Workloads

• 1: Pods
• 1.1: Pod Lifecycle
• 1.2: Init Containers
• 1.3: Disruptions
• 1.4: Ephemeral Containers
• 1.5: User Namespaces
• 1.6: Downward API
• 2: Workload Resources
• 2.1: Deployments
• 2.2: ReplicaSet
• 2.3: StatefulSets
• 2.4: DaemonSet
• 2.5: Jobs
• 2.6: Automatic Clean-up for Finished Jobs
• 2.7: CronJob
• 2.8: ReplicationController

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 if your cluster offers this.

What is a Pod?

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

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

Using Pods

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

pods/simple-pod.yaml

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

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

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

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

Workload resources for managing pods

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

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.

  Note: 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.

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.

How Pods manage 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.

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. Init containers run and complete before the app containers are started.

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.

When you create the manifest for a Pod object, make sure the name specified is a valid DNS subdomain name.

Pod OS

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 future, this list may be expanded.

In Kubernetes v1.25, the value you set for this field has no effect on scheduling of the pods. Setting the .spec.os.name helps to identify the pod OS authoratitively and is used for validation. The kubelet refuses to run a Pod where you have specified a Pod OS, if this isn't the same as the operating system for the node where that kubelet is running. The Pod security standards also use this field to avoid enforcing policies that aren't relevant to that 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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pod update and replacement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resource sharing and communication

Pods enable data sharing and communication among their constituent containers.

Storage in Pods

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

Pod networking

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

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

Privileged mode for containers

In Linux, any container in a Pod can enable privileged mode using the privileged (Linux) flag on the security context of the container spec. This is useful for containers that want to use operating system administrative capabilities such as manipulating the network stack or accessing hardware devices.

If your cluster has the WindowsHostProcessContainers feature enabled, you can create a Windows HostProcess pod by setting the windowsOptions.hostProcess flag on the security context of the pod spec. All containers in these pods must run as Windows HostProcess containers. HostProcess pods run directly on the host and can also be used to perform administrative tasks as is done with Linux privileged containers.

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.

Container probes

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

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

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

What's next

• 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.

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.

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. Once a Pod is scheduled (assigned) to a Node, the Pod runs on that Node until it stops or is terminated.

Pod lifetime

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 nodes where they remain until termination (according to restart policy) or deletion. If a Node dies, the Pods scheduled to that node are scheduled for deletion after a timeout period.

Pods do not, by themselves, self-heal. If a Pod is scheduled to a node that then fails, the Pod is deleted; likewise, 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, with even the same name if desired, but with a different UID.

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

A multi-container Pod that contains a file puller and a web server that uses a persistent 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:

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

Container states

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

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

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

Each state has a specific meaning:

Waiting

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

Running

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

Terminated

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

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

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 applies to all containers in the Pod. restartPolicy only refers to restarts of the containers by the kubelet on the same node. After containers in a Pod exit, the kubelet restarts them with an exponential back-off delay (10s, 20s, 40s, …), that is capped at five minutes. Once a container has executed for 10 minutes without any problems, the kubelet resets the restart backoff timer for that container.

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.
• PodHasNetwork: (alpha feature; must be enabled explicitly) 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.

Pod readiness

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

After a Pod gets scheduled on a node, it needs to be admitted by the Kubelet and have any 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 PodHasNetworkCondition feature gate is enabled, Kubelet reports whether a pod has reached this initialization milestone through the PodHasNetwork condition in the status.conditions field of a Pod.

The PodHasNetwork 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 PodHasNetwork 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 PodHasNetwork 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.
gRPC probes are an alpha feature and are only available if you enable the GRPCContainerProbe feature gate.

httpGet

Performs an HTTP GET request against the Pod's IP address on a specified port and path. The diagnostic is considered successful if the response has a status code greater than or equal to 200 and less than 400.

tcpSocket

Performs a TCP check against the Pod's IP address on a specified port. The diagnostic is considered successful if the port is open. If the remote system (the container) closes the connection immediately after it opens, this counts as healthy.

Probe outcome

Each probe has one of three results:

Success

The container passed the diagnostic.

Failure

The container failed the diagnostic.

Unknown

The diagnostic failed (no action should be taken, and the kubelet will make further checks).

Types of probe

The kubelet can optionally perform and react to three kinds of probes on running containers:

livenessProbe

Indicates whether the container is running. If the liveness probe fails, the kubelet kills the container, and the container is subjected to its restart policy. If a container does not provide a liveness probe, the default state is Success.

readinessProbe

Indicates whether the container is ready to respond to requests. If the readiness probe fails, the endpoints controller removes the Pod's IP address from the endpoints of all Services that match the Pod. The default state of readiness before the initial delay is Failure. If a container does not provide a readiness probe, the default state is Success.

startupProbe

Indicates whether the application within the container is started. All other probes are disabled if a startup probe is provided, until it succeeds. If the startup probe fails, the kubelet kills the container, and the container is subjected to its restart policy. If a container does not provide a startup probe, the default state is Success.

For more information about how to set up a liveness, readiness, or startup probe, see Configure Liveness, Readiness and Startup Probes.

When should you use a liveness probe?

If the process in your container is able to crash on its own whenever it encounters an issue or becomes unhealthy, you do not necessarily need a liveness probe; the kubelet will automatically perform the correct action in accordance with the Pod's restartPolicy.

If you'd like your container to be killed and restarted if a probe fails, then specify a liveness probe, and specify a restartPolicy of Always or OnFailure.

When should you use a readiness probe?

If you'd like to start sending traffic to a Pod only when a probe succeeds, specify a readiness probe. In this case, the readiness probe might be the same as the liveness probe, but the existence of the readiness probe in the spec means that the Pod will start without receiving any traffic and only start receiving traffic after the probe starts succeeding.

If you want your container to be able to take itself down for maintenance, you can specify a readiness probe that checks an endpoint specific to readiness that is different from the liveness probe.

If your app has a strict dependency on back-end services, you can implement both a liveness and a readiness probe. The liveness probe passes when the app itself is healthy, but the readiness probe additionally checks that each required back-end service is available. This helps you avoid directing traffic to Pods that can only respond with error messages.

If your container needs to work on loading large data, configuration files, or migrations during startup, you can use a startup probe. However, if you want to detect the difference between an app that has failed and an app that is still processing its startup data, you might prefer a readiness probe.

When should you use a startup probe?

Startup probes are useful for Pods that have containers that take a long time to come into service. Rather than set a long liveness interval, you can configure a separate configuration for probing the container as it starts up, allowing a time longer than the liveness interval would allow.

If your container usually starts in more than initialDelaySeconds + failureThreshold × periodSeconds, you should specify a startup probe that checks the same endpoint as the liveness probe. The default for periodSeconds is 10s. You should then set its failureThreshold high enough to allow the container to start, without changing the default values of the liveness probe. This helps to protect against deadlocks.

Termination of Pods

Because Pods represent processes running on nodes in the cluster, it is important to allow those processes to gracefully terminate when they are no longer needed (rather than being abruptly stopped with a KILL signal and having no chance to clean up).

The design aim is for you to be able to request deletion and know when processes terminate, but also be able to ensure that deletes eventually complete. When you request deletion of a Pod, the cluster records and tracks the intended grace period before the Pod is allowed to be forcefully killed. With that forceful shutdown tracking in place, the kubelet attempts graceful shutdown.

Typically, the container runtime sends a TERM signal to the main process in each container. Many container runtimes respect the STOPSIGNAL value defined in the container image and send this 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.

An example flow:

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 on 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, the kubelet runs that hook inside of the container. 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.
      Note: 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.
3. At the same time as the kubelet is starting graceful shutdown, the control plane removes that shutting-down Pod from Endpoints (and, if enabled, EndpointSlice) objects where these 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 cannot continue to serve traffic as load balancers (like the service proxy) remove the Pod from the list of endpoints as soon as the termination grace period begins.
4. When the grace period expires, 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.
5. The kubelet triggers forcible removal of Pod object from the API server, by setting grace period to 0 (immediate deletion).
6. The API server deletes the Pod's API object, which is then no longer visible from any client.

Forced Pod termination

By default, all deletes are graceful within 30 seconds. The kubectl delete command supports the --grace-period=<seconds> option which allows you to override the default and specify your own value.

Setting the grace period to 0 forcibly and immediately deletes the Pod from the API server. If the pod was still running on a node, that forcible deletion triggers the kubelet to begin immediate cleanup.

When a force deletion is performed, the API server does not wait for confirmation from the kubelet that the Pod has been terminated on the node it was running on. It removes the Pod in the API immediately so a new Pod can be created with the same name. On the node, Pods that are set to terminate immediately will still be given a small grace period before being force killed.

If you need to force-delete Pods that are part of a StatefulSet, refer to the task documentation for deleting Pods from a StatefulSet.

Garbage collection of terminated Pods

For failed Pods, the API objects remain in the cluster's API until a human or controller process explicitly removes them.

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.

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.

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

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).

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 Resources.

Also, init containers do not support lifecycle, livenessProbe, readinessProbe, or startupProbe because they must run to completion before the Pod can be ready.

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.

Using init containers

Because init containers have separate images from app containers, they have some advantages for start-up related code:

• Init containers can contain utilities or custom code for setup that are not present in an app image. For example, there is no need to make an image FROM another image just to use a tool like sed, awk, python, or dig during setup.
• The application image builder and deployer roles can work independently without the need to jointly build a single app image.
• Init containers can run with a different view of the filesystem than app containers in the same Pod. Consequently, they can be given access to Secrets that app containers cannot access.
• Because init containers run to completion before any app containers start, init containers offer a mechanism to block or delay app container startup until a set of preconditions are met. Once preconditions are met, all of the app containers in a Pod can start in parallel.
• Init containers can securely run utilities or custom code that would otherwise make an app container image less secure. By keeping unnecessary tools separate you can limit the attack surface of your app container image.

Examples

Here are some ideas for how to use init containers:

• Wait for a Service to be created, using a shell one-line command like:

  for i in {1..100}; do sleep 1; if dig myservice; then exit 0; fi; done; exit 1
  

• Register this Pod with a remote server from the downward API with a command like:

  curl -X POST http://$MANAGEMENT_SERVICE_HOST:$MANAGEMENT_SERVICE_PORT/register -d 'instance=$(<POD_NAME>)&ip=$(<POD_IP>)'
  

• Wait for some time before starting the app container with a command like

  sleep 60
  

• Clone a Git repository into a Volume

• Place values into a configuration file and run a template tool to dynamically generate a configuration file for the main app container. For example, place the POD_IP value in a configuration and generate the main app configuration file using Jinja.

Init containers in use

This example defines a simple Pod that has two init containers. The first waits for myservice, and the second waits for mydb. Once both init containers complete, the Pod runs the app container from its spec section.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: myapp-pod
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
spec:
  containers:
  - name: myapp-container
    image: busybox:1.28
    command: ['sh', '-c', 'echo The app is running! && sleep 3600']
  initContainers:
  - name: init-myservice
    image: busybox:1.28
    command: ['sh', '-c', "until nslookup myservice.$(cat /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/namespace).svc.cluster.local; do echo waiting for myservice; sleep 2; done"]
  - name: init-mydb
    image: busybox:1.28
    command: ['sh', '-c', "until nslookup mydb.$(cat /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/namespace).svc.cluster.local; do echo waiting for mydb; sleep 2; done"]

You can start this Pod by running:

kubectl apply -f myapp.yaml

The output is similar to this:

pod/myapp-pod created

And check on its status with:

kubectl get -f myapp.yaml

The output is similar to this:

NAME        READY     STATUS     RESTARTS   AGE
myapp-pod   0/1       Init:0/2   0          6m

or for more details:

kubectl describe -f myapp.yaml

The output is similar to this:

Name:          myapp-pod
Namespace:     default
[...]
Labels:        app.kubernetes.io/name=MyApp
Status:        Pending
[...]
Init Containers:
  init-myservice:
[...]
    State:         Running
[...]
  init-mydb:
[...]
    State:         Waiting
      Reason:      PodInitializing
    Ready:         False
[...]
Containers:
  myapp-container:
[...]
    State:         Waiting
      Reason:      PodInitializing
    Ready:         False
[...]
Events:
  FirstSeen    LastSeen    Count    From                      SubObjectPath                           Type          Reason        Message
  ---------    --------    -----    ----                      -------------                           --------      ------        -------
  16s          16s         1        {default-scheduler }                                              Normal        Scheduled     Successfully assigned myapp-pod to 172.17.4.201
  16s          16s         1        {kubelet 172.17.4.201}    spec.initContainers{init-myservice}     Normal        Pulling       pulling image "busybox"
  13s          13s         1        {kubelet 172.17.4.201}    spec.initContainers{init-myservice}     Normal        Pulled        Successfully pulled image "busybox"
  13s          13s         1        {kubelet 172.17.4.201}    spec.initContainers{init-myservice}     Normal        Created       Created container init-myservice
  13s          13s         1        {kubelet 172.17.4.201}    spec.initContainers{init-myservice}     Normal        Started       Started container init-myservice

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

kubectl logs myapp-pod -c init-myservice # Inspect the first init container
kubectl logs myapp-pod -c init-mydb      # Inspect the second init container

At this point, those init containers will be waiting to discover Services named mydb and myservice.

Here's a configuration you can use to make those Services appear:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: myservice
spec:
  ports:
  - protocol: TCP
    port: 80
    targetPort: 9376
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: mydb
spec:
  ports:
  - protocol: TCP
    port: 80
    targetPort: 9377

To create the mydb and myservice services:

kubectl apply -f services.yaml

The output is similar to this:

service/myservice created
service/mydb created

You'll then see that those init containers complete, and that the myapp-pod Pod moves into the Running state:

kubectl get -f myapp.yaml

The output is similar to this:

NAME        READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
myapp-pod   1/1       Running   0          9m

This simple example should provide some inspiration for you to create your own init containers. What's next contains a link to a more detailed example.

Detailed behavior

During Pod startup, the kubelet delays running init containers until the networking and storage are ready. Then the kubelet runs the Pod's init containers in the order they appear in the Pod's spec.

Each init container must exit successfully before the next container starts. If a container fails to start due to the runtime or exits with failure, it is retried according to the Pod restartPolicy. However, if the Pod restartPolicy is set to Always, the init containers use restartPolicy OnFailure.

A Pod cannot be Ready until all init containers have succeeded. The ports on an init container are not aggregated under a Service. A Pod that is initializing is in the Pending state but should have a condition Initialized set to false.

If the Pod restarts, or is restarted, all init containers must execute again.

Changes to the init container spec are limited to the container image field. 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.

Resources

Given the ordering and execution for init 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.

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

• Read about creating a Pod that has an init container
• Learn how to debug init containers

1.3 - Disruptions

This guide is for application owners who want to build highly available applications, and thus need to understand what types of disruptions can happen to Pods.

It is also for cluster administrators who want to perform automated cluster actions, like upgrading and autoscaling clusters.

Voluntary and involuntary disruptions

Pods do not disappear until someone (a person or a controller) destroys them, or there is an unavoidable hardware or system software error.

We call these unavoidable cases involuntary disruptions to an application. Examples are:

• a hardware failure of the physical machine backing the node
• cluster administrator deletes VM (instance) by mistake
• cloud provider or hypervisor failure makes VM disappear
• a kernel panic
• the node disappears from the cluster due to cluster network partition
• eviction of a pod due to the node being out-of-resources.

Except for the out-of-resources condition, all these conditions should be familiar to most users; they are not specific to Kubernetes.

