Chapter 1. Working with pods

Pods are the rough equivalent of a machine instance (physical or virtual) to a Container. Each pod is allocated its own internal IP address, therefore owning its entire port space, and containers within pods can share their local storage and networking.

Pods have a lifecycle; they are defined, then they are assigned to run on a node, then they run until their container(s) exit or they are removed for some other reason. Pods, depending on policy and exit code, might be removed after exiting, or can be retained in order to enable access to the logs of their containers.

OpenShift Container Platform treats pods as largely immutable; changes cannot be made to a pod definition while it is running. OpenShift Container Platform implements changes by terminating an existing pod and recreating it with modified configuration, base image(s), or both. Pods are also treated as expendable, and do not maintain state when recreated. Therefore pods should usually be managed by higher-level controllers, rather than directly by users.

OpenShift Container Platform leverages the Kubernetes concept of a pod, which is one or more containers deployed together on one host, and the smallest compute unit that can be defined, deployed, and managed.

The following is an example definition of a pod that provides a long-running service, which is actually a part of the OpenShift Container Platform infrastructure: the integrated container image registry. It demonstrates many features of pods, most of which are discussed in other topics and thus only briefly mentioned here:

kind: Pod
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: example
  namespace: default
  selfLink: /api/v1/namespaces/default/pods/example
  uid: 5cc30063-0265780783bc
  resourceVersion: '165032'
  creationTimestamp: '2019-02-13T20:31:37Z'
  labels:                  1
    app: hello-openshift
  annotations:
    openshift.io/scc: anyuid
spec:
  restartPolicy: Always      2
  serviceAccountName: default
  imagePullSecrets:
    - name: default-dockercfg-5zrhb
  priority: 0
  schedulerName: default-scheduler
  terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30
  nodeName: ip-10-0-140-16.us-east-2.compute.internal
  securityContext:     3
    seLinuxOptions:
      level: 's0:c11,c10'
  containers:          4
    - resources: {}
      terminationMessagePath: /dev/termination-log
      name: hello-openshift
      securityContext:
        capabilities:
          drop:
            - MKNOD
        procMount: Default
      ports:
        - containerPort: 8080
          protocol: TCP
      imagePullPolicy: Always
      volumeMounts:             5
        - name: default-token-wbqsl
          readOnly: true
          mountPath: /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount
      terminationMessagePolicy: File
      image: registry.redhat.io/openshift4/ose-ogging-eventrouter:v4.3 6
  serviceAccount: default     7
  volumes:                    8
    - name: default-token-wbqsl
      secret:
        secretName: default-token-wbqsl
        defaultMode: 420
  dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst
status:
  phase: Pending
  conditions:
    - type: Initialized
      status: 'True'
      lastProbeTime: null
      lastTransitionTime: '2019-02-13T20:31:37Z'
    - type: Ready
      status: 'False'
      lastProbeTime: null
      lastTransitionTime: '2019-02-13T20:31:37Z'
      reason: ContainersNotReady
      message: 'containers with unready status: [hello-openshift]'
    - type: ContainersReady
      status: 'False'
      lastProbeTime: null
      lastTransitionTime: '2019-02-13T20:31:37Z'
      reason: ContainersNotReady
      message: 'containers with unready status: [hello-openshift]'
    - type: PodScheduled
      status: 'True'
      lastProbeTime: null
      lastTransitionTime: '2019-02-13T20:31:37Z'
  hostIP: 10.0.140.16
  startTime: '2019-02-13T20:31:37Z'
  containerStatuses:
    - name: hello-openshift
      state:
        waiting:
          reason: ContainerCreating
      lastState: {}
      ready: false
      restartCount: 0
      image: openshift/hello-openshift
      imageID: ''
  qosClass: BestEffort

OpenShift Container Platform leverages the Kubernetes concept of a pod, which is one or more containers deployed together on one host, and the smallest compute unit that can be defined, deployed, and managed. Pods are the rough equivalent of a machine instance (physical or virtual) to a container.

You can view a list of pods associated with a specific project or view usage statistics about pods.

You can view a list of pods associated with the current project, including the number of replica, the current status, number or restarts and the age of the pod.

