Chapter 5. Managing Pods

This topic describes the management of pods, including limiting their run-once duration, and how much bandwidth they can use.

OpenShift Container Platform relies on run-once pods to perform tasks such as deploying a pod or performing a build. Run-once pods are pods that have a RestartPolicy of Never or OnFailure.

The cluster administrator can use the RunOnceDuration admission control plug-in to force a limit on the time that those run-once pods can be active. Once the time limit expires, the cluster will try to actively terminate those pods. The main reason to have such a limit is to prevent tasks such as builds to run for an excessive amount of time.

kubernetesMasterConfig:
  admissionConfig:
    pluginConfig:
      RunOnceDuration:
        configuration:
          apiVersion: v1
          kind: RunOnceDurationConfig
          activeDeadlineSecondsOverride: 3600 1

apiVersion: v1
kind: Project
metadata:
  annotations:
    openshift.io/active-deadline-seconds-override: "1000" 1

You can apply quality-of-service traffic shaping to a pod and effectively limit its available bandwidth. Egress traffic (from the pod) is handled by policing, which simply drops packets in excess of the configured rate. Ingress traffic (to the pod) is handled by shaping queued packets to effectively handle data. The limits you place on a pod do not affect the bandwidth of other pods.

To limit the bandwidth on a pod:

A pod disruption budget is part of the Kubernetes API, which can be managed with oc commands like other object types. They allow the specification of safety constraints on pods during operations, such as draining a node for maintenance.

PodDisruptionBudget is an API object that specifies the minimum number or percentage of replicas that must be up at a time. Setting these in projects can be helpful during node maintenance (such as scaling a cluster down or a cluster upgrade) and is only honored on voluntary evictions (not on node failures).

A PodDisruptionBudget object’s configuration consists of the following key parts:

The following is an example of a PodDisruptionBudget resource:

apiVersion: policy/v1beta1 1
kind: PodDisruptionBudget
metadata:
  name: my-pdb
spec:
  selector:  2
    matchLabels:
      foo: bar
  minAvailable: 2  3

If you created a YAML file with the above object definition, you could add it to project with the following:

$ oc create -f </path/to/file> -n <project_name>

You can check for pod disruption budgets across all projects with the following:

$ oc get poddisruptionbudget --all-namespaces

NAMESPACE         NAME          MIN-AVAILABLE   SELECTOR
another-project   another-pdb   4               bar=foo
test-project      my-pdb        2               foo=bar

The PodDisruptionBudget is considered healthy when there are at least minAvailable pods running in the system. Every pod above that limit can be evicted.