We call other cases voluntary disruptions. These include both actions initiated by the application owner and those initiated by a Cluster Administrator. Typical application owner actions include:

• deleting the deployment or other controller that manages the pod
• updating a deployment's pod template causing a restart
• directly deleting a pod (e.g. by accident)

Cluster administrator actions include:

• Draining a node for repair or upgrade.
• Draining a node from a cluster to scale the cluster down (learn about Cluster Autoscaling ).
• Removing a pod from a node to permit something else to fit on that node.

These actions might be taken directly by the cluster administrator, or by automation run by the cluster administrator, or by your cluster hosting provider.

Ask your cluster administrator or consult your cloud provider or distribution documentation to determine if any sources of voluntary disruptions are enabled for your cluster. If none are enabled, you can skip creating Pod Disruption Budgets.

Dealing with disruptions

Here are some ways to mitigate involuntary disruptions:

• Ensure your pod requests the resources it needs.
• Replicate your application if you need higher availability. (Learn about running replicated stateless and stateful applications.)
• For even higher availability when running replicated applications, spread applications across racks (using anti-affinity) or across zones (if using a multi-zone cluster.)

The frequency of voluntary disruptions varies. On a basic Kubernetes cluster, there are no automated voluntary disruptions (only user-triggered ones). However, your cluster administrator or hosting provider may run some additional services which cause voluntary disruptions. For example, rolling out node software updates can cause voluntary disruptions. Also, some implementations of cluster (node) autoscaling may cause voluntary disruptions to defragment and compact nodes. Your cluster administrator or hosting provider should have documented what level of voluntary disruptions, if any, to expect. Certain configuration options, such as using PriorityClasses in your pod spec can also cause voluntary (and involuntary) disruptions.

Pod disruption budgets

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.

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:

All 3 pods are part of a deployment, and they collectively have a PDB which requires there be at least 2 of the 3 pods to be available at all times.

For example, assume the cluster administrator wants to reboot into a new kernel version to fix a bug in the kernel. The cluster administrator first tries to drain node-1 using the kubectl drain command. That tool tries to evict pod-a and pod-x. This succeeds immediately. Both pods go into the terminating state at the same time. This puts the cluster in this state:

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:

At some point, the pods terminate, and the cluster looks like this:

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:

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:

At this point, the cluster administrator needs to add a node back to the cluster to proceed with the upgrade.

You can see how Kubernetes varies the rate at which disruptions can happen, according to:

• how many replicas an application needs
• how long it takes to gracefully shutdown an instance
• how long it takes a new instance to start up
• the type of controller
• the cluster's resource capacity

Pod disruption conditions

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:

PreemptionByKubeScheduler

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.

When using a Job (or CronJob), you may want to use these Pod disruption conditions as part of your Job's Pod failure policy.

Separating Cluster Owner and Application Owner Roles

Often, it is useful to think of the Cluster Manager and Application Owner as separate roles with limited knowledge of each other. This separation of responsibilities may make sense in these scenarios:

• when there are many application teams sharing a Kubernetes cluster, and there is natural specialization of roles
• when third-party tools or services are used to automate cluster management

Pod Disruption Budgets support this separation of roles by providing an interface between the roles.

If you do not have such a separation of responsibilities in your organization, you may not need to use Pod Disruption Budgets.

How to perform Disruptive Actions on your Cluster

If you are a Cluster Administrator, and you need to perform a disruptive action on all the nodes in your cluster, such as a node or system software upgrade, here are some options:

• Accept downtime during the upgrade.
• Failover to another complete replica cluster.
  • No downtime, but may be costly both for the duplicated nodes and for human effort to orchestrate the switchover.
• Write disruption tolerant applications and use PDBs.
  • No downtime.
  • Minimal resource duplication.
  • Allows more automation of cluster administration.
  • Writing disruption-tolerant applications is tricky, but the work to tolerate voluntary disruptions largely overlaps with work to support autoscaling and tolerating involuntary disruptions.

What's next

• 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.

1.4 - Ephemeral Containers

This page provides an overview of ephemeral containers: a special type of container that runs temporarily in an existing Pod to accomplish user-initiated actions such as troubleshooting. You use ephemeral containers to inspect services rather than to build applications.

Understanding ephemeral containers

Pods are the fundamental building block of Kubernetes applications. Since Pods are intended to be disposable and replaceable, you cannot add a container to a Pod once it has been created. Instead, you usually delete and replace Pods in a controlled fashion using deployments.

Sometimes it's necessary to inspect the state of an existing Pod, however, for example to troubleshoot a hard-to-reproduce bug. In these cases you can run an ephemeral container in an existing Pod to inspect its state and run arbitrary commands.

What is an ephemeral container?

Ephemeral containers differ from other containers in that they lack guarantees for resources or execution, and they will never be automatically restarted, so they are not appropriate for building applications. Ephemeral containers are described using the same ContainerSpec as regular containers, but many fields are incompatible and disallowed for ephemeral containers.

• Ephemeral containers may not have ports, so fields such as ports, livenessProbe, readinessProbe are disallowed.
• Pod resource allocations are immutable, so setting resources is disallowed.
• For a complete list of allowed fields, see the EphemeralContainer reference documentation.

Ephemeral containers are created using a special ephemeralcontainers handler in the API rather than by adding them directly to pod.spec, so it's not possible to add an ephemeral container using kubectl edit.

Like regular containers, you may not change or remove an ephemeral container after you have added it to a Pod.

Uses for ephemeral containers

Ephemeral containers are useful for interactive troubleshooting when kubectl exec is insufficient because a container has crashed or a container image doesn't include debugging utilities.

In particular, distroless images enable you to deploy minimal container images that reduce attack surface and exposure to bugs and vulnerabilities. Since distroless images do not include a shell or any debugging utilities, it's difficult to troubleshoot distroless images using kubectl exec alone.

When using ephemeral containers, it's helpful to enable process namespace sharing so you can view processes in other containers.

What's next

• Learn how to debug pods using ephemeral containers.

1.5 - User Namespaces

This page explains how user namespaces are used in Kubernetes pods. A user namespace allows to isolate the user running inside the container from the one in the host.

A process running as root in a container can run as a different (non-root) user in the host; in other words, the process has full privileges for operations inside the user namespace, but is unprivileged for operations outside the namespace.

You can use this feature to reduce the damage a compromised container can do to the host or other pods in the same node. There are several security vulnerabilities rated either HIGH or CRITICAL that were not exploitable when user namespaces is active. It is expected user namespace will mitigate some future vulnerabilities too.

Before you begin

This is a Linux only feature. In addition, support is needed in the container runtime to use this feature with Kubernetes stateless pods:

• CRI-O: v1.25 has support for user namespaces.

• containerd: support is planned for the 1.7 release. See containerd issue #7063 for more details.

Support for this in cri-dockerd is not planned yet.

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 stateless 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 stateless 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 the user the container process is running ps 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

It is recommended that the host's files and host's processes use UIDs/GIDs in the range of 0-65535.

The kubelet will assign UIDs/GIDs higher than that to pods. Therefore, to guarantee as much isolation as possible, the UIDs/GIDs used by the host's files and host's processes should be in the range 0-65535.

Note that this recommendation is important to mitigate the impact of CVEs like CVE-2021-25741, where a pod can potentially read arbitrary files in the hosts. 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.

Limitations

When using a user namespace for the pod, it is disallowed to use other host namespaces. In particular, if you set hostUsers: false then you are not allowed to set any of:

• hostNetwork: true
• hostIPC: true
• hostPID: true

The pod is allowed to use no volumes at all or, if using volumes, only these volume types are allowed:

• configmap
• secret
• projected
• downwardAPI
• emptyDir

To guarantee that the pod can read the files of such volumes, volumes are created as if you specified .spec.securityContext.fsGroup as 0 for the Pod. If it is specified to a different value, this other value will of course be honored instead.

As a by-product of this, folders and files for these volumes will have permissions for the group, even if defaultMode or mode to specific items of the volumes were specified without permissions to groups. For example, it is not possible to mount these volumes in a way that its files have permissions only for the owner.

1.6 - 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 most 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'])

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.podIP

the pod's primary IP address (usually, its IPv4 address)

In addition, 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 (provided that the DownwardAPIHugePages feature gate is enabled)

resource: requests.hugepages-*

A container's hugepages request (provided that the DownwardAPIHugePages feature gate is enabled)

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

2 - Workload Resources

2.1 - Deployments

A Deployment provides declarative updates for Pods and ReplicaSets.

You describe a desired state in a Deployment, and the Deployment Controller changes the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. You can define Deployments to create new ReplicaSets, or to remove existing Deployments and adopt all their resources with new Deployments.

Use Case

The following are typical use cases for Deployments:

• 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

In this example:

• A Deployment named nginx-deployment is created, indicated by the .metadata.name field.

• The Deployment creates three replicated Pods, indicated by the .spec.replicas field.

• The .spec.selector field defines how the Deployment 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: nginxusing the .metadata.labels field.
  • The Pod template's specification, or .template.spec field, indicates that the Pods run one container, nginx, which runs the nginx Docker Hub image at version 1.14.2.
  • Create one container and name it nginx using the .spec.template.spec.containers[0].name field.

Before you begin, make sure your Kubernetes cluster is up and running. Follow the steps given below to create the above Deployment:

1. Create the Deployment by running the following command:

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

2. Run kubectl get deployments to check if the Deployment was created.

   If the Deployment is still being created, the output is similar to the following:

   NAME               READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
   nginx-deployment   0/3     0            0           1s
   

   When you inspect the Deployments in your cluster, the following fields are displayed:

   • NAME lists the names of the Deployments in the namespace.
   • READY displays how many replicas of the application are available to your users. It follows the pattern ready/desired.
   • UP-TO-DATE displays the number of replicas that have been updated to achieve the desired state.
   • AVAILABLE displays how many replicas of the application are available to your users.
   • AGE displays the amount of time that the application has been running.

   Notice how the number of desired replicas is 3 according to .spec.replicas field.

3. To see the Deployment rollout status, run kubectl rollout status deployment/nginx-deployment.

   The output is similar to:

   Waiting for rollout to finish: 2 out of 3 new replicas have been updated...
   deployment "nginx-deployment" successfully rolled out
   

4. Run the kubectl get deployments again a few seconds later. The output is similar to this:

   NAME               READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
   nginx-deployment   3/3     3            3           18s
   

   Notice that the Deployment has created all three replicas, and all replicas are up-to-date (they contain the latest Pod template) and available.

5. To see the ReplicaSet (rs) created by the Deployment, run kubectl get rs. The output is similar to this:

   NAME                          DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
   nginx-deployment-75675f5897   3         3         3       18s
   

   ReplicaSet output shows the following fields:

   • NAME lists the names of the ReplicaSets in the namespace.
   • DESIRED displays the desired number of replicas of the application, which you define when you create the Deployment. This is the desired state.
   • CURRENT displays how many replicas are currently running.
   • READY displays how many replicas of the application are available to your users.
   • AGE displays the amount of time that the application has been running.

   Notice that the name of the ReplicaSet is always formatted as [DEPLOYMENT-NAME]-[HASH]. 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=3123191453
   nginx-deployment-75675f5897-kzszj   1/1       Running   0          18s       app=nginx,pod-template-hash=3123191453
   nginx-deployment-75675f5897-qqcnn   1/1       Running   0          18s       app=nginx,pod-template-hash=3123191453
   

   The created ReplicaSet ensures that there are three nginx Pods.

Pod-template-hash label

The pod-template-hash label is added by the Deployment controller to every ReplicaSet that a Deployment creates or adopts.

This label ensures that child ReplicaSets of a Deployment do not overlap. It is generated by hashing the PodTemplate of the ReplicaSet and using the resulting hash as the label value that is added to the ReplicaSet selector, Pod template labels, and in any existing Pods that the ReplicaSet might have.

Updating a Deployment

Follow the steps given below to update your Deployment:

1. Let's update the nginx Pods to use the nginx:1.16.1 image instead of the nginx:1.14.2 image.

   kubectl set image deployment.v1.apps/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.16.1
   

   or use the following command:

   kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.16.1
   

   The output is similar to:

   deployment.apps/nginx-deployment image updated
   

   Alternatively, you can edit the Deployment and change .spec.template.spec.containers[0].image from nginx:1.14.2 to nginx:1.16.1:

   kubectl edit deployment/nginx-deployment
   

   The output is similar to:

   deployment.apps/nginx-deployment edited
   

2. To see the rollout status, run:

   kubectl rollout status deployment/nginx-deployment
   

   The output is similar to this:

   Waiting for rollout to finish: 2 out of 3 new replicas have been updated...
   

   or

   deployment "nginx-deployment" successfully rolled out
   

Get more details on your updated Deployment:

• After the rollout succeeds, you can view the Deployment by running kubectl get deployments. The output is similar to this:

  NAME               READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
  nginx-deployment   3/3     3            3           36s
  

• Run kubectl get rs to see that the Deployment updated the Pods by creating a new ReplicaSet and scaling it up to 3 replicas, as well as scaling down the old ReplicaSet to 0 replicas.

  kubectl get rs
  

  The output is similar to this:

  NAME                          DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
  nginx-deployment-1564180365   3         3         3       6s
  nginx-deployment-2035384211   0         0         0       36s
  

• Running get pods should now show only the new Pods:

  kubectl get pods
  

  The output is similar to this:

  NAME                                READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
  nginx-deployment-1564180365-khku8   1/1       Running   0          14s
  nginx-deployment-1564180365-nacti   1/1       Running   0          14s
  nginx-deployment-1564180365-z9gth   1/1       Running   0          14s
  

  Next time you want to update these Pods, you only need to update the Deployment's Pod template again.

  Deployment ensures that only a certain number of Pods are down while they are being updated. By default, it ensures that at least 75% of the desired number of Pods are up (25% max unavailable).

  Deployment also ensures that only a certain number of Pods are created above the desired number of Pods. By default, it ensures that at most 125% of the desired number of Pods are up (25% max surge).

  For example, if you look at the above Deployment closely, you will see that it first creates a new Pod, then deletes an old Pod, and creates another new one. It does not kill old Pods until a sufficient number of new Pods have come up, and does not create new Pods until a sufficient number of old Pods have been killed. It makes sure that at least 3 Pods are available and that at max 4 Pods in total are available. In case of a Deployment with 4 replicas, the number of Pods would be between 3 and 5.

• Get details of your Deployment:

  kubectl describe deployments
  

  The output is similar to this:

  Name:                   nginx-deployment
  Namespace:              default
  CreationTimestamp:      Thu, 30 Nov 2017 10:56:25 +0000
  Labels:                 app=nginx
  Annotations:            deployment.kubernetes.io/revision=2
  Selector:               app=nginx
  Replicas:               3 desired | 3 updated | 3 total | 3 available | 0 unavailable
  StrategyType:           RollingUpdate
  MinReadySeconds:        0
  RollingUpdateStrategy:  25% max unavailable, 25% max surge
  Pod Template:
    Labels:  app=nginx
     Containers:
      nginx:
        Image:        nginx:1.16.1
        Port:         80/TCP
        Environment:  <none>
        Mounts:       <none>
      Volumes:        <none>
    Conditions:
      Type           Status  Reason
      ----           ------  ------
      Available      True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
      Progressing    True    NewReplicaSetAvailable
    OldReplicaSets:  <none>
    NewReplicaSet:   nginx-deployment-1564180365 (3/3 replicas created)
    Events:
      Type    Reason             Age   From                   Message
      ----    ------             ----  ----                   -------
      Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  2m    deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 3
      Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  24s   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-1564180365 to 1
      Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  22s   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 2
      Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  22s   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-1564180365 to 2
      Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  19s   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 1
      Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  19s   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-1564180365 to 3
      Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  14s   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 0
  

  Here you see that when you first created the Deployment, it created a ReplicaSet (nginx-deployment-2035384211) and scaled it up to 3 replicas directly. When you updated the Deployment, it created a new ReplicaSet (nginx-deployment-1564180365) and scaled it up to 1 and waited for it to come up. Then it scaled down the old ReplicaSet to 2 and scaled up the new ReplicaSet to 2 so that at least 3 Pods were available and at most 4 Pods were created at all times. It then continued scaling up and down the new and the old ReplicaSet, with the same rolling update strategy. Finally, you'll have 3 available replicas in the new ReplicaSet, and the old ReplicaSet is scaled down to 0.