You can display usage statistics about pods, which provide the runtime environments for containers. These usage statistics include CPU, memory, and storage consumption.

A pod restart policy determines how OpenShift Container Platform responds when Containers in that pod exit. The policy applies to all Containers in that pod.

The possible values are:

After the pod is bound to a node, the pod will never be bound to another node. This means that a controller is necessary in order for a pod to survive node failure:

If a Container on a pod fails and the restart policy is set to OnFailure, the pod stays on the node and the Container is restarted. If you do not want the Container to restart, use a restart policy of Never.

If an entire pod fails, OpenShift Container Platform starts a new pod. Developers must address the possibility that applications might be restarted in a new pod. In particular, applications must handle temporary files, locks, incomplete output, and so forth caused by previous runs.

For details on how OpenShift Container Platform uses restart policy with failed Containers, see the Example States in the Kubernetes documentation.

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.

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:

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.

There are a number of core components that are critical to a fully functional cluster, but, run on a regular cluster node rather than the master. A cluster might stop working properly if a critical add-on is evicted.

Pods marked as critical are not allowed to be evicted.

Alternatively, you can specify system-node-critical for pods that are important to the cluster but can be removed if necessary.

You can create a horizontal pod autoscaler to specify the minimum and maximum number of pods you want to run, as well as the CPU utilization or memory utilization your pods should target.

After you create a horizontal pod autoscaler, OpenShift Container Platform begins to query the CPU and/or memory resource metrics on the pods. When these metrics are available, the horizontal pod autoscaler computes the ratio of the current metric utilization with the desired metric utilization, and scales up or down accordingly. The query and scaling occurs at a regular interval, but can take one to two minutes before metrics become available.

For replication controllers, this scaling corresponds directly to the replicas of the replication controller. For deployment configurations, scaling corresponds directly to the replica count of the deployment configuration. Note that autoscaling applies only to the latest deployment in the Complete phase.

OpenShift Container Platform automatically accounts for resources and prevents unnecessary autoscaling during resource spikes, such as during start up. Pods in the unready state have 0 CPU usage when scaling up and the autoscaler ignores the pods when scaling down. Pods without known metrics have 0% CPU usage when scaling up and 100% CPU when scaling down. This allows for more stability during the HPA decision. To use this feature, you must configure readiness checks to determine if a new pod is ready for use.

In order to use horizontal pod autoscalers, your cluster administrator must have properly configured cluster metrics.

You can create a horizontal pod autoscaler (HPA) for an existing DeploymentConfig or ReplicationController object that automatically scales the pods associated with that object in order to maintain the CPU usage you specify.

The HPA increases and decreases the number of replicas between the minimum and maximum numbers to maintain the specified CPU utilization across all pods.

When autoscaling for CPU utilization, you can use the oc autoscale command and specify the minimum and maximum number of pods you want to run at any given time and the average CPU utilization your pods should target. If you do not specify a minimum, the pods are given default values from the OpenShift Container Platform server. To autoscale for a specific CPU value, create a HorizontalPodAutoscaler object with the target CPU and pod limits.

$ oc describe PodMetrics openshift-kube-scheduler-ip-10-0-135-131.ec2.internal

Name:         openshift-kube-scheduler-ip-10-0-135-131.ec2.internal
Namespace:    openshift-kube-scheduler
Labels:       <none>
Annotations:  <none>
API Version:  metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1
Containers:
  Name:  wait-for-host-port
  Usage:
    Memory:  0
  Name:      scheduler
  Usage:
    Cpu:     8m
    Memory:  45440Ki
Kind:        PodMetrics
Metadata:
  Creation Timestamp:  2019-05-23T18:47:56Z
  Self Link:           /apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/namespaces/openshift-kube-scheduler/pods/openshift-kube-scheduler-ip-10-0-135-131.ec2.internal
Timestamp:             2019-05-23T18:47:56Z
Window:                1m0s
Events:                <none>

For example, the following command creates a horizontal pod autoscaler that maintains between 3 and 7 replicas of the pods that are controlled by the image-registry DeploymentConfig object in order to maintain an average CPU utilization of 75% across all pods.

