPUs allocated to a particular container. If the
goal is to evaluate CPUs that belong to the shared pool, the List endpoint needs to be used in conjunction with the
GetAllocatableResources endpoint as explained below:

1. Call GetAllocatableResources to get a list of all the allocatable CPUs

2. Call GetCpuIds on all ContainerResources in the system
3. Subtract out all of the CPUs from the GetCpuIds calls from the GetAllocatableResources call

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.

Note:
GetAllocatableResourcesshould only be used to evaluate allocatable resources on a node. If the goal is to evaluate
free/unallocated resources it should be used in conjunction with the List() endpoint. The result obtained by
GetAllocatableResources would remain the same unless the underlying resources exposed to kubelet change. This happens
rarely but when it does (for example: hotplug/hotunplug, device health changes), client is expected to call
GetAlloctableResources endpoint.

However, calling GetAllocatableResources endpoint is not sufficient in case of cpu and/or memory update and Kubelet needs to
be restarted to reflect the correct resource capacity and allocatable.

// 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.

Note:
When accessing the /var/lib/kubelet/pod-resources/kubelet.sock from DaemonSet or any other app deployed as a container on
the host, which is mounting socket as a volume, it is a good practice to mount directory /var/lib/kubelet/pod-resources/ instead
of the /var/lib/kubelet/pod-resources/kubelet.sock . This will ensure that after kubelet restart, container will be able to re-
connect to this socket.

Container mounts are managed by inode referencing the socket or directory, depending on what was mounted. When kubelet
restarts, socket is deleted and a new socket is created, while directory stays untouched. So the original inode for the socket
become unusable. Inode to directory will continue working.

Get gRPC endpoint

ⓘ FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [alpha]

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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{&plu

Device plugin examples

Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project
authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide
before submitting a change. More information.

Here are some examples of device plugin implementations:

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Akri, which lets you easily expose heterogeneous leaf devices (such as IP cameras and USB devices).
The AMD GPU device plugin
The generic device plugin for generic Linux devices and USB devices
The Intel device plugins for Intel GPU, FPGA, QAT, VPU, SGX, DSA, DLB and IAA devices
The KubeVirt device plugins for hardware-assisted virtualization
The NVIDIA GPU device plugin for Container-Optimized OS
The RDMA device plugin
The SocketCAN device plugin
The Solarflare device plugin
The SR-IOV Network device plugin
The Xilinx FPGA device plugins for Xilinx FPGA devices

What's next
Learn about scheduling GPU resources using device plugins
Learn about advertising extended resources on a node
Learn about the Topology Manager
Read about using hardware acceleration for TLS ingress with Kubernetes

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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.

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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, Kubernetes UI support is not required.
alongside built-in types.

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 You need to have specific REST paths to be
REST resource paths, such as API Groups and Namespaces. (See the API compatible with an already defined REST API.
Overview.)

Your resources are naturally scoped to a cluster or namespaces of a Cluster or namespace scoped resources are a poor
cluster. fit; you need control over the specifics of resource
paths.

You want to reuse Kubernetes API support features. You don't need those features.

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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.

Note:
Use a Secret for sensitive data, which is similar to a ConfigMap but more secure.

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.

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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).

Note:
Avoid using a Custom Resource as data storage for application, end user, or monitoring data: architecture designs that store
application data within the Kubernetes API typically represent a design that is too closely coupled.

Architecturally, cloud native application architectures favor loose coupling between components. If part of your workload
requires a backing service for its routine operation, run that backing service as a component or consume it as an external
service. This way, your workload does not rely on the Kubernetes API for its normal operation.

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 a CRD object must 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 Requires programming and building binary and image.
CRD controller.

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CRDs Aggregated API

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 May need to periodically pickup bug fixes from upstream
picked up as part of normal Kubernetes Master upgrades. and rebuild and update the Aggregated API server.

No need to handle multiple versions of your API; for example, when You need to handle multiple versions of your API; for
you control the client for this resource, you can upgrade it in sync example, when developing an extension to share with
with the API. the world.

Advanced features and flexibility

Aggregated APIs offer more advanced API features and customization of other features; for example, the storage layer.

Aggregated
Feature Description CRDs API

Validation Help users prevent errors and allow you to Yes. Most validation can be specified in the Yes, arbitrary
evolve your API independently of your CRD using OpenAPI v3.0 validation. validation
clients. These features are most useful when CRDValidationRatcheting feature gate allows checks
there are many clients who can't all update failing validations specified using OpenAPI also
at the same time. can be ignored if the failing part of the
resource was unchanged. Any other
validations supported by addition of a
Validating Webhook.

Defaulting See above Yes, either via OpenAPI v3.0 validation Yes
default keyword (GA in 1.17), or via a
Mutating Webhook (though this will not be run
when reading from etcd for old objects).

Multi- Allows serving the same object through two Yes Yes
versioning API versions. Can help ease API changes like
renaming fields. Less important if you
control your client versions.

Custom If you need storage with a different No Yes

Storage performance mode (for example, a time-
series database instead of key-value store)
or isolation for security (for example,
encryption of sensitive information, etc.)

Custom Perform arbitrary checks or actions when Yes, using Webhooks. Yes
Business creating, reading, updating or deleting an
Logic object

Scale Allows systems like HorizontalPodAutoscaler Yes Yes

Subresource and PodDisruptionBudget interact with your
new resource

Status Allows fine-grained access control where Yes Yes

Subresource 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)

Other Add operations other than CRUD, such as No Yes

Subresources "logs" or "exec".

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Aggregated
Feature Description CRDs API

strategic- The new endpoints support PATCH with No Yes

merge-patch 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"

Protocol The new resource supports clients that want No Yes

Buffers to use Protocol Buffers

OpenAPI Is there an OpenAPI (swagger) schema for Yes, based on the OpenAPI v3.0 validation Yes
Schema the types that can be dynamically fetched schema (GA in 1.16).
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?)

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 Kubernetes provides generic client libraries, as well as tools to generate type-specific client libraries.
Generation

Labels and annotations Common metadata across objects that tools know how to edit for core and custom resources.

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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 v1.30 [alpha]

You need to enable the CustomResourceFieldSelectors feature gate to use this behavior, which then applies to all
CustomResourceDefinitions in your cluster.

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.
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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
Learn how to Extend the Kubernetes API with the aggregation layer.
Learn how to Extend the Kubernetes API with CustomResourceDefinition.

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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 Resources, 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
To get the aggregator working in your environment, configure the aggregation layer.
Then, setup an extension api-server to work with the aggregation layer.
Read about APIService in the API reference

Alternatively: learn how to extend the Kubernetes API using Custom Resource Definitions.

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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.

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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.

Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project
authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide
before submitting a change. More information.

Charmed Operator Framework

Java Operator SDK
Kopf (Kubernetes Operator Pythonic Framework)
kube-rs (Rust)
kubebuilder
KubeOps (.NET operator SDK)
Mast
Metacontroller along with WebHooks that you implement yourself
Operator Framework
shell-operator

What's next
Read the CNCF Operator White Paper.
Learn more about Custom Resources
Find ready-made operators on OperatorHub.io to suit your use case
Publish your operator for other people to use
Read CoreOS' original article that introduced the operator pattern (this is an archived version of the original article).
Read an article from Google Cloud about best practices for building operators

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