Rollover (aka multiple updates in-flight)

Each time a new Deployment is observed by the Deployment controller, a ReplicaSet is created to bring up the desired Pods. If the Deployment is updated, the existing ReplicaSet that controls Pods whose labels match .spec.selector but whose template does not match .spec.template are scaled down. Eventually, the new ReplicaSet is scaled to .spec.replicas and all old ReplicaSets is scaled to 0.

If you update a Deployment while an existing rollout is in progress, the Deployment creates a new ReplicaSet as per the update and start scaling that up, and rolls over the ReplicaSet that it was scaling up previously -- it will add it to its list of old ReplicaSets and start scaling it down.

For example, suppose you create a Deployment to create 5 replicas of nginx:1.14.2, but then update the Deployment to create 5 replicas of nginx:1.16.1, when only 3 replicas of nginx:1.14.2 had been created. In that case, the Deployment immediately starts killing the 3 nginx:1.14.2 Pods that it had created, and starts creating nginx:1.16.1 Pods. It does not wait for the 5 replicas of nginx:1.14.2 to be created before changing course.

Label selector updates

It is generally discouraged to make label selector updates and it is suggested to plan your selectors up front. In any case, if you need to perform a label selector update, exercise great caution and make sure you have grasped all of the implications.

• Selector additions require the Pod template labels in the Deployment spec to be updated with the new label too, otherwise a validation error is returned. This change is a non-overlapping one, meaning that the new selector does not select ReplicaSets and Pods created with the old selector, resulting in orphaning all old ReplicaSets and creating a new ReplicaSet.
• Selector updates changes the existing value in a selector key -- result in the same behavior as additions.
• Selector removals removes an existing key from the Deployment selector -- do not require any changes in the Pod template labels. Existing ReplicaSets are not orphaned, and a new ReplicaSet is not created, but note that the removed label still exists in any existing Pods and ReplicaSets.

Rolling Back a Deployment

Sometimes, you may want to rollback a Deployment; for example, when the Deployment is not stable, such as crash looping. By default, all of the Deployment's rollout history is kept in the system so that you can rollback anytime you want (you can change that by modifying revision history limit).

• Suppose that you made a typo while updating the Deployment, by putting the image name as nginx:1.161 instead of nginx:1.16.1:

  kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.161 
  

  The output is similar to this:

  deployment.apps/nginx-deployment image updated
  

• The rollout gets stuck. You can verify it by checking the rollout status:

  kubectl rollout status deployment/nginx-deployment
  

  The output is similar to this:

  Waiting for rollout to finish: 1 out of 3 new replicas have been updated...
  

• Press Ctrl-C to stop the above rollout status watch. For more information on stuck rollouts, read more here.

• You see that the number of old replicas (nginx-deployment-1564180365 and nginx-deployment-2035384211) is 2, and new replicas (nginx-deployment-3066724191) is 1.

  kubectl get rs
  

  The output is similar to this:

  NAME                          DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
  nginx-deployment-1564180365   3         3         3       25s
  nginx-deployment-2035384211   0         0         0       36s
  nginx-deployment-3066724191   1         1         0       6s
  

• Looking at the Pods created, you see that 1 Pod created by new ReplicaSet is stuck in an image pull loop.

  kubectl get pods
  

  The output is similar to this:

  NAME                                READY     STATUS             RESTARTS   AGE
  nginx-deployment-1564180365-70iae   1/1       Running            0          25s
  nginx-deployment-1564180365-jbqqo   1/1       Running            0          25s
  nginx-deployment-1564180365-hysrc   1/1       Running            0          25s
  nginx-deployment-3066724191-08mng   0/1       ImagePullBackOff   0          6s
  

  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:

  Name:           nginx-deployment
  Namespace:      default
  CreationTimestamp:  Tue, 15 Mar 2016 14:48:04 -0700
  Labels:         app=nginx
  Selector:       app=nginx
  Replicas:       3 desired | 1 updated | 4 total | 3 available | 1 unavailable
  StrategyType:       RollingUpdate
  MinReadySeconds:    0
  RollingUpdateStrategy:  25% max unavailable, 25% max surge
  Pod Template:
    Labels:  app=nginx
    Containers:
     nginx:
      Image:        nginx:1.161
      Port:         80/TCP
      Host Port:    0/TCP
      Environment:  <none>
      Mounts:       <none>
    Volumes:        <none>
  Conditions:
    Type           Status  Reason
    ----           ------  ------
    Available      True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
    Progressing    True    ReplicaSetUpdated
  OldReplicaSets:     nginx-deployment-1564180365 (3/3 replicas created)
  NewReplicaSet:      nginx-deployment-3066724191 (1/1 replicas created)
  Events:
    FirstSeen LastSeen    Count   From                    SubObjectPath   Type        Reason              Message
    --------- --------    -----   ----                    -------------   --------    ------              -------
    1m        1m          1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 3
    22s       22s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-1564180365 to 1
    22s       22s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 2
    22s       22s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-1564180365 to 2
    21s       21s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 1
    21s       21s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-1564180365 to 3
    13s       13s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-2035384211 to 0
    13s       13s         1       {deployment-controller }                Normal      ScalingReplicaSet   Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-3066724191 to 1
  

  To fix this, you need to rollback to a previous revision of Deployment that is stable.

Checking Rollout History of a Deployment

Follow the steps given below to check the rollout history:

1. First, check the revisions of this Deployment:

   kubectl rollout history deployment/nginx-deployment
   

   The output is similar to this:

   deployments "nginx-deployment"
   REVISION    CHANGE-CAUSE
   1           kubectl apply --filename=https://k8s.io/examples/controllers/nginx-deployment.yaml
   2           kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.16.1
   3           kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.161
   

   CHANGE-CAUSE is copied from the Deployment annotation kubernetes.io/change-cause to its revisions upon creation. You can specify theCHANGE-CAUSE message by:

   • Annotating the Deployment with kubectl annotate deployment/nginx-deployment kubernetes.io/change-cause="image updated to 1.16.1"
   • Manually editing the manifest of the resource.

2. To see the details of each revision, run:

   kubectl rollout history deployment/nginx-deployment --revision=2
   

   The output is similar to this:

   deployments "nginx-deployment" revision 2
     Labels:       app=nginx
             pod-template-hash=1159050644
     Annotations:  kubernetes.io/change-cause=kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.16.1
     Containers:
      nginx:
       Image:      nginx:1.16.1
       Port:       80/TCP
        QoS Tier:
           cpu:      BestEffort
           memory:   BestEffort
       Environment Variables:      <none>
     No volumes.
   

Rolling Back to a Previous Revision

Follow the steps given below to rollback the Deployment from the current version to the previous version, which is version 2.

1. Now you've decided to undo the current rollout and rollback to the previous revision:

   kubectl rollout undo deployment/nginx-deployment
   

   The output is similar to this:

   deployment.apps/nginx-deployment rolled back
   

   Alternatively, you can rollback to a specific revision by specifying it with --to-revision:

   kubectl rollout undo deployment/nginx-deployment --to-revision=2
   

   The output is similar to this:

   deployment.apps/nginx-deployment rolled back
   

   For more details about rollout related commands, read kubectl rollout.

   The Deployment is now rolled back to a previous stable revision. As you can see, a DeploymentRollback event for rolling back to revision 2 is generated from Deployment controller.

2. Check if the rollback was successful and the Deployment is running as expected, run:

   kubectl get deployment nginx-deployment
   

   The output is similar to this:

   NAME               READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
   nginx-deployment   3/3     3            3           30m
   

3. Get the description of the Deployment:

   kubectl describe deployment nginx-deployment
   

   The output is similar to this:

   Name:                   nginx-deployment
   Namespace:              default
   CreationTimestamp:      Sun, 02 Sep 2018 18:17:55 -0500
   Labels:                 app=nginx
   Annotations:            deployment.kubernetes.io/revision=4
                           kubernetes.io/change-cause=kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.16.1
   Selector:               app=nginx
   Replicas:               3 desired | 3 updated | 3 total | 3 available | 0 unavailable
   StrategyType:           RollingUpdate
   MinReadySeconds:        0
   RollingUpdateStrategy:  25% max unavailable, 25% max surge
   Pod Template:
     Labels:  app=nginx
     Containers:
      nginx:
       Image:        nginx:1.16.1
       Port:         80/TCP
       Host Port:    0/TCP
       Environment:  <none>
       Mounts:       <none>
     Volumes:        <none>
   Conditions:
     Type           Status  Reason
     ----           ------  ------
     Available      True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
     Progressing    True    NewReplicaSetAvailable
   OldReplicaSets:  <none>
   NewReplicaSet:   nginx-deployment-c4747d96c (3/3 replicas created)
   Events:
     Type    Reason              Age   From                   Message
     ----    ------              ----  ----                   -------
     Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   12m   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-75675f5897 to 3
     Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-c4747d96c to 1
     Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-75675f5897 to 2
     Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-c4747d96c to 2
     Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-75675f5897 to 1
     Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-c4747d96c to 3
     Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-75675f5897 to 0
     Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   11m   deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set nginx-deployment-595696685f to 1
     Normal  DeploymentRollback  15s   deployment-controller  Rolled back deployment "nginx-deployment" to revision 2
     Normal  ScalingReplicaSet   15s   deployment-controller  Scaled down replica set nginx-deployment-595696685f to 0
   

Scaling a Deployment

You can scale a Deployment by using the following command:

kubectl scale deployment/nginx-deployment --replicas=10

The output is similar to this:

deployment.apps/nginx-deployment scaled

Assuming horizontal Pod autoscaling is enabled in your cluster, you can set up an autoscaler for your Deployment and choose the minimum and maximum number of Pods you want to run based on the CPU utilization of your existing Pods.

kubectl autoscale deployment/nginx-deployment --min=10 --max=15 --cpu-percent=80

The output is similar to this:

deployment.apps/nginx-deployment scaled

Proportional scaling

RollingUpdate Deployments support running multiple versions of an application at the same time. When you or an autoscaler scales a RollingUpdate Deployment that is in the middle of a rollout (either in progress or paused), the Deployment controller balances the additional replicas in the existing active ReplicaSets (ReplicaSets with Pods) in order to mitigate risk. This is called proportional scaling.

For example, you are running a Deployment with 10 replicas, maxSurge=3, and maxUnavailable=2.

• Ensure that the 10 replicas in your Deployment are running.

  kubectl get deploy
  

  The output is similar to this:

  NAME                 DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
  nginx-deployment     10        10        10           10          50s
  

• You update to a new image which happens to be unresolvable from inside the cluster.

  kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:sometag
  

  The output is similar to this:

  deployment.apps/nginx-deployment image updated
  

• The image update starts a new rollout with ReplicaSet nginx-deployment-1989198191, but it's blocked due to the maxUnavailable requirement that you mentioned above. Check out the rollout status:

  kubectl get rs
  

  The output is similar to this:
  

  NAME                          DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     AGE
  nginx-deployment-1989198191   5         5         0         9s
  nginx-deployment-618515232    8         8         8         1m
  

• Then a new scaling request for the Deployment comes along. The autoscaler increments the Deployment replicas to 15. The Deployment controller needs to decide where to add these new 5 replicas. If you weren't using proportional scaling, all 5 of them would be added in the new ReplicaSet. With proportional scaling, you spread the additional replicas across all ReplicaSets. Bigger proportions go to the ReplicaSets with the most replicas and lower proportions go to ReplicaSets with less replicas. Any leftovers are added to the ReplicaSet with the most replicas. ReplicaSets with zero replicas are not scaled up.

In our example above, 3 replicas are added to the old ReplicaSet and 2 replicas are added to the new ReplicaSet. The rollout process should eventually move all replicas to the new ReplicaSet, assuming the new replicas become healthy. To confirm this, run:

kubectl get deploy

The output is similar to this:

NAME                 DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
nginx-deployment     15        18        7            8           7m

The rollout status confirms how the replicas were added to each ReplicaSet.

kubectl get rs

The output is similar to this:

NAME                          DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     AGE
nginx-deployment-1989198191   7         7         0         7m
nginx-deployment-618515232    11        11        11        7m

Pausing and Resuming a rollout of a Deployment

When you update a Deployment, or plan to, you can pause rollouts for that Deployment before you trigger one or more updates. When you're ready to apply those changes, you resume rollouts for the Deployment. This approach allows you to apply multiple fixes in between pausing and resuming without triggering unnecessary rollouts.

• For example, with a Deployment that was created:

  Get the Deployment details:

  kubectl get deploy
  

  The output is similar to this:

  NAME      DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
  nginx     3         3         3            3           1m
  

  Get the rollout status:

  kubectl get rs
  

  The output is similar to this:

  NAME               DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     AGE
  nginx-2142116321   3         3         3         1m
  

• Pause by running the following command:

  kubectl rollout pause deployment/nginx-deployment
  

  The output is similar to this:

  deployment.apps/nginx-deployment paused
  

• Then update the image of the Deployment:

  kubectl set image deployment/nginx-deployment nginx=nginx:1.16.1
  

  The output is similar to this:

  deployment.apps/nginx-deployment image updated
  

• Notice that no new rollout started:

  kubectl rollout history deployment/nginx-deployment
  

  The output is similar to this:

  deployments "nginx"
  REVISION  CHANGE-CAUSE
  1   <none>
  

• Get the rollout status to verify that the existing ReplicaSet has not changed:

  kubectl get rs
  

  The output is similar to this:

  NAME               DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     AGE
  nginx-2142116321   3         3         3         2m
  

• You can make as many updates as you wish, for example, update the resources that will be used:

  kubectl set resources deployment/nginx-deployment -c=nginx --limits=cpu=200m,memory=512Mi
  

  The output is similar to this:

  deployment.apps/nginx-deployment resource requirements updated
  

  The initial state of the Deployment prior to pausing its rollout will continue its function, but new updates to the Deployment will not have any effect as long as the Deployment rollout is paused.

• Eventually, resume the Deployment rollout and observe a new ReplicaSet coming up with all the new updates:

  kubectl rollout resume deployment/nginx-deployment
  

  The output is similar to this:

  deployment.apps/nginx-deployment resumed
  

• Watch the status of the rollout until it's done.

  kubectl get rs -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
  

Deployment status

A Deployment enters various states during its lifecycle. It can be progressing while rolling out a new ReplicaSet, it can be complete, or it can fail to progress.

Progressing Deployment

Kubernetes marks a Deployment as progressing when one of the following tasks is performed:

• The Deployment creates a new ReplicaSet.
• The Deployment is scaling up its newest ReplicaSet.
• The Deployment is scaling down its older ReplicaSet(s).
• New Pods become ready or available (ready for at least MinReadySeconds).