$ oc autoscale dc/image-registry --min 3 --max 7 --cpu-percent=75
deploymentconfig "image-registry" autoscaled

The command creates a horizontal pod autoscaler with the following definition:

$ oc edit hpa frontend -n openshift-image-registry

apiVersion: autoscaling/v1
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: "2020-02-21T20:19:28Z"
  name: image-registry
  namespace: default
  resourceVersion: "32452"
  selfLink: /apis/autoscaling/v1/namespaces/default/horizontalpodautoscalers/frontend
  uid: 1a934a22-925d-431e-813a-d00461ad7521
spec:
  maxReplicas: 7
  minReplicas: 3
  scaleTargetRef:
    apiVersion: apps.openshift.io/v1
    kind: DeploymentConfig
    name: image-registry
  targetCPUUtilizationPercentage: 75
status:
  currentReplicas: 5
  desiredReplicas: 0

The following example shows autoscaling for the image-registry DeploymentConfig object. The initial deployment requires 3 pods. The HPA object increased that minimum to 5 and will increase the pods up to 7 if CPU usage on the pods reaches 75%:

$ oc get dc image-registry
NAME             REVISION   DESIRED   CURRENT   TRIGGERED BY
image-registry   1          3         3         config

$ oc autoscale dc/image-registry --min=5 --max=7 --cpu-percent=75
horizontalpodautoscaler.autoscaling/image-registry autoscaled

$ oc get dc image-registry
NAME             REVISION   DESIRED   CURRENT   TRIGGERED BY
image-registry   1          5         5         config

You can create a horizontal pod autoscaler (HPA) for an existing DeploymentConfig object or ReplicationController object that automatically scales the pods associated with that object in order to maintain the average memory utilization you specify, either a direct value or a percentage of requested memory.

The HPA increases and decreases the number of replicas between the minimum and maximum numbers to maintain the specified memory utilization across all pods.

For memory utilization, you can specify the minimum and maximum number of pods and the average memory utilization your pods should target. If you do not specify a minimum, the pods are given default values from the OpenShift Container Platform server.

$ oc describe PodMetrics openshift-kube-scheduler-ip-10-0-129-223.compute.internal -n openshift-kube-scheduler

Name:         openshift-kube-scheduler-ip-10-0-129-223.compute.internal
Namespace:    openshift-kube-scheduler
Labels:       <none>
Annotations:  <none>
API Version:  metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1
Containers:
  Name:  scheduler
  Usage:
    Cpu:     2m
    Memory:  41056Ki
  Name:      wait-for-host-port
  Usage:
    Memory:  0
Kind:        PodMetrics
Metadata:
  Creation Timestamp:  2020-02-14T22:21:14Z
  Self Link:           /apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/namespaces/openshift-kube-scheduler/pods/openshift-kube-scheduler-ip-10-0-129-223.compute.internal
Timestamp:             2020-02-14T22:21:14Z
Window:                5m0s
Events:                <none>

You can use the status conditions set to determine whether or not the horizontal pod autoscaler (HPA) is able to scale and whether or not it is currently restricted in any way.

The HPA status conditions are available with the v2beta1 version of the autoscaling API.

The HPA responds with the following status conditions:

The following is an example of a pod that is unable to scale:

Conditions:
  Type         Status  Reason          Message
  ----         ------  ------          -------
  AbleToScale  False   FailedGetScale  the HPA controller was unable to get the target's current scale: no matches for kind "ReplicationController" in group "apps"
Events:
  Type     Reason          Age               From                       Message
  ----     ------          ----              ----                       -------
  Warning  FailedGetScale  6s (x3 over 36s)  horizontal-pod-autoscaler  no matches for kind "ReplicationController" in group "apps"

The following is an example of a pod that could not obtain the needed metrics for scaling:

Conditions:
  Type                  Status    Reason                    Message
  ----                  ------    ------                    -------
  AbleToScale           True     SucceededGetScale          the HPA controller was able to get the target's current scale
  ScalingActive         False    FailedGetResourceMetric    the HPA was unable to compute the replica count: unable to get metrics for resource cpu: no metrics returned from heapster

The following is an example of a pod where the requested autoscaling was less than the required minimums:

Conditions:
  Type              Status    Reason              Message
  ----              ------    ------              -------
  AbleToScale       True      ReadyForNewScale    the last scale time was sufficiently old as to warrant a new scale
  ScalingActive     True      ValidMetricFound    the HPA was able to successfully calculate a replica count from pods metric http_request
  ScalingLimited    False     DesiredWithinRange  the desired replica count is within the acceptable range

$ oc describe PodMetrics openshift-kube-scheduler-ip-10-0-135-131.ec2.internal

Name:         openshift-kube-scheduler-ip-10-0-135-131.ec2.internal
Namespace:    openshift-kube-scheduler
Labels:       <none>
Annotations:  <none>
API Version:  metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1
Containers:
  Name:  wait-for-host-port
  Usage:
    Memory:  0
  Name:      scheduler
  Usage:
    Cpu:     8m
    Memory:  45440Ki
Kind:        PodMetrics
Metadata:
  Creation Timestamp:  2019-05-23T18:47:56Z
  Self Link:           /apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/namespaces/openshift-kube-scheduler/pods/openshift-kube-scheduler-ip-10-0-135-131.ec2.internal
Timestamp:             2019-05-23T18:47:56Z
Window:                1m0s
Events:                <none>

$ oc describe hpa <pod-name>

$ oc describe hpa cm-test

Name:                           cm-test
Namespace:                      prom
Labels:                         <none>
Annotations:                    <none>
CreationTimestamp:              Fri, 16 Jun 2017 18:09:22 +0000
Reference:                      ReplicationController/cm-test
Metrics:                        ( current / target )
  "http_requests" on pods:      66m / 500m
Min replicas:                   1
Max replicas:                   4
ReplicationController pods:     1 current / 1 desired
Conditions: 1
  Type              Status    Reason              Message
  ----              ------    ------              -------
  AbleToScale       True      ReadyForNewScale    the last scale time was sufficiently old as to warrant a new scale
  ScalingActive     True      ValidMetricFound    the HPA was able to successfully calculate a replica count from pods metric http_request
  ScalingLimited    False     DesiredWithinRange  the desired replica count is within the acceptable range

For more information on replication controllers and deployment controllers, see Understanding deployments and deployment configs.

The Secret object type provides a mechanism to hold sensitive information such as passwords, OpenShift Container Platform client configuration files, private source repository credentials, and so on. Secrets decouple sensitive content from the pods. You can mount secrets into containers using a volume plug-in or the system can use secrets to perform actions on behalf of a pod.

Key properties include:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: test-secret
  namespace: my-namespace
type: Opaque 1
data: 2
  username: dmFsdWUtMQ0K 3
  password: dmFsdWUtMg0KDQo=
stringData: 4
  hostname: myapp.mydomain.com 5

You must create a secret before creating the pods that depend on that secret.

When creating secrets:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: test-secret
data:
  username: dmFsdWUtMQ0K     1
  password: dmFsdWUtMQ0KDQo= 2
stringData:
  hostname: myapp.mydomain.com 3
  secret.properties: |-     4
    property1=valueA
    property2=valueB

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: secret-example-pod
spec:
  containers:
    - name: secret-test-container
      image: busybox
      command: [ "/bin/sh", "-c", "cat /etc/secret-volume/*" ]
      volumeMounts:
          # name must match the volume name below
          - name: secret-volume
            mountPath: /etc/secret-volume
            readOnly: true
  volumes:
    - name: secret-volume
      secret:
        secretName: test-secret
  restartPolicy: Never

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: secret-example-pod
spec:
  containers:
    - name: secret-test-container
      image: busybox
      command: [ "/bin/sh", "-c", "export" ]
      env:
        - name: TEST_SECRET_USERNAME_ENV_VAR
          valueFrom:
            secretKeyRef:
              name: test-secret
              key: username
  restartPolicy: Never

apiVersion: v1
kind: BuildConfig
metadata:
  name: secret-example-bc
spec:
  strategy:
    sourceStrategy:
      env:
      - name: TEST_SECRET_USERNAME_ENV_VAR
        valueFrom:
          secretKeyRef:
            name: test-secret
            key: username

As an administrator you must create a secret before developers can create the pods that depend on that secret.

