Chapter 4. Managing Projects

The API server automatically provisions projects based on the template that is identified by the projectRequestTemplate parameter of the master-config.yaml file. If the parameter is not defined, the API server creates a default template that creates a project with the requested name, and assigns the requesting user to the "admin" role for that project.

To create your own custom project template:

When a project request is submitted, the API substitutes the following parameters into the template:

Access to the API is granted to developers with the self-provisioner role and the self-provisioners cluster role binding. This role is available to all authenticated developers by default.

You can prevent an authenticated user group from self-provisioning new projects.

As a cluster administrator, you can set the cluster-wide default node selector to restrict pod placement to specific nodes.

Edit the master configuration file at /etc/origin/master/master-config.yaml and add a value for a default node selector. This is applied to the pods created in all projects without a specified nodeSelector value:

...
projectConfig:
  defaultNodeSelector: "type=user-node,region=east"
...

Restart the OpenShift service for the changes to take effect:

# systemctl restart atomic-openshift-master

To create an individual project with a node selector, use the --node-selector option when creating a project. For example, if you have an OpenShift Container Platform topology with multiple regions, you can use a node selector to restrict specific OpenShift Container Platform projects to only deploy pods onto nodes in a specific region.

The following creates a new project named myproject and dictates that pods be deployed onto nodes labeled user-node and east:

$ oc adm new-project myproject \
    --node-selector='type=user-node,region=east'

Once this command is run, this becomes the adminstrator-set node selector for all pods contained in the specified project.

Using the oc adm new-project command adds an annotation section to the project. You can edit a project, and change the openshift.io/node-selector value to override the default:

...
metadata:
  annotations:
    openshift.io/node-selector: type=user-node,region=east
...

You can also override the default value for an existing project namespace by using the following command:

# oc patch namespace myproject -p \
    '{"metadata":{"annotations":{"openshift.io/node-selector":"region=infra"}}}'

If openshift.io/node-selector is set to an empty string (oc adm new-project --node-selector=""), the project will not have an adminstrator-set node selector, even if the cluster-wide default has been set. This means that, as a cluster administrator, you can set a default to restrict developer projects to a subset of nodes and still enable infrastructure or other projects to schedule the entire cluster.

OpenShift Container Platform developers can set a node selector on their pod configuration if they wish to restrict nodes even further. This will be in addition to the project node selector, meaning that you can still dictate node selector values for all projects that have a node selector value.

For example, if a project has been created with the above annotation (openshift.io/node-selector: type=user-node,region=east) and a developer sets another node selector on a pod in that project, for example clearance=classified, the pod will only ever be scheduled on nodes that have all three labels (type=user-node, region=east, and clearance=classified). If they set region=west on a pod, their pods would be demanding nodes with labels region=east and region=west, which cannot work. The pods will never be scheduled, because labels can only be set to one value.