When the rollout becomes “progressing”, the Deployment controller adds a condition with the following attributes to the Deployment's .status.conditions:

• type: Progressing
• status: "True"
• reason: NewReplicaSetCreated | reason: FoundNewReplicaSet | reason: ReplicaSetUpdated

You can monitor the progress for a Deployment by using kubectl rollout status.

Complete Deployment

Kubernetes marks a Deployment as complete when it has the following characteristics:

• All of the replicas associated with the Deployment have been updated to the latest version you've specified, meaning any updates you've requested have been completed.
• All of the replicas associated with the Deployment are available.
• No old replicas for the Deployment are running.

When the rollout becomes “complete”, the Deployment controller sets a condition with the following attributes to the Deployment's .status.conditions:

• type: Progressing
• status: "True"
• reason: NewReplicaSetAvailable

This Progressing condition will retain a status value of "True" until a new rollout is initiated. The condition holds even when availability of replicas changes (which does instead affect the Available condition).

You can check if a Deployment has completed by using kubectl rollout status. If the rollout completed successfully, kubectl rollout status returns a zero exit code.

kubectl rollout status deployment/nginx-deployment

The output is similar to this:

Waiting for rollout to finish: 2 of 3 updated replicas are available...
deployment "nginx-deployment" successfully rolled out

and the exit status from kubectl rollout is 0 (success):

echo $?

0

Failed Deployment

Your Deployment may get stuck trying to deploy its newest ReplicaSet without ever completing. This can occur due to some of the following factors:

• Insufficient quota
• Readiness probe failures
• Image pull errors
• Insufficient permissions
• Limit ranges
• Application runtime misconfiguration

One way you can detect this condition is to specify a deadline parameter in your Deployment spec: (.spec.progressDeadlineSeconds). .spec.progressDeadlineSeconds denotes the number of seconds the Deployment controller waits before indicating (in the Deployment status) that the Deployment progress has stalled.

The following kubectl command sets the spec with progressDeadlineSeconds to make the controller report lack of progress of a rollout for a Deployment after 10 minutes:

kubectl patch deployment/nginx-deployment -p '{"spec":{"progressDeadlineSeconds":600}}'

The output is similar to this:

deployment.apps/nginx-deployment patched

Once the deadline has been exceeded, the Deployment controller adds a DeploymentCondition with the following attributes to the Deployment's .status.conditions:

• type: Progressing
• status: "False"
• reason: ProgressDeadlineExceeded

This condition can also fail early and is then set to status value of "False" due to reasons as ReplicaSetCreateError. Also, the deadline is not taken into account anymore once the Deployment rollout completes.

See the Kubernetes API conventions for more information on status conditions.

You may experience transient errors with your Deployments, either due to a low timeout that you have set or due to any other kind of error that can be treated as transient. For example, let's suppose you have insufficient quota. If you describe the Deployment you will notice the following section:

kubectl describe deployment nginx-deployment

The output is similar to this:

<...>
Conditions:
  Type            Status  Reason
  ----            ------  ------
  Available       True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
  Progressing     True    ReplicaSetUpdated
  ReplicaFailure  True    FailedCreate
<...>

If you run kubectl get deployment nginx-deployment -o yaml, the Deployment status is similar to this:

status:
  availableReplicas: 2
  conditions:
  - lastTransitionTime: 2016-10-04T12:25:39Z
    lastUpdateTime: 2016-10-04T12:25:39Z
    message: Replica set "nginx-deployment-4262182780" is progressing.
    reason: ReplicaSetUpdated
    status: "True"
    type: Progressing
  - lastTransitionTime: 2016-10-04T12:25:42Z
    lastUpdateTime: 2016-10-04T12:25:42Z
    message: Deployment has minimum availability.
    reason: MinimumReplicasAvailable
    status: "True"
    type: Available
  - lastTransitionTime: 2016-10-04T12:25:39Z
    lastUpdateTime: 2016-10-04T12:25:39Z
    message: 'Error creating: pods "nginx-deployment-4262182780-" is forbidden: exceeded quota:
      object-counts, requested: pods=1, used: pods=3, limited: pods=2'
    reason: FailedCreate
    status: "True"
    type: ReplicaFailure
  observedGeneration: 3
  replicas: 2
  unavailableReplicas: 2

Eventually, once the Deployment progress deadline is exceeded, Kubernetes updates the status and the reason for the Progressing condition:

Conditions:
  Type            Status  Reason
  ----            ------  ------
  Available       True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
  Progressing     False   ProgressDeadlineExceeded
  ReplicaFailure  True    FailedCreate

You can address an issue of insufficient quota by scaling down your Deployment, by scaling down other controllers you may be running, or by increasing quota in your namespace. If you satisfy the quota conditions and the Deployment controller then completes the Deployment rollout, you'll see the Deployment's status update with a successful condition (status: "True" and reason: NewReplicaSetAvailable).

Conditions:
  Type          Status  Reason
  ----          ------  ------
  Available     True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
  Progressing   True    NewReplicaSetAvailable

type: Available with status: "True" means that your Deployment has minimum availability. Minimum availability is dictated by the parameters specified in the deployment strategy. type: Progressing with status: "True" means that your Deployment is either in the middle of a rollout and it is progressing or that it has successfully completed its progress and the minimum required new replicas are available (see the Reason of the condition for the particulars - in our case reason: NewReplicaSetAvailable means that the Deployment is complete).

You can check if a Deployment has failed to progress by using kubectl rollout status. kubectl rollout status returns a non-zero exit code if the Deployment has exceeded the progression deadline.

kubectl rollout status deployment/nginx-deployment

The output is similar to this:

Waiting for rollout to finish: 2 out of 3 new replicas have been updated...
error: deployment "nginx" exceeded its progress deadline

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

echo $?

1

Operating on a failed deployment

All actions that apply to a complete Deployment also apply to a failed Deployment. You can scale it up/down, roll back to a previous revision, or even pause it if you need to apply multiple tweaks in the Deployment Pod template.

Clean up Policy

You can set .spec.revisionHistoryLimit field in a Deployment to specify how many old ReplicaSets for this Deployment you want to retain. The rest will be garbage-collected in the background. By default, it is 10.

Canary Deployment

If you want to roll out releases to a subset of users or servers using the Deployment, you can create multiple Deployments, one for each release, following the canary pattern described in managing resources.

Writing a Deployment Spec

As with all other Kubernetes configs, a Deployment needs .apiVersion, .kind, and .metadata fields. For general information about working with config files, see deploying applications, configuring containers, and using kubectl to manage resources documents. The name of a Deployment object must be a valid DNS subdomain name.

A Deployment also needs a .spec section.

Pod Template

The .spec.template and .spec.selector are the only required fields of the .spec.

The .spec.template is a Pod template. It has exactly the same schema as a Pod, except it is nested and does not have an apiVersion or kind.

In addition to required fields for a Pod, a Pod template in a Deployment must specify appropriate labels and an appropriate restart policy. For labels, make sure not to overlap with other controllers. See selector.

Only a .spec.template.spec.restartPolicy equal to Always is allowed, which is the default if not specified.

Replicas

.spec.replicas is an optional field that specifies the number of desired Pods. It defaults to 1.

Should you manually scale a Deployment, example via kubectl scale deployment deployment --replicas=X, and then you update that Deployment based on a manifest (for example: by running kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml), then applying that manifest overwrites the manual scaling that you previously did.

If a HorizontalPodAutoscaler (or any similar API for horizontal scaling) is managing scaling for a Deployment, don't set .spec.replicas.

Instead, allow the Kubernetes control plane to manage the .spec.replicas field automatically.

Selector

.spec.selector is a required field that specifies a label selector for the Pods targeted by this Deployment.

.spec.selector must match .spec.template.metadata.labels, or it will be rejected by the API.

In API version apps/v1, .spec.selector and .metadata.labels do not default to .spec.template.metadata.labels if not set. So they must be set explicitly. Also note that .spec.selector is immutable after creation of the Deployment in apps/v1.

A Deployment may terminate Pods whose labels match the selector if their template is different from .spec.template or if the total number of such Pods exceeds .spec.replicas. It brings up new Pods with .spec.template if the number of Pods is less than the desired number.

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

Strategy

.spec.strategy specifies the strategy used to replace old Pods by new ones. .spec.strategy.type can be "Recreate" or "RollingUpdate". "RollingUpdate" is the default value.

Recreate Deployment

All existing Pods are killed before new ones are created when .spec.strategy.type==Recreate.

Rolling Update Deployment

The Deployment updates Pods in a rolling update fashion when .spec.strategy.type==RollingUpdate. You can specify maxUnavailable and maxSurge to control the rolling update process.

Max Unavailable

.spec.strategy.rollingUpdate.maxUnavailable is an optional field that specifies the maximum number of Pods that can be unavailable during the update process. The value can be an absolute number (for example, 5) or a percentage of desired Pods (for example, 10%). The absolute number is calculated from percentage by rounding down. The value cannot be 0 if .spec.strategy.rollingUpdate.maxSurge is 0. The default value is 25%.

For example, when this value is set to 30%, the old ReplicaSet can be scaled down to 70% of desired Pods immediately when the rolling update starts. Once new Pods are ready, old ReplicaSet can be scaled down further, followed by scaling up the new ReplicaSet, ensuring that the total number of Pods available at all times during the update is at least 70% of the desired Pods.

Max Surge

.spec.strategy.rollingUpdate.maxSurge is an optional field that specifies the maximum number of Pods that can be created over the desired number of Pods. The value can be an absolute number (for example, 5) or a percentage of desired Pods (for example, 10%). The value cannot be 0 if MaxUnavailable is 0. The absolute number is calculated from the percentage by rounding up. The default value is 25%.

For example, when this value is set to 30%, the new ReplicaSet can be scaled up immediately when the rolling update starts, such that the total number of old and new Pods does not exceed 130% of desired Pods. Once old Pods have been killed, the new ReplicaSet can be scaled up further, ensuring that the total number of Pods running at any time during the update is at most 130% of desired Pods.

Progress Deadline Seconds

.spec.progressDeadlineSeconds is an optional field that specifies the number of seconds you want to wait for your Deployment to progress before the system reports back that the Deployment has failed progressing - surfaced as a condition with type: Progressing, status: "False". and reason: ProgressDeadlineExceeded in the status of the resource. The Deployment controller will keep retrying the Deployment. This defaults to 600. In the future, once automatic rollback will be implemented, the Deployment controller will roll back a Deployment as soon as it observes such a condition.

If specified, this field needs to be greater than .spec.minReadySeconds.

Min Ready Seconds

.spec.minReadySeconds is an optional field that specifies the minimum number of seconds for which a newly created Pod should be ready without any of its containers crashing, for it to be considered available. This defaults to 0 (the Pod will be considered available as soon as it is ready). To learn more about when a Pod is considered ready, see Container Probes.

Revision History Limit

A Deployment's revision history is stored in the ReplicaSets it controls.

.spec.revisionHistoryLimit is an optional field that specifies the number of old ReplicaSets to retain to allow rollback. These old ReplicaSets consume resources in etcd and crowd the output of kubectl get rs. The configuration of each Deployment revision is stored in its ReplicaSets; therefore, once an old ReplicaSet is deleted, you lose the ability to rollback to that revision of Deployment. By default, 10 old ReplicaSets will be kept, however its ideal value depends on the frequency and stability of new Deployments.

More specifically, setting this field to zero means that all old ReplicaSets with 0 replicas will be cleaned up. In this case, a new Deployment rollout cannot be undone, since its revision history is cleaned up.

Paused

.spec.paused is an optional boolean field for pausing and resuming a Deployment. The only difference between a paused Deployment and one that is not paused, is that any changes into the PodTemplateSpec of the paused Deployment will not trigger new rollouts as long as it is paused. A Deployment is not paused by default when it is created.

What's next

• Learn about Pods.
• Run a Stateless Application Using a Deployment.
• Deployment is a top-level resource in the Kubernetes REST API. Read the Deployment object definition to understand the API for deployments.
• Read about PodDisruptionBudget and how you can use it to manage application availability during disruptions.

2.2 - ReplicaSet

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: gcr.io/google_samples/gb-frontend:v3

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:  kubectl.kubernetes.io/last-applied-configuration:
                {"apiVersion":"apps/v1","kind":"ReplicaSet","metadata":{"annotations":{},"labels":{"app":"guestbook","tier":"frontend"},"name":"frontend",...
Replicas:     3 current / 3 desired
Pods Status:  3 Running / 0 Waiting / 0 Succeeded / 0 Failed
Pod Template:
  Labels:  tier=frontend
  Containers:
   php-redis:
    Image:        gcr.io/google_samples/gb-frontend:v3
    Port:         <none>
    Host Port:    <none>
    Environment:  <none>
    Mounts:       <none>
  Volumes:        <none>
Events:
  Type    Reason            Age   From                   Message
  ----    ------            ----  ----                   -------
  Normal  SuccessfulCreate  117s  replicaset-controller  Created pod: frontend-wtsmm
  Normal  SuccessfulCreate  116s  replicaset-controller  Created pod: frontend-b2zdv
  Normal  SuccessfulCreate  116s  replicaset-controller  Created pod: frontend-vcmts

And lastly you can check for the Pods brought up:

kubectl get pods

You should see Pod information similar to:

NAME             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
frontend-b2zdv   1/1     Running   0          6m36s
frontend-vcmts   1/1     Running   0          6m36s
frontend-wtsmm   1/1     Running   0          6m36s

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-b2zdv -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: "2020-02-12T07:06:16Z"
  generateName: frontend-
  labels:
    tier: frontend
  name: frontend-b2zdv
  namespace: default
  ownerReferences:
  - apiVersion: apps/v1
    blockOwnerDeletion: true
    controller: true
    kind: ReplicaSet
    name: frontend
    uid: f391f6db-bb9b-4c09-ae74-6a1f77f3d5cf
...

Non-Template Pod acquisitions

While you can create bare Pods with no problems, it is strongly recommended to make sure that the bare Pods do not have labels which match the selector of one of your ReplicaSets. The reason for this is because a ReplicaSet is not limited to owning Pods specified by its template-- it can acquire other Pods in the manner specified in the previous sections.

Take the previous frontend ReplicaSet example, and the Pods specified in the following manifest:

pods/pod-rs.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pod1
  labels:
    tier: frontend
spec:
  containers:
  - name: hello1
    image: gcr.io/google-samples/hello-app:2.0

---

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pod2
  labels:
    tier: frontend
spec:
  containers:
  - name: hello2
    image: gcr.io/google-samples/hello-app:1.0

As those Pods do not have a Controller (or any object) as their owner reference and match the selector of the frontend ReplicaSet, they will immediately be acquired by it.

Suppose you create the Pods after the frontend ReplicaSet has been deployed and has set up its initial Pod replicas to fulfill its replica count requirement:

kubectl apply -f https://kubernetes.io/examples/pods/pod-rs.yaml

The new Pods will be acquired by the ReplicaSet, and then immediately terminated as the ReplicaSet would be over its desired count.