When creating secrets:

When you modify the value of a secret, the value (used by an already running pod) will not dynamically change. To change a secret, you must delete the original pod and create a new pod (perhaps with an identical PodSpec).

Updating a secret follows the same workflow as deploying a new Container image. You can use the kubectl rolling-update command.

The resourceVersion value in a secret is not specified when it is referenced. Therefore, if a secret is updated at the same time as pods are starting, then the version of the secret will be used for the pod will not be defined.

To secure communication to your service, you can configure OpenShift Container Platform to generate a signed serving certificate/key pair that you can add into a secret in a project.

A service serving certificate secret is intended to support complex middleware applications that need out-of-the-box certificates. It has the same settings as the server certificates generated by the administrator tooling for nodes and masters.

apiVersion: v1
  kind: Service
  metadata:
    name: registry
    annotations:
      service.alpha.openshift.io/serving-cert-secret-name: registry-cert1
....

Other pods can trust cluster-created certificates (which are only signed for internal DNS names), by using the CA bundle in the /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/service-ca.crt file that is automatically mounted in their pod.

The signature algorithm for this feature is x509.SHA256WithRSA. To manually rotate, delete the generated secret. A new certificate is created.

If a service certificate generation fails with (service’s service.alpha.openshift.io/serving-cert-generation-error annotation contains):

secret/ssl-key references serviceUID 62ad25ca-d703-11e6-9d6f-0e9c0057b608, which does not match 77b6dd80-d716-11e6-9d6f-0e9c0057b60

The service that generated the certificate no longer exists, or has a different serviceUID. You must force certificates regeneration by removing the old secret, and clearing the following annotations on the service service.alpha.openshift.io/serving-cert-generation-error, service.alpha.openshift.io/serving-cert-generation-error-num:

$ oc delete secret <secret_name>
$ oc annotate service <service_name> service.alpha.openshift.io/serving-cert-generation-error-
$ oc annotate service <service_name> service.alpha.openshift.io/serving-cert-generation-error-num-

The device plug-in provides a consistent and portable solution to consume hardware devices across clusters. The device plug-in provides support for these devices through an extension mechanism, which makes these devices available to Containers, provides health checks of these devices, and securely shares them.

A device plug-in is a gRPC service running on the nodes (external to the kubelet) that is responsible for managing specific hardware resources. Any device plug-in must support following remote procedure calls (RPCs):

service DevicePlugin {
      // GetDevicePluginOptions returns options to be communicated with Device
      // Manager
      rpc GetDevicePluginOptions(Empty) returns (DevicePluginOptions) {}

      // ListAndWatch returns a stream of List of Devices
      // Whenever a Device state change or a Device disappears, ListAndWatch
      // returns the new list
      rpc ListAndWatch(Empty) returns (stream ListAndWatchResponse) {}

      // Allocate is called during container creation so that the Device
      // Plug-in can run device specific operations and instruct Kubelet
      // of the steps to make the Device available in the container
      rpc Allocate(AllocateRequest) returns (AllocateResponse) {}

      // PreStartcontainer is called, if indicated by Device Plug-in during
      // registration phase, before each container start. Device plug-in
      // can run device specific operations such as reseting the device
      // before making devices available to the container
      rpc PreStartcontainer(PreStartcontainerRequest) returns (PreStartcontainerResponse) {}
}

Example device plug-ins

Device Manager provides a mechanism for advertising specialized node hardware resources with the help of plug-ins known as device plug-ins.

You can advertise specialized hardware without requiring any upstream code changes.

Device Manager advertises devices as Extended Resources. User pods can consume devices, advertised by Device Manager, using the same Limit/Request mechanism, which is used for requesting any other Extended Resource.

Upon start, the device plug-in registers itself with Device Manager invoking Register on the /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins/kubelet.sock and starts a gRPC service at /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins/<plugin>.sock for serving Device Manager requests.

Device Manager, while processing a new registration request, invokes ListAndWatch remote procedure call (RPC) at the device plug-in service. In response, Device Manager gets a list of Device objects from the plug-in over a gRPC stream. Device Manager will keep watching on the stream for new updates from the plug-in. On the plug-in side, the plug-in will also keep the stream open and whenever there is a change in the state of any of the devices, a new device list is sent to the Device Manager over the same streaming connection.