Fetching the Pods:

kubectl get pods

The output shows that the new Pods are either already terminated, or in the process of being terminated:

NAME             READY   STATUS        RESTARTS   AGE
frontend-b2zdv   1/1     Running       0          10m
frontend-vcmts   1/1     Running       0          10m
frontend-wtsmm   1/1     Running       0          10m
pod1             0/1     Terminating   0          1s
pod2             0/1     Terminating   0          1s

If you create the Pods first:

kubectl apply -f https://kubernetes.io/examples/pods/pod-rs.yaml

And then create the ReplicaSet however:

kubectl apply -f https://kubernetes.io/examples/controllers/frontend.yaml

You shall see that the ReplicaSet has acquired the Pods and has only created new ones according to its spec until the number of its new Pods and the original matches its desired count. As fetching the Pods:

kubectl get pods

Will reveal in its output:

NAME             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
frontend-hmmj2   1/1     Running   0          9s
pod1             1/1     Running   0          36s
pod2             1/1     Running   0          36s

In this manner, a ReplicaSet can own a non-homogenous 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.

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

A ReplicaSet also needs a .spec section.

Pod Template

The .spec.template is a pod template which is also required to have labels in place. In our frontend.yaml example we had one label: tier: frontend. Be careful not to overlap with the selectors of other controllers, lest they try to adopt this Pod.

For the template's restart policy field, .spec.template.spec.restartPolicy, the only allowed value is Always, which is the default.

Pod Selector

The .spec.selector field is a label selector. As discussed earlier these are the labels used to identify potential Pods to acquire. In our frontend.yaml example, the selector was:

matchLabels:
  tier: frontend

In the ReplicaSet, .spec.template.metadata.labels must match spec.selector, or it will be rejected by the API.

Replicas

You can specify how many Pods should run concurrently by setting .spec.replicas. The ReplicaSet will create/delete its Pods to match this number.

If you do not specify .spec.replicas, then it defaults to 1.

Working with ReplicaSets

Deleting a ReplicaSet and its Pods

To delete a ReplicaSet and all of its Pods, use kubectl delete. The Garbage collector automatically deletes all of the dependent Pods by default.

When using the REST API or the client-go library, you must set propagationPolicy to Background or Foreground in the -d option. For example:

kubectl proxy --port=8080
curl -X DELETE  'localhost:8080/apis/apps/v1/namespaces/default/replicasets/frontend' \
> -d '{"kind":"DeleteOptions","apiVersion":"v1","propagationPolicy":"Foreground"}' \
> -H "Content-Type: application/json"

Deleting just a ReplicaSet

You can delete a ReplicaSet without affecting any of its Pods using kubectl delete with the --cascade=orphan option. When using the REST API or the client-go library, you must set propagationPolicy to Orphan. For example:

kubectl proxy --port=8080
curl -X DELETE  'localhost:8080/apis/apps/v1/namespaces/default/replicasets/frontend' \
> -d '{"kind":"DeleteOptions","apiVersion":"v1","propagationPolicy":"Orphan"}' \
> -H "Content-Type: application/json"

Once the original is deleted, you can create a new ReplicaSet to replace it. As long as the old and new .spec.selector are the same, then the new one will adopt the old Pods. However, it will not make any effort to make existing Pods match a new, different pod template. To update Pods to a new spec in a controlled way, use a Deployment, as ReplicaSets do not support a rolling update directly.

Isolating Pods from a ReplicaSet

You can remove Pods from a ReplicaSet by changing their labels. This technique may be used to remove Pods from service for debugging, data recovery, etc. Pods that are removed in this way will be replaced automatically ( assuming that the number of replicas is not also changed).

Scaling a ReplicaSet

A ReplicaSet can be easily scaled up or down by simply updating the .spec.replicas field. The ReplicaSet controller ensures that a desired number of Pods with a matching label selector are available and operational.

When scaling down, the ReplicaSet controller chooses which pods to delete by sorting the available pods to prioritize scaling down pods based on the following general algorithm:

1. Pending (and unschedulable) pods are scaled down first
2. If controller.kubernetes.io/pod-deletion-cost annotation is set, then the pod with the lower value will come first.
3. Pods on nodes with more replicas come before pods on nodes with fewer replicas.
4. If the pods' creation times differ, the pod that was created more recently comes before the older pod (the creation times are bucketed on an integer log scale when the LogarithmicScaleDown feature gate is enabled)

If all of the above match, then selection is random.

Pod deletion cost

Using the controller.kubernetes.io/pod-deletion-cost annotation, users can set a preference regarding which pods to remove first when downscaling a ReplicaSet.

The annotation should be set on the pod, the range is [-2147483647, 2147483647]. It represents the cost of deleting a pod compared to other pods belonging to the same ReplicaSet. Pods with lower deletion cost are preferred to be deleted before pods with higher deletion cost.

The implicit value for this annotation for pods that don't set it is 0; negative values are permitted. Invalid values will be rejected by the API server.

This feature is beta and enabled by default. You can disable it using the feature gate PodDeletionCost in both kube-apiserver and kube-controller-manager.

Example Use Case

The different pods of an application could have different utilization levels. On scale down, the application may prefer to remove the pods with lower utilization. To avoid frequently updating the pods, the application should update controller.kubernetes.io/pod-deletion-cost once before issuing a scale down (setting the annotation to a value proportional to pod utilization level). This works if the application itself controls the down scaling; for example, the driver pod of a Spark deployment.

ReplicaSet as a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler Target

A ReplicaSet can also be a target for Horizontal Pod Autoscalers (HPA). That is, a ReplicaSet can be auto-scaled by an HPA. Here is an example HPA targeting the ReplicaSet we created in the previous example.

controllers/hpa-rs.yaml

apiVersion: autoscaling/v1
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
metadata:
  name: frontend-scaler
spec:
  scaleTargetRef:
    kind: ReplicaSet
    name: frontend
  minReplicas: 3
  maxReplicas: 10
  targetCPUUtilizationPercentage: 50

Saving this manifest into hpa-rs.yaml and submitting it to a Kubernetes cluster should create the defined HPA that autoscales the target ReplicaSet depending on the CPU usage of the replicated Pods.

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/controllers/hpa-rs.yaml

Alternatively, you can use the kubectl autoscale command to accomplish the same (and it's easier!)

kubectl autoscale rs frontend --max=10 --min=3 --cpu-percent=50

Alternatives to ReplicaSet

Deployment (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.

2.3 - StatefulSets

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 their 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 based on the requested storage class, or pre-provisioned by an admin.
• Deleting and/or scaling a StatefulSet down will not delete the volumes associated with the StatefulSet. This is done to ensure data safety, which is generally more valuable than an automatic purge of all related StatefulSet resources.
• StatefulSets currently require a Headless Service to be responsible for the network identity of the Pods. You are responsible for creating this Service.
• StatefulSets do not provide any guarantees on the termination of pods when a StatefulSet is deleted. To achieve ordered and graceful termination of the pods in the StatefulSet, it is possible to scale the StatefulSet down to 0 prior to deletion.
• When using Rolling Updates with the default Pod Management Policy (OrderedReady), it's possible to get into a broken state that requires manual intervention to repair.

Components

The example below demonstrates the components of a StatefulSet.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: nginx
  labels:
    app: nginx
spec:
  ports:
  - port: 80
    name: web
  clusterIP: None
  selector:
    app: nginx
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  name: web
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx # has to match .spec.template.metadata.labels
  serviceName: "nginx"
  replicas: 3 # by default is 1
  minReadySeconds: 10 # by default is 0
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx # has to match .spec.selector.matchLabels
    spec:
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 10
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: registry.k8s.io/nginx-slim:0.8
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
          name: web
        volumeMounts:
        - name: www
          mountPath: /usr/share/nginx/html
  volumeClaimTemplates:
  - metadata:
      name: www
    spec:
      accessModes: [ "ReadWriteOnce" ]
      storageClassName: "my-storage-class"
      resources:
        requests:
          storage: 1Gi

In the above example:

• A Headless Service, named nginx, is used to control the network domain.
• The StatefulSet, named web, has a Spec that indicates that 3 replicas of the nginx container will be launched in unique Pods.
• The volumeClaimTemplates will provide stable storage using PersistentVolumes provisioned by a PersistentVolume Provisioner.

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

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 which can provide stable storage using PersistentVolumes provisioned by a PersistentVolume Provisioner.

Minimum ready seconds

.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 is comprised 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, from 0 up through N-1, that is unique over the Set.

Stable Network ID

Each Pod in a StatefulSet derives its hostname from the name of the StatefulSet and the ordinal of the Pod. The pattern for the constructed hostname is $(statefulset name)-$(ordinal). The example above will create three Pods named web-0,web-1,web-2. A StatefulSet can use a Headless Service to control the domain of its Pods. The domain managed by this Service takes the form: $(service name).$(namespace).svc.cluster.local, where "cluster.local" is the cluster domain. As each Pod is created, it gets a matching DNS subdomain, taking the form: $(podname).$(governing service domain), where the governing service is defined by the serviceName field on the StatefulSet.

Depending on how DNS is configured in your cluster, you may not be able to look up the DNS name for a newly-run Pod immediately. This behavior can occur when other clients in the cluster have already sent queries for the hostname of the Pod before it was created. Negative caching (normal in DNS) means that the results of previous failed lookups are remembered and reused, even after the Pod is running, for at least a few seconds.

If you need to discover Pods promptly after they are created, you have a few options:

• Query the Kubernetes API directly (for example, using a watch) rather than relying on DNS lookups.
• Decrease the time of caching in your Kubernetes DNS provider (typically this means editing the config map for CoreDNS, which currently caches for 30 seconds).

As mentioned in the limitations section, you are responsible for creating the Headless Service responsible for the network identity of the pods.

Here are some examples of choices for Cluster Domain, Service name, StatefulSet name, and how that affects the DNS names for the StatefulSet's Pods.

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.

Deployment and Scaling Guarantees

• For a StatefulSet with N replicas, when Pods are being deployed, they are created sequentially, in order from {0..N-1}.
• When Pods are being deleted, they are terminated in reverse order, from {N-1..0}.
• Before a scaling operation is applied to a Pod, all of its predecessors must be Running and Ready.
• Before a Pod is terminated, all of its successors must be completely shutdown.

The StatefulSet should not specify a pod.Spec.TerminationGracePeriodSeconds of 0. This practice is unsafe and strongly discouraged. For further explanation, please refer to force deleting StatefulSet Pods.

When the nginx example above is created, three Pods will be deployed in the order web-0, web-1, web-2. web-1 will not be deployed before web-0 is Running and Ready, and web-2 will not be deployed until web-1 is Running and Ready. If web-0 should fail, after web-1 is Running and Ready, but before web-2 is launched, web-2 will not be launched until web-0 is successfully relaunched and becomes Running and Ready.

If a user were to scale the deployed example by patching the StatefulSet such that replicas=1, web-2 would be terminated first. web-1 would not be terminated until web-2 is fully shutdown and deleted. If web-0 were to fail after web-2 has been terminated and is completely shutdown, but prior to web-1's termination, web-1 would not be terminated until web-0 is Running and Ready.

Pod Management Policies

StatefulSet allows you to relax its ordering guarantees while preserving its uniqueness and identity guarantees via its .spec.podManagementPolicy field.

OrderedReady Pod Management

OrderedReady pod management is the default for StatefulSets. It implements the behavior described above.

Parallel Pod Management

Parallel pod management tells the StatefulSet controller to launch or terminate all Pods in parallel, and to not wait for Pods to become Running and Ready or completely terminated prior to launching or terminating another Pod. This option only affects the behavior for scaling operations. Updates are not affected.

Update strategies

A StatefulSet's .spec.updateStrategy field allows you to configure and disable automated rolling updates for containers, labels, resource request/limits, and annotations for the Pods in a StatefulSet. There are two possible values:

OnDelete

When a StatefulSet's .spec.updateStrategy.type is set to OnDelete, the StatefulSet controller will not automatically update the Pods in a StatefulSet. Users must manually delete Pods to cause the controller to create new Pods that reflect modifications made to a StatefulSet's .spec.template.

RollingUpdate

The RollingUpdate update strategy implements automated, rolling update for the Pods in a StatefulSet. This is the default update strategy.

Rolling Updates

When a StatefulSet's .spec.updateStrategy.type is set to RollingUpdate, the StatefulSet controller will delete and recreate each Pod in the StatefulSet. It will proceed in the same order as Pod termination (from the largest ordinal to the smallest), updating each Pod one at a time.

The Kubernetes control plane waits until an updated Pod is Running and Ready prior to updating its predecessor. If you have set .spec.minReadySeconds (see Minimum Ready Seconds), the control plane additionally waits that amount of time after the Pod turns ready, before moving on.

Partitioned rolling updates

The RollingUpdate update strategy can be partitioned, by specifying a .spec.updateStrategy.rollingUpdate.partition. If a partition is specified, all Pods with an ordinal that is greater than or equal to the partition will be updated when the StatefulSet's .spec.template is updated. All Pods with an ordinal that is less than the partition will not be updated, and, even if they are deleted, they will be recreated at the previous version. If a StatefulSet's .spec.updateStrategy.rollingUpdate.partition is greater than its .spec.replicas, updates to its .spec.template will not be propagated to its Pods. In most cases you will not need to use a partition, but they are useful if you want to stage an update, roll out a canary, or perform a phased roll out.

Maximum unavailable Pods

You can control the maximum number of Pods that can be unavailable during an update by specifying the .spec.updateStrategy.rollingUpdate.maxUnavailable field. The value can be an absolute number (for example, 5) or a percentage of desired Pods (for example, 10%). Absolute number is calculated from the percentage value by rounding it up. This field cannot be 0. The default setting is 1.

This field applies to all Pods in the range 0 to replicas - 1. If there is any unavailable Pod in the range 0 to replicas - 1, it will be counted towards maxUnavailable.

Forced rollback

When using Rolling Updates with the default Pod Management Policy (OrderedReady), it's possible to get into a broken state that requires manual intervention to repair.

If you update the Pod template to a configuration that never becomes Running and Ready (for example, due to a bad binary or application-level configuration error), StatefulSet will stop the rollout and wait.

In this state, it's not enough to revert the Pod template to a good configuration. Due to a known issue, StatefulSet will continue to wait for the broken Pod to become Ready (which never happens) before it will attempt to revert it back to the working configuration.

After reverting the template, you must also delete any Pods that StatefulSet had already attempted to run with the bad configuration. StatefulSet will then begin to recreate the Pods using the reverted template.

PersistentVolumeClaim retention

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 to use this field. Once enabled, there are two policies you can configure for each StatefulSet:

whenDeleted

configures the volume retention behavior that applies when the StatefulSet is deleted

whenScaled

configures the volume retention behavior that applies when the replica count of the StatefulSet is reduced; for example, when scaling down the set.

For each policy that you can configure, you can set the value to either Delete or Retain.

Delete

The PVCs created from the StatefulSet volumeClaimTemplate are deleted for each Pod affected by the policy. With the whenDeleted policy all PVCs from the volumeClaimTemplate are deleted after their Pods have been deleted. With the whenScaled policy, only PVCs corresponding to Pod replicas being scaled down are deleted, after their Pods have been deleted.

Retain (default)

PVCs from the volumeClaimTemplate are not affected when their Pod is deleted. This is the behavior before this new feature.

Bear in mind that these policies only apply when Pods are being removed due to the StatefulSet being deleted or scaled down. For example, if a Pod associated with a StatefulSet fails due to node failure, and the control plane creates a replacement Pod, the StatefulSet retains the existing PVC. The existing volume is unaffected, and the cluster will attach it to the node where the new Pod is about to launch.

The default for policies is Retain, matching the StatefulSet behavior before this new feature.

Here is an example policy.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
...
spec:
  persistentVolumeClaimRetentionPolicy:
    whenDeleted: Retain
    whenScaled: Delete
...

The StatefulSet controller adds owner references to its PVCs, which are then deleted by the garbage collector after the Pod is terminated. This enables the Pod to cleanly unmount all volumes before the PVCs are deleted (and before the backing PV and volume are deleted, depending on the retain policy). When you set the whenDeleted policy to Delete, an owner reference to the StatefulSet instance is placed on all PVCs associated with that StatefulSet.

The whenScaled policy must delete PVCs only when a Pod is scaled down, and not when a Pod is deleted for another reason. When reconciling, the StatefulSet controller compares its desired replica count to the actual Pods present on the cluster. Any StatefulSet Pod whose id greater than the replica count is condemned and marked for deletion. If the whenScaled policy is Delete, the condemned Pods are first set as owners to the associated StatefulSet template PVCs, before the Pod is deleted. This causes the PVCs to be garbage collected after only the condemned Pods have terminated.

This means that if the controller crashes and restarts, no Pod will be deleted before its owner reference has been updated appropriate to the policy. If a condemned Pod is force-deleted while the controller is down, the owner reference may or may not have been set up, depending on when the controller crashed. It may take several reconcile loops to update the owner references, so some condemned Pods may have set up owner references and other 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.

2.4 - DaemonSet

A DaemonSet ensures that all (or some) Nodes run a copy of a Pod. As nodes are added to the cluster, Pods are added to them. As nodes are removed from the cluster, those Pods are garbage collected. Deleting a DaemonSet will clean up the Pods it created.

Some typical uses of a DaemonSet are:

• running a cluster storage daemon on every node
• running a logs collection daemon on every node
• running a node monitoring daemon on every node

In a simple case, one DaemonSet, covering all nodes, would be used for each type of daemon. A more complex setup might use multiple DaemonSets for a single type of daemon, but with different flags and/or different memory and cpu requests for different hardware types.

Writing a DaemonSet Spec

Create a DaemonSet

You can describe a DaemonSet in a YAML file. For example, the daemonset.yaml file below describes a DaemonSet that runs the fluentd-elasticsearch Docker image:

controllers/daemonset.yaml

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: DaemonSet
metadata:
  name: fluentd-elasticsearch
  namespace: kube-system
  labels:
    k8s-app: fluentd-logging
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      name: fluentd-elasticsearch
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        name: fluentd-elasticsearch
    spec:
      tolerations:
      # these tolerations are to have the daemonset runnable on control plane nodes
      # remove them if your control plane nodes should not run pods
      - key: node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane
        operator: Exists
        effect: NoSchedule
      - key: node-role.kubernetes.io/master
        operator: Exists
        effect: NoSchedule
      containers:
      - name: fluentd-elasticsearch
        image: quay.io/fluentd_elasticsearch/fluentd:v2.5.2
        resources:
          limits:
            memory: 200Mi
          requests:
            cpu: 100m
            memory: 200Mi
        volumeMounts:
        - name: varlog
          mountPath: /var/log
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30
      volumes:
      - name: varlog
        hostPath:
          path: /var/log

Create a DaemonSet based on the YAML file:

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/controllers/daemonset.yaml

Required Fields

As with all other Kubernetes config, a DaemonSet needs apiVersion, kind, and metadata fields. For general information about working with config files, see running stateless applications and object management using kubectl.

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

A DaemonSet also needs a .spec section.

Pod Template

The .spec.template is one of the required fields in .spec.

The .spec.template is a pod template. It has exactly the same schema as a Pod, except it is nested and does not have an apiVersion or kind.

In addition to required fields for a Pod, a Pod template in a DaemonSet has to specify appropriate labels (see pod selector).

A Pod Template in a DaemonSet must have a RestartPolicy equal to Always, or be unspecified, which defaults to Always.

Pod Selector

The .spec.selector field is a pod selector. It works the same as the .spec.selector of a Job.

You must specify a pod selector that matches the labels of the .spec.template. Also, once a DaemonSet is created, its .spec.selector can not be mutated. Mutating the pod selector can lead to the unintentional orphaning of Pods, and it was found to be confusing to users.

The .spec.selector is an object consisting of two fields:

• matchLabels - works the same as the .spec.selector of a ReplicationController.
• matchExpressions - allows to build more sophisticated selectors by specifying key, list of values and an operator that relates the key and values.

When the two are specified the result is ANDed.

The .spec.selector must match the .spec.template.metadata.labels. Config with these two not matching will be rejected by the API.

Running Pods on select Nodes

If you specify a .spec.template.spec.nodeSelector, then the DaemonSet controller will create Pods on nodes which match that node selector. Likewise if you specify a .spec.template.spec.affinity, then DaemonSet controller will create Pods on nodes which match that node affinity. If you do not specify either, then the DaemonSet controller will create Pods on all nodes.

How Daemon Pods are scheduled

Scheduled by default scheduler

A DaemonSet ensures that all eligible nodes run a copy of a Pod. Normally, the node that a Pod runs on is selected by the Kubernetes scheduler. However, DaemonSet pods are created and scheduled by the DaemonSet controller instead. That introduces the following issues:

• Inconsistent Pod behavior: Normal Pods waiting to be scheduled are created and in Pending state, but DaemonSet pods are not created in Pending state. This is confusing to the user.
• Pod preemption is handled by default scheduler. When preemption is enabled, the DaemonSet controller will make scheduling decisions without considering pod priority and preemption.

ScheduleDaemonSetPods allows you to schedule DaemonSets using the default scheduler instead of the DaemonSet controller, by adding the NodeAffinity term to the DaemonSet pods, instead of the .spec.nodeName term. The default scheduler is then used to bind the pod to the target host. If node affinity of the DaemonSet pod already exists, it is replaced (the original node affinity was taken into account before selecting the target host). The DaemonSet controller only performs these operations when creating or modifying DaemonSet pods, and no changes are made to the spec.template of the DaemonSet.

nodeAffinity:
  requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
    nodeSelectorTerms:
    - matchFields:
      - key: metadata.name
        operator: In
        values:
        - target-host-name

In addition, node.kubernetes.io/unschedulable:NoSchedule toleration is added automatically to DaemonSet Pods. The default scheduler ignores unschedulable Nodes when scheduling DaemonSet Pods.

Taints and Tolerations

Although Daemon Pods respect taints and tolerations, the following tolerations are added to DaemonSet Pods automatically according to the related features.

Communicating with Daemon Pods

Some possible patterns for communicating with Pods in a DaemonSet are:

• Push: Pods in the DaemonSet are configured to send updates to another service, such as a stats database. They do not have clients.
• NodeIP and Known Port: Pods in the DaemonSet can use a hostPort, so that the pods are reachable via the node IPs. Clients know the list of node IPs somehow, and know the port by convention.
• DNS: Create a headless service with the same pod selector, and then discover DaemonSets using the endpoints resource or retrieve multiple A records from DNS.
• Service: Create a service with the same Pod selector, and use the service to reach a daemon on a random node. (No way to reach specific node.)

Updating a DaemonSet

If node labels are changed, the DaemonSet will promptly add Pods to newly matching nodes and delete Pods from newly not-matching nodes.

You can modify the Pods that a DaemonSet creates. However, Pods do not allow all fields to be updated. Also, the DaemonSet controller will use the original template the next time a node (even with the same name) is created.

You can delete a DaemonSet. If you specify --cascade=orphan with kubectl, then the Pods will be left on the nodes. If you subsequently create a new DaemonSet with the same selector, the new DaemonSet adopts the existing Pods. If any Pods need replacing the DaemonSet replaces them according to its updateStrategy.

You can perform a rolling update on a DaemonSet.

Alternatives to DaemonSet

Init scripts

It is certainly possible to run daemon processes by directly starting them on a node (e.g. using init, upstartd, or systemd). This is perfectly fine. However, there are several advantages to running such processes via a DaemonSet:

• Ability to monitor and manage logs for daemons in the same way as applications.
• Same config language and tools (e.g. Pod templates, kubectl) for daemons and applications.
• Running daemons in containers with resource limits increases isolation between daemons from app containers. However, this can also be accomplished by running the daemons in a container but not in a Pod.

Bare Pods

It is possible to create Pods directly which specify a particular node to run on. However, a DaemonSet replaces Pods that are deleted or terminated for any reason, such as in the case of node failure or disruptive node maintenance, such as a kernel upgrade. For this reason, you should use a DaemonSet rather than creating individual Pods.

Static Pods

It is possible to create Pods by writing a file to a certain directory watched by Kubelet. These are called static pods. Unlike DaemonSet, static Pods cannot be managed with kubectl or other Kubernetes API clients. Static Pods do not depend on the apiserver, making them useful in cluster bootstrapping cases. Also, static Pods may be deprecated in the future.

Deployments

DaemonSets are similar to Deployments in that they both create Pods, and those Pods have processes which are not expected to terminate (e.g. web servers, storage servers).

Use a Deployment for stateless services, like frontends, where scaling up and down the number of replicas and rolling out updates are more important than controlling exactly which host the Pod runs on. Use a DaemonSet when it is important that a copy of a Pod always run on all or certain hosts, if the DaemonSet provides node-level functionality that allows other Pods to run correctly on that particular node.

For example, network plugins often include a component that runs as a DaemonSet. The DaemonSet component makes sure that the node where it's running has working cluster networking.

What's next

• 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.

2.5 - Jobs

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

Name:           pi
Namespace:      default
Selector:       controller-uid=c9948307-e56d-4b5d-8302-ae2d7b7da67c
Labels:         controller-uid=c9948307-e56d-4b5d-8302-ae2d7b7da67c
                job-name=pi
Annotations:    kubectl.kubernetes.io/last-applied-configuration:
                  {"apiVersion":"batch/v1","kind":"Job","metadata":{"annotations":{},"name":"pi","namespace":"default"},"spec":{"backoffLimit":4,"template":...
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:  controller-uid=c9948307-e56d-4b5d-8302-ae2d7b7da67c
           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  14m   job-controller  Created pod: pi-5rwd7

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  annotations:
    kubectl.kubernetes.io/last-applied-configuration: |
      {"apiVersion":"batch/v1","kind":"Job","metadata":{"annotations":{},"name":"pi","namespace":"default"},"spec":{"backoffLimit":4,"template":{"spec":{"containers":[{"command":["perl","-Mbignum=bpi","-wle","print bpi(2000)"],"image":"perl","name":"pi"}],"restartPolicy":"Never"}}}}
  creationTimestamp: "2022-06-15T08:40:15Z"
  generation: 1
  labels:
    controller-uid: 863452e6-270d-420e-9b94-53a54146c223
    job-name: pi
  name: pi
  namespace: default
  resourceVersion: "987"
  uid: 863452e6-270d-420e-9b94-53a54146c223
spec:
  backoffLimit: 4
  completionMode: NonIndexed
  completions: 1
  parallelism: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      controller-uid: 863452e6-270d-420e-9b94-53a54146c223
  suspend: false
  template:
    metadata:
      creationTimestamp: null
      labels:
        controller-uid: 863452e6-270d-420e-9b94-53a54146c223
        job-name: pi
    spec:
      containers:
      - command:
        - perl
        - -Mbignum=bpi
        - -wle
        - print bpi(2000)
        image: perl:5.34.0
        imagePullPolicy: Always
        name: pi
        resources: {}
        terminationMessagePath: /dev/termination-log
        terminationMessagePolicy: File
      dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst
      restartPolicy: Never
      schedulerName: default-scheduler
      securityContext: {}
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30
status:
  active: 1
  ready: 1
  startTime: "2022-06-15T08:40:15Z"

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=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

The output is similar to this:

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491412737245870066063155881748815209209628292540917153643678925903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094330572703657595919530921861173819326117931051185480744623799627495673518857527248912279381830119491298336733624406566430860213949463952247371907021798609437027705392171762931767523846748184676694051320005681271452635608277857713427577896091736371787214684409012249534301465495853710507922796892589235420199561121290219608640344181598136297747713099605187072113499999983729780499510597317328160963185950244594553469083026425223082533446850352619311881710100031378387528865875332083814206171776691473035982534904287554687311595628638823537875937519577818577805321712268066130019278766111959092164201989380952572010654858632788659361533818279682303019520353018529689957736225994138912497217752834791315155748572424541506959508295331168617278558890750983817546374649393192550604009277016711390098488240128583616035637076601047101819429555961989467678374494482553797747268471040475346462080466842590694912933136770289891521047521620569660240580381501935112533824300355876402474964732639141992726042699227967823547816360093417216412199245863150302861829745557067498385054945885869269956909272107975093029553211653449872027559602364806654991198818347977535663698074265425278625518184175746728909777727938000816470600161452491921732172147723501414419735685481613611573525521334757418494684385233239073941433345477624168625189835694855620992192221842725502542568876717904946016534668049886272327917860857843838279679766814541009538837863609506800642251252051173929848960841284886269456042419652850222106611863067442786220391949450471237137869609563643719172874677646575739624138908658326459958133904780275901

Writing a Job spec

As with all other Kubernetes config, a Job needs apiVersion, kind, and metadata fields. Its name must be a valid DNS subdomain name.

A Job 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 Job must specify appropriate labels (see pod selector) and an appropriate restart policy.

Only a RestartPolicy equal to Never or OnFailure is allowed.

Pod selector

The .spec.selector field is optional. In almost all cases you should not specify it. See section specifying your own pod selector.

Parallel execution for Jobs

There are three main types of task suitable to run as a Job:

1. Non-parallel Jobs
   • normally, only one Pod is started, unless the Pod fails.
   • the Job is complete as soon as its Pod terminates successfully.
2. Parallel Jobs with a fixed completion count:
   • specify a non-zero positive value for .spec.completions.
   • the Job represents the overall task, and is complete when there are .spec.completions successful Pods.
   • when using .spec.completionMode="Indexed", each Pod gets a different index in the range 0 to .spec.completions-1.
3. Parallel Jobs with a work queue:
   • do not specify .spec.completions, default to .spec.parallelism.
   • the Pods must coordinate amongst themselves or an external service to determine what each should work on. For example, a Pod might fetch a batch of up to N items from the work queue.
   • each Pod is independently capable of determining whether or not all its peers are done, and thus that the entire Job is done.
   • when any Pod from the Job terminates with success, no new Pods are created.
   • once at least one Pod has terminated with success and all Pods are terminated, then the Job is completed with success.
   • once any Pod has exited with success, no other Pod should still be doing any work for this task or writing any output. They should all be in the process of exiting.

For a non-parallel Job, you can leave both .spec.completions and .spec.parallelism unset. When both are unset, both are defaulted to 1.

For a fixed completion count Job, you should set .spec.completions to the number of completions needed. You can set .spec.parallelism, or leave it unset and it will default to 1.

For a work queue Job, you must leave .spec.completions unset, and set .spec.parallelism to a non-negative integer.

For more information about how to make use of the different types of job, see the job patterns section.

Controlling parallelism

The requested parallelism (.spec.parallelism) can be set to any non-negative value. If it is unspecified, it defaults to 1. If it is specified as 0, then the Job is effectively paused until it is increased.

Actual parallelism (number of pods running at any instant) may be more or less than requested parallelism, for a variety of reasons:

• For fixed completion count Jobs, the actual number of pods running in parallel will not exceed the number of remaining completions. Higher values of .spec.parallelism are effectively ignored.
• For work queue Jobs, no new Pods are started after any Pod has succeeded -- remaining Pods are allowed to complete, however.
• If the Job Controller has not had time to react.
• If the Job controller failed to create Pods for any reason (lack of ResourceQuota, lack of permission, etc.), then there may be fewer pods than requested.
• The Job controller may throttle new Pod creation due to excessive previous pod failures in the same Job.
• When a Pod is gracefully shut down, it takes time to stop.

Completion mode

Jobs with fixed completion count - that is, jobs that have non null .spec.completions - can have a completion mode that is specified in .spec.completionMode:

• NonIndexed (default): the Job is considered complete when there have been .spec.completions successfully completed Pods. In other words, each Pod completion is homologous to each other. Note that Jobs that have null .spec.completions are implicitly NonIndexed.

• Indexed: the Pods of a Job get an associated completion index from 0 to .spec.completions-1. The index is available through three mechanisms:

  • The Pod annotation batch.kubernetes.io/job-completion-index.
  • 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.
  • 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 that, although rare, more than one Pod could be started for the same index, but only one of them will count towards the completion count.

Handling Pod and container failures

A container in a Pod may fail for a number of reasons, such as because the process in it exited with a non-zero exit code, or the container was killed for exceeding a memory limit, etc. If this happens, and the .spec.template.spec.restartPolicy = "OnFailure", then the Pod stays on the node, but the container is re-run. Therefore, your program needs to handle the case when it is restarted locally, or else specify .spec.template.spec.restartPolicy = "Never". See pod lifecycle for more information on restartPolicy.

An entire Pod can also fail, for a number of reasons, such as when the pod is kicked off the node (node is upgraded, rebooted, deleted, etc.), or if a container of the Pod fails and the .spec.template.spec.restartPolicy = "Never". When a Pod fails, then the Job controller starts a new Pod. This means that your application needs to handle the case when it is restarted in a new pod. In particular, it needs to handle temporary files, locks, incomplete output and the like caused by previous runs.

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.

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.

When the JobTrackingWithFinalizers feature is disabled, the number of failed Pods is only based on Pods that are still present in the API.

Job termination and cleanup

When a Job completes, no more Pods are created, but the Pods are usually not deleted either. Keeping them around allows you to still view the logs of completed pods to check for errors, warnings, or other diagnostic output. The job object also remains after it is completed so that you can view its status. It is up to the user to delete old jobs after noting their status. Delete the job with kubectl (e.g. kubectl delete jobs/pi or kubectl delete -f ./job.yaml). When you delete the job using kubectl, all the pods it created are deleted too.

By default, a Job will run uninterrupted unless a Pod fails (restartPolicy=Never) or a Container exits in error (restartPolicy=OnFailure), at which point the Job defers to the .spec.backoffLimit described above. Once .spec.backoffLimit has been reached the Job will be marked as failed and any running Pods will be terminated.

Another way to terminate a Job is by setting an active deadline. Do this by setting the .spec.activeDeadlineSeconds field of the Job to a number of seconds. The activeDeadlineSeconds applies to the duration of the job, no matter how many Pods are created. Once a Job reaches activeDeadlineSeconds, all of its running Pods are terminated and the Job status will become type: Failed with reason: DeadlineExceeded.

Note that a Job's .spec.activeDeadlineSeconds takes precedence over its .spec.backoffLimit. Therefore, a Job that is retrying one or more failed Pods will not deploy additional Pods once it reaches the time limit specified by activeDeadlineSeconds, even if the backoffLimit is not yet reached.

Example:

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: pi-with-timeout
spec:
  backoffLimit: 5
  activeDeadlineSeconds: 100
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: pi
        image: perl:5.34.0
        command: ["perl",  "-Mbignum=bpi", "-wle", "print bpi(2000)"]
      restartPolicy: Never

Note that both the Job spec and the Pod template spec within the Job have an activeDeadlineSeconds field. Ensure that you set this field at the proper level.

Keep in mind that the restartPolicy applies to the Pod, and not to the Job itself: there is no automatic Job restart once the Job status is type: Failed. That is, the Job termination mechanisms activated with .spec.activeDeadlineSeconds and .spec.backoffLimit result in a permanent Job failure that requires manual intervention to resolve.

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

Another way to clean up finished Jobs (either Complete or Failed) automatically is to use a TTL mechanism provided by a TTL controller for finished resources, by specifying the .spec.ttlSecondsAfterFinished field of the Job.

When the TTL controller cleans up the Job, it will delete the Job cascadingly, i.e. delete its dependent objects, such as Pods, together with the Job. Note that when the Job is deleted, its lifecycle guarantees, such as finalizers, will be honored.

For example:

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: pi-with-ttl
spec:
  ttlSecondsAfterFinished: 100
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: pi
        image: perl:5.34.0
        command: ["perl",  "-Mbignum=bpi", "-wle", "print bpi(2000)"]
      restartPolicy: Never

The Job pi-with-ttl will be eligible to be automatically deleted, 100 seconds after it finishes.

If the field is set to 0, the Job will be eligible to be automatically deleted immediately after it finishes. If the field is unset, this Job won't be cleaned up by the TTL controller after it finishes.

Job patterns

The Job object can be used to support reliable parallel execution of Pods. The Job object is not designed to support closely-communicating parallel processes, as commonly found in scientific computing. It does support parallel processing of 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, vs. a single Job object for all work items. The latter is better for large numbers of work items. The former creates some overhead for the user and for the system to manage large numbers of Job objects.
• Number of pods created equals number of work items, vs. each Pod can process multiple work items. The former typically requires less modification to existing code and containers. The latter is better for large numbers of work items, for similar reasons to the previous bullet.
• 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.

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.

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.

Advanced usage

Suspending a Job

When a Job is created, the Job controller will immediately begin creating Pods to satisfy the Job's requirements and will continue to do so until the Job is complete. However, you may want to temporarily suspend a Job's execution and resume it later, or start Jobs in suspended state and have a custom controller decide later when to start them.

To suspend a Job, you can update the .spec.suspend field of the Job to true; later, when you want to resume it again, update it to false. Creating a Job with .spec.suspend set to true will create it in the suspended state.

When a Job is resumed from suspension, its .status.startTime field will be reset to the current time. This means that the .spec.activeDeadlineSeconds timer will be stopped and reset when a Job is suspended and resumed.

When you suspend a Job, any running Pods that don't have a status of Completed will be terminated. with a SIGTERM signal. The Pod's graceful termination period will be honored and your Pod must handle this signal in this period. This may involve saving progress for later or undoing changes. Pods terminated this way will not count towards the Job's completions count.

An example Job definition in the suspended state can be like so:

kubectl get job myjob -o yaml

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: myjob
spec:
  suspend: true
  parallelism: 1
  completions: 5
  template:
    spec:
      ...

You can also toggle Job suspension by patching the Job using the command line.

Suspend an active Job:

kubectl patch job/myjob --type=strategic --patch '{"spec":{"suspend":true}}'

Resume a suspended Job:

kubectl patch job/myjob --type=strategic --patch '{"spec":{"suspend":false}}'

The Job's status can be used to determine if a Job is suspended or has been suspended in the past:

kubectl get jobs/myjob -o yaml

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
# .metadata and .spec omitted
status:
  conditions:
  - lastProbeTime: "2021-02-05T13:14:33Z"
    lastTransitionTime: "2021-02-05T13:14:33Z"
    status: "True"
    type: Suspended
  startTime: "2021-02-05T13:13:48Z"

The Job condition of type "Suspended" with status "True" means the Job is suspended; the lastTransitionTime field can be used to determine how long the Job has been suspended for. If the status of that condition is "False", then the Job was previously suspended and is now running. If such a condition does not exist in the Job's status, the Job has never been stopped.

Events are also created when the Job is suspended and resumed:

kubectl describe jobs/myjob

Name:           myjob
...
Events:
  Type    Reason            Age   From            Message
  ----    ------            ----  ----            -------
  Normal  SuccessfulCreate  12m   job-controller  Created pod: myjob-hlrpl
  Normal  SuccessfulDelete  11m   job-controller  Deleted pod: myjob-hlrpl
  Normal  Suspended         11m   job-controller  Job suspended
  Normal  SuccessfulCreate  3s    job-controller  Created pod: myjob-jvb44
  Normal  Resumed           3s    job-controller  Job resumed

The last four events, particularly the "Suspended" and "Resumed" events, are directly a result of toggling the .spec.suspend field. In the time between these two events, we see that no Pods were created, but Pod creation restarted as soon as the Job was resumed.

Mutable Scheduling Directives

In most cases a parallel job will want the pods to run with constraints, like all in the same zone, or all either on GPU model x or y but not a mix of both.

The suspend field is the first step towards achieving those semantics. Suspend allows a custom queue controller to decide when a job should start; However, once a job is unsuspended, a custom queue controller has no influence on where the pods of a job will actually land.

This feature allows updating a Job's scheduling directives before it starts, which gives custom queue controllers the ability to influence pod placement while at the same time offloading actual pod-to-node assignment to kube-scheduler. This is allowed only for suspended Jobs that have never been unsuspended before.

The fields in a Job's pod template that can be updated are node affinity, node selector, tolerations, labels and annotations.

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:
      controller-uid: a8f3d00d-c6d2-11e5-9f87-42010af00002
  ...

Then you create a new Job with name new and you explicitly specify the same selector. Since the existing Pods have label 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:
      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.

Pod failure policy

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 preemption, API-initiated eviction or taint-based eviction) so that they don't count towards the .spec.backoffLimit limit of retries.

You can configure a Pod failure policy, in the .spec.podFailurePolicy field, to meet the above use cases. This policy can handle Pod failures based on the container exit codes and the Pod conditions.

Here is a manifest for a Job that defines a podFailurePolicy:

/controllers/job-pod-failure-policy-example.yaml

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: job-pod-failure-policy-example
spec:
  completions: 12
  parallelism: 3
  template:
    spec:
      restartPolicy: Never
      containers:
      - name: main
        image: docker.io/library/bash:5
        command: ["bash"]        # example command simulating a bug which triggers the FailJob action
        args:
        - -c
        - echo "Hello world!" && sleep 5 && exit 42
  backoffLimit: 6
  podFailurePolicy:
    rules:
    - action: FailJob
      onExitCodes:
        containerName: main      # optional
        operator: In             # one of: In, NotIn
        values: [42]
    - action: Ignore             # one of: Ignore, FailJob, Count
      onPodConditions:
      - type: DisruptionTarget   # indicates Pod disruption

In the example above, the first rule of the Pod failure policy specifies that the Job should be marked failed if the main container fails with the 42 exit code. The following are the rules for the main container specifically:

• an exit code of 0 means that the container succeeded
• an exit code of 42 means that the entire Job failed
• any other exit code represents that the container failed, and hence the entire Pod. The Pod will be re-created if the total number of restarts is below backoffLimit. If the backoffLimit is reached the entire Job failed.

The second rule of the Pod failure policy, specifying the Ignore action for failed Pods with condition DisruptionTarget excludes Pod disruptions from being counted towards the .spec.backoffLimit limit of retries.

These are some requirements and semantics of the API:

• if you want to use a .spec.podFailurePolicy field for a Job, you must also define that Job's pod template with .spec.restartPolicy set to Never.
• the Pod failure policy rules you specify under spec.podFailurePolicy.rules are evaluated in order. Once a rule matches a Pod failure, the remaining rules are ignored. When no rule matches the Pod failure, the default handling applies.
• you may want to restrict a rule to a specific container by specifing its name inspec.podFailurePolicy.rules[*].containerName. When not specified the rule applies to all containers. When specified, it should match one the container or initContainer names in the Pod template.
• you may specify the action taken when a Pod failure policy is matched by spec.podFailurePolicy.rules[*].action. Possible values are:
  • FailJob: use to indicate that the Pod's job should be marked as Failed and all running Pods should be terminated.
  • Ignore: use to indicate that the counter towards the .spec.backoffLimit should not be incremented and a replacement Pod should be created.
  • Count: use to indicate that the Pod should be handled in the default way. The counter towards the .spec.backoffLimit should be incremented.

Job tracking with finalizers

When this feature isn't enabled, the Job Controller relies on counting the Pods that exist in the cluster to track the Job status, that is, to keep the counters for succeeded and failed Pods. However, Pods can be removed for a number of reasons, including:

• The garbage collector that removes orphan Pods when a Node goes down.
• The garbage collector that removes finished Pods (in Succeeded or Failed phase) after a threshold.
• Human intervention to delete Pods belonging to a Job.
• An external controller (not provided as part of Kubernetes) that removes or replaces Pods.

If you enable the JobTrackingWithFinalizers feature for your cluster, 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.

The Job controller uses the new algorithm for new Jobs only. Jobs created before the feature is enabled are unaffected. You can determine if the Job controller is tracking a Job using Pod finalizers by checking if the Job has the annotation batch.kubernetes.io/job-tracking. You should not manually add or remove this annotation from Jobs.

Alternatives

Bare Pods

When the node that a Pod is running on reboots or fails, the pod is terminated and will not be restarted. However, a Job will create new Pods to replace terminated ones. For this reason, we recommend that you use a Job rather than a bare Pod, even if your application requires only a single Pod.

Replication Controller

Jobs are complementary to Replication Controllers. A Replication Controller manages Pods which are not expected to terminate (e.g. web servers), and a Job manages Pods that are expected to terminate (e.g. batch tasks).

As discussed in Pod Lifecycle, Job is only appropriate for pods with RestartPolicy equal to OnFailure or Never. (Note: If RestartPolicy is not set, the default value is Always.)

Single Job starts controller Pod

Another pattern is for a single Job to create a Pod which then creates other Pods, acting as a sort of custom controller for those Pods. This allows the most flexibility, but may be somewhat complicated to get started with and offers less integration with Kubernetes.

One example of this pattern would be a Job which starts a Pod which runs a script that in turn starts a Spark master controller (see spark example), runs a spark driver, and then cleans up.

An advantage of this approach is that the overall process gets the completion guarantee of a Job object, but maintains complete control over what Pods are created and how work is assigned to them.

What's next

• 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.

2.6 - Automatic Clean-up for Finished Jobs

TTL-after-finished controller provides a TTL (time to live) mechanism to limit the lifetime of resource objects that have finished execution. TTL controller only handles Jobs.

TTL-after-finished Controller

The TTL-after-finished controller is only supported for Jobs. A cluster operator can use this feature 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 will assume that a job is eligible to be cleaned up TTL seconds after the job has finished, in other words, when the TTL has expired. 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. Note that when the job is deleted, its lifecycle guarantees, such as finalizers, will be honored.

The TTL seconds can be set 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.
• Set this field of existing, already finished jobs, to adopt this new feature.
• 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, etc.

Caveat

Updating TTL Seconds

Note that the TTL period, e.g. .spec.ttlSecondsAfterFinished field of Jobs, can be modified after the job is created or has finished. However, once the Job becomes eligible to be deleted (when the TTL has expired), the system won't guarantee that the Jobs will be kept, even if an update to extend the TTL returns a successful API response.

Time Skew

Because 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 the cluster, which may cause TTL-after-finish controller 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

• Clean up Jobs automatically

• Design doc

2.7 - CronJob

A CronJob creates Jobs on a repeating schedule.

One CronJob object is like one line of a crontab (cron table) file. It runs a job periodically on a given schedule, written in Cron format.

When creating the manifest for a CronJob resource, make sure the name you provide is a valid DNS subdomain name. The name must be no longer than 52 characters. This is because the CronJob controller will automatically append 11 characters to the job name provided and there is a constraint that the maximum length of a Job name is no more than 63 characters.

CronJob

CronJobs are meant for performing regular scheduled actions such as backups, report generation, and so on. Each of those tasks should be configured to recur indefinitely (for example: once a day / week / month); you can define the point in time within that interval when the job should start.

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).

Cron schedule syntax

# ┌───────────── minute (0 - 59)
# │ ┌───────────── hour (0 - 23)
# │ │ ┌───────────── day of the month (1 - 31)
# │ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 - 12)
# │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of the week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday;
# │ │ │ │ │                                   7 is also Sunday on some systems)
# │ │ │ │ │                                   OR sun, mon, tue, wed, thu, fri, sat
# │ │ │ │ │
# * * * * *

For example, the line below states that the task must be started every Friday at midnight, as well as on the 13th of each month at midnight:

0 0 13 * 5

To generate CronJob schedule expressions, you can also use web tools like crontab.guru.

Time zones

For CronJobs with no time zone specified, the kube-controller-manager interprets schedules relative to its local time zone.

If you enable the CronJobTimeZone feature gate, you can specify a time zone for a CronJob (if you don't enable that feature gate, or if you are using a version of Kubernetes that does not have experimental time zone support, all CronJobs in your cluster have an unspecified timezone).

When you have the feature enabled, you can set spec.timeZone to the name of a valid time zone name. 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

A cron job creates a job object about once per execution time of its schedule. We say "about" because there are certain circumstances where two jobs might be created, or no job might be created. We attempt to make these rare, but do not completely prevent them. Therefore, jobs should be idempotent.

If startingDeadlineSeconds is set to a large value or left unset (the default) and if concurrencyPolicy is set to Allow, the jobs will always run at least once.

For every CronJob, the CronJob Controller checks how many schedules it missed in the duration from its last scheduled time until now. If there are more than 100 missed schedules, then it does not start the job and logs the error

Cannot determine if job needs to be started. Too many missed start time (> 100). Set or decrease .spec.startingDeadlineSeconds or check clock skew.

It is important to note that if the startingDeadlineSeconds field is set (not nil), the controller counts how many missed jobs occurred from the value of startingDeadlineSeconds until now rather than from the last scheduled time until now. For example, if startingDeadlineSeconds is 200, the controller counts how many missed jobs occurred in the last 200 seconds.

A CronJob is counted as missed if it has failed to be created at its scheduled time. For example, If concurrencyPolicy is set to Forbid and a CronJob was attempted to be scheduled when there was a previous schedule still running, then it would count as missed.

For example, suppose a CronJob is set to schedule a new Job every one minute beginning at 08:30:00, and its startingDeadlineSeconds field is not set. If the CronJob controller happens to be down from 08:29:00 to 10:21:00, the job will not start as the number of missed jobs which missed their schedule is greater than 100.

To illustrate this concept further, suppose a CronJob is set to schedule a new Job every one minute beginning at 08:30:00, and its startingDeadlineSeconds is set to 200 seconds. If the CronJob controller happens to be down for the same period as the previous example (08:29:00 to 10:21:00,) the Job will still start at 10:22:00. This happens as the controller now checks how many missed schedules happened in the last 200 seconds (ie, 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.

Controller version

Starting with Kubernetes v1.21 the second version of the CronJob controller is the default implementation. To disable the default CronJob controller and use the original CronJob controller instead, one pass the CronJobControllerV2 feature gate flag to the kube-controller-manager, and set this flag to false. For example:

--feature-gates="CronJobControllerV2=false"

What's next

• Learn about Pods and Jobs, two concepts that CronJobs rely upon.
• Read about the 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.
• For instructions to clean up failed or completed jobs automatically, see Clean up Jobs automatically
• CronJob is part of the Kubernetes REST API. Read the CronJob object definition to understand the API for Kubernetes cron jobs.

2.8 - ReplicationController

A ReplicationController ensures that a specified number of pod replicas are running at any one time. In other words, a ReplicationController makes sure that a pod or a homogeneous set of pods is always up and available.

How a ReplicationController Works

If there are too many pods, the ReplicationController terminates the extra pods. If there are too few, the ReplicationController starts more pods. Unlike manually created pods, the pods maintained by a ReplicationController are automatically replaced if they fail, are deleted, or are terminated. For example, your pods are re-created on a node after disruptive maintenance such as a kernel upgrade. For this reason, you should use a ReplicationController even if your application requires only a single pod. A ReplicationController is similar to a process supervisor, but instead of supervising individual processes on a single node, the ReplicationController supervises multiple pods across multiple nodes.

ReplicationController is often abbreviated to "rc" in discussion, and as a shortcut in kubectl commands.

A simple case is to create one ReplicationController object to reliably run one instance of a Pod indefinitely. A more complex use case is to run several identical replicas of a replicated service, such as web servers.

Running an example ReplicationController

This example ReplicationController config runs three copies of the nginx web server.

controllers/replication.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: ReplicationController
metadata:
  name: nginx
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    app: nginx
  template:
    metadata:
      name: nginx
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: nginx
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80

Run the example job by downloading the example file and then running this command:

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/controllers/replication.yaml

The output is similar to this:

replicationcontroller/nginx created

Check on the status of the ReplicationController using this command:

kubectl describe replicationcontrollers/nginx

The output is similar to this:

Name:        nginx
Namespace:   default
Selector:    app=nginx
Labels:      app=nginx
Annotations:    <none>
Replicas:    3 current / 3 desired
Pods Status: 0 Running / 3 Waiting / 0 Succeeded / 0 Failed
Pod Template:
  Labels:       app=nginx
  Containers:
   nginx:
    Image:              nginx
    Port:               80/TCP
    Environment:        <none>
    Mounts:             <none>
  Volumes:              <none>
Events:
  FirstSeen       LastSeen     Count    From                        SubobjectPath    Type      Reason              Message
  ---------       --------     -----    ----                        -------------    ----      ------              -------
  20s             20s          1        {replication-controller }                    Normal    SuccessfulCreate    Created pod: nginx-qrm3m
  20s             20s          1        {replication-controller }                    Normal    SuccessfulCreate    Created pod: nginx-3ntk0
  20s             20s          1        {replication-controller }                    Normal    SuccessfulCreate    Created pod: nginx-4ok8v

Here, three pods are created, but none is running yet, perhaps because the image is being pulled. A little later, the same command may show:

Pods Status:    3 Running / 0 Waiting / 0 Succeeded / 0 Failed

To list all the pods that belong to the ReplicationController in a machine readable form, you can use a command like this:

pods=$(kubectl get pods --selector=app=nginx --output=jsonpath={.items..metadata.name})
echo $pods

The output is similar to this:

nginx-3ntk0 nginx-4ok8v nginx-qrm3m

Here, the selector is the same as the selector for the ReplicationController (seen in the kubectl describe output), and in a different form in replication.yaml. The --output=jsonpath option specifies an expression with the name from each pod in the returned list.

Writing a ReplicationController Spec

As with all other Kubernetes config, a ReplicationController needs apiVersion, kind, and metadata fields. The name of a ReplicationController object must be a valid DNS subdomain name. For general information about working with configuration files, see object management.

A ReplicationController also needs a .spec section.

Pod Template

The .spec.template is the only required field of the .spec.

The .spec.template is a pod template. It has exactly the same schema as a Pod, except it is nested and does not have an apiVersion or kind.

In addition to required fields for a Pod, a pod template in a ReplicationController must specify appropriate labels and an appropriate restart policy. For labels, make sure not to overlap with other controllers. See pod selector.

Only a .spec.template.spec.restartPolicy equal to Always is allowed, which is the default if not specified.

For local container restarts, ReplicationControllers delegate to an agent on the node, for example the Kubelet.

Labels on the ReplicationController

The ReplicationController can itself have labels (.metadata.labels). Typically, you would set these the same as the .spec.template.metadata.labels; if .metadata.labels is not specified then it defaults to .spec.template.metadata.labels. However, they are allowed to be different, and the .metadata.labels do not affect the behavior of the ReplicationController.

Pod Selector

The .spec.selector field is a label selector. A ReplicationController manages all the pods with labels that match the selector. It does not distinguish between pods that it created or deleted and pods that another person or process created or deleted. This allows the ReplicationController to be replaced without affecting the running pods.

If specified, the .spec.template.metadata.labels must be equal to the .spec.selector, or it will be rejected by the API. If .spec.selector is unspecified, it will be defaulted to .spec.template.metadata.labels.

Also you should not normally create any pods whose labels match this selector, either directly, with another ReplicationController, or with another controller such as Job. If you do so, the ReplicationController thinks that it created the other pods. Kubernetes does not stop you from doing this.

If you do end up with multiple controllers that have overlapping selectors, you will have to manage the deletion yourself (see below).

Multiple Replicas

You can specify how many pods should run concurrently by setting .spec.replicas to the number of pods you would like to have running concurrently. The number running at any time may be higher or lower, such as if the replicas were just increased or decreased, or if a pod is gracefully shutdown, and a replacement starts early.

If you do not specify .spec.replicas, then it defaults to 1.

Working with ReplicationControllers

Deleting a ReplicationController and its Pods

To delete a ReplicationController and all its pods, use kubectl delete. Kubectl will scale the ReplicationController to zero and wait for it to delete each pod before deleting the ReplicationController itself. If this kubectl command is interrupted, it can be restarted.

When using the REST API or client library, you need to do the steps explicitly (scale replicas to 0, wait for pod deletions, then delete the ReplicationController).

Deleting only a ReplicationController

You can delete a ReplicationController without affecting any of its pods.

Using kubectl, specify the --cascade=orphan option to kubectl delete.

When using the REST API or client library, you can delete the ReplicationController object.

Once the original is deleted, you can create a new ReplicationController to replace it. As long as the old and new .spec.selector are the same, then the new one will adopt the old pods. However, it will not make any effort to make existing pods match a new, different pod template. To update pods to a new spec in a controlled way, use a rolling update.

Isolating pods from a ReplicationController

Pods may be removed from a ReplicationController's target set by changing their labels. This technique may be used to remove pods from service for debugging and data recovery. Pods that are removed in this way will be replaced automatically (assuming that the number of replicas is not also changed).

Common usage patterns

Rescheduling

As mentioned above, whether you have 1 pod you want to keep running, or 1000, a ReplicationController will ensure that the specified number of pods exists, even in the event of node failure or pod termination (for example, due to an action by another control agent).

Scaling

The ReplicationController enables scaling the number of replicas up or down, either manually or by an auto-scaling control agent, by updating the replicas field.

Rolling updates

The ReplicationController is designed to facilitate rolling updates to a service by replacing pods one-by-one.

As explained in #1353, the recommended approach is to create a new ReplicationController with 1 replica, scale the new (+1) and old (-1) controllers one by one, and then delete the old controller after it reaches 0 replicas. This predictably updates the set of pods regardless of unexpected failures.

Ideally, the rolling update controller would take application readiness into account, and would ensure that a sufficient number of pods were productively serving at any given time.

The two ReplicationControllers would need to create pods with at least one differentiating label, such as the image tag of the primary container of the pod, since it is typically image updates that motivate rolling updates.

Multiple release tracks

In addition to running multiple releases of an application while a rolling update is in progress, it's common to run multiple releases for an extended period of time, or even continuously, using multiple release tracks. The tracks would be differentiated by labels.

For instance, a service might target all pods with tier in (frontend), environment in (prod). Now say you have 10 replicated pods that make up this tier. But you want to be able to 'canary' a new version of this component. You could set up a ReplicationController with replicas set to 9 for the bulk of the replicas, with labels tier=frontend, environment=prod, track=stable, and another ReplicationController with replicas set to 1 for the canary, with labels tier=frontend, environment=prod, track=canary. Now the service is covering both the canary and non-canary pods. But you can mess with the ReplicationControllers separately to test things out, monitor the results, etc.

Using ReplicationControllers with Services

Multiple ReplicationControllers can sit behind a single service, so that, for example, some traffic goes to the old version, and some goes to the new version.

A ReplicationController will never terminate on its own, but it isn't expected to be as long-lived as services. Services may be composed of pods controlled by multiple ReplicationControllers, and it is expected that many ReplicationControllers may be created and destroyed over the lifetime of a service (for instance, to perform an update of pods that run the service). Both services themselves and their clients should remain oblivious to the ReplicationControllers that maintain the pods of the services.

Writing programs for Replication

Pods created by a ReplicationController are intended to be fungible and semantically identical, though their configurations may become heterogeneous over time. This is an obvious fit for replicated stateless servers, but ReplicationControllers can also be used to maintain availability of master-elected, sharded, and worker-pool applications. Such applications should use dynamic work assignment mechanisms, such as the RabbitMQ work queues, as opposed to static/one-time customization of the configuration of each pod, which is considered an anti-pattern. Any pod customization performed, such as vertical auto-sizing of resources (for example, cpu or memory), should be performed by another online controller process, not unlike the ReplicationController itself.

Responsibilities of the ReplicationController

The ReplicationController ensures that the desired number of pods matches its label selector and are operational. Currently, only terminated pods are excluded from its count. In the future, readiness and other information available from the system may be taken into account, we may add more controls over the replacement policy, and we plan to emit events that could be used by external clients to implement arbitrarily sophisticated replacement and/or scale-down policies.

The ReplicationController is forever constrained to this narrow responsibility. It itself will not perform readiness nor liveness probes. Rather than performing auto-scaling, it is intended to be controlled by an external auto-scaler (as discussed in #492), which would change its replicas field. We will not add scheduling policies (for example, spreading) to the ReplicationController. Nor should it verify that the pods controlled match the currently specified template, as that would obstruct auto-sizing and other automated processes. Similarly, completion deadlines, ordering dependencies, configuration expansion, and other features belong elsewhere. We even plan to factor out the mechanism for bulk pod creation (#170).

The ReplicationController is intended to be a composable building-block primitive. We expect higher-level APIs and/or tools to be built on top of it and other complementary primitives for user convenience in the future. The "macro" operations currently supported by kubectl (run, scale) are proof-of-concept examples of this. For instance, we could imagine something like Asgard managing ReplicationControllers, auto-scalers, services, scheduling policies, canaries, etc.

API Object

Replication controller is a top-level resource in the Kubernetes REST API. More details about the API object can be found at: ReplicationController API object.

Alternatives to ReplicationController

ReplicaSet

ReplicaSet is the next-generation ReplicationController that supports the new set-based label selector. It's mainly used by Deployment as a mechanism to orchestrate pod creation, deletion and updates. Note that we recommend using Deployments instead of directly using Replica Sets, unless you require custom update orchestration or don't require updates at all.

Deployment (Recommended)

Deployment is a higher-level API object that updates its underlying Replica Sets and their Pods. Deployments are recommended if you want the rolling update functionality, because they are declarative, server-side, and have additional features.

Bare Pods

Unlike in the case where a user directly created pods, a ReplicationController replaces pods that are deleted or terminated for any reason, such as in the case of node failure or disruptive node maintenance, such as a kernel upgrade. For this reason, we recommend that you use a ReplicationController even if your application requires only a single pod. Think of it similarly to a process supervisor, only it supervises multiple pods across multiple nodes instead of individual processes on a single node. A ReplicationController delegates local container restarts to some agent on the node, such as the kubelet.

Job

Use a Job instead of a ReplicationController for pods that are expected to terminate on their own (that is, batch jobs).

DaemonSet

Use a DaemonSet instead of a ReplicationController for pods that provide a machine-level function, such as machine monitoring or machine logging. These pods have a lifetime that is tied to a machine lifetime: the pod needs to be running on the machine before other pods start, and are safe to terminate when the machine is otherwise ready to be rebooted/shutdown.

What's next

• Learn about Pods.
• Learn about Deployment, the replacement for ReplicationController.
• ReplicationController is part of the Kubernetes REST API. Read the ReplicationController object definition to understand the API for replication controllers.