While handling a new pod admission request, Kubelet passes requested Extended Resources to the Device Manager for device allocation. Device Manager checks in its database to verify if a corresponding plug-in exists or not. If the plug-in exists and there are free allocatable devices as well as per local cache, Allocate RPC is invoked at that particular device plug-in.

Additionally, device plug-ins can also perform several other device-specific operations, such as driver installation, device initialization, and device resets. These functionalities vary from implementation to implementation.

Enable Device Manager to implement a device plug-in to advertise specialized hardware without any upstream code changes.

Device Manager provides a mechanism for advertising specialized node hardware resources with the help of plug-ins known as device plug-ins.

When you use the Pod Priority and Preemption feature, the scheduler orders pending pods by their priority, and a pending pod is placed ahead of other pending pods with lower priority in the scheduling queue. As a result, the higher priority pod might be scheduled sooner than pods with lower priority if its scheduling requirements are met. If a pod cannot be scheduled, scheduler continues to schedule other lower priority pods.

$ oc get priorityclasses

NAME                      VALUE        GLOBAL-DEFAULT   AGE
cluster-logging           1000000      false            29s
system-cluster-critical   2000000000   false            72m
system-node-critical      2000001000   false            72m

When a developer creates a pod, the pod goes into a queue. If the developer configured the pod for pod priority or preemption, the scheduler picks a pod from the queue and tries to schedule the pod on a node. If the scheduler cannot find space on an appropriate node that satisfies all the specified requirements of the pod, preemption logic is triggered for the pending pod.

When the scheduler preempts one or more pods on a node, the nominatedNodeName field of higher-priority Pod spec is set to the name of the node, along with the nodename field. The scheduler uses the nominatedNodeName field to keep track of the resources reserved for pods and also provides information to the user about preemptions in the clusters.

After the scheduler preempts a lower-priority pod, the scheduler honors the graceful termination period of the pod. If another node becomes available while scheduler is waiting for the lower-priority pod to terminate, the scheduler can schedule the higher-priority pod on that node. As a result, the nominatedNodeName field and nodeName field of the Pod spec might be different.

Also, if the scheduler preempts pods on a node and is waiting for termination, and a pod with a higher-priority pod than the pending pod needs to be scheduled, the scheduler can schedule the higher-priority pod instead. In such a case, the scheduler clears the nominatedNodeName of the pending pod, making the pod eligible for another node.

Preemption does not necessarily remove all lower-priority pods from a node. The scheduler can schedule a pending pod by removing a portion of the lower-priority pods.

The scheduler considers a node for pod preemption only if the pending pod can be scheduled on the node.

You apply pod priority and preemption by creating a priority class object and associating pods to the priority using the priorityClassName in your Pod specs.

apiVersion: scheduling.k8s.io/v1
kind: PriorityClass
metadata:
  name: high-priority 1
value: 1000000 2
globalDefault: false 3
description: "This priority class should be used for XYZ service pods only." 4

You can use node selector labels on pods to control where the pod is scheduled.

With node selectors, OpenShift Container Platform schedules the pods on nodes that contain matching labels.

To add node selectors to an existing pod, add a node selector to the controlling object for that pod, such as a ReplicaSet object, DaemonSet object, StatefulSet object, Deployment object, or DeploymentConfig object. Any existing pods under that controlling object are recreated on a node with a matching label. If you are creating a new pod, you can add the node selector directly to the Pod spec.

You can add labels to a node or machine config, but the labels will not persist if the node or machine goes down. Adding the label to the machine set ensures that new nodes or machines will have the label.

$ oc describe pod router-default-66d5cf9464-7pwkc

Name:               router-default-66d5cf9464-7pwkc
Namespace:          openshift-ingress

....

Controlled By:      ReplicaSet/router-default-66d5cf9464

The web console lists the controlling object under ownerReferences in the pod YAML:

  ownerReferences:
    - apiVersion: apps/v1
      kind: ReplicaSet
      name: router-default-66d5cf9464
      uid: d81dd094-da26-11e9-a48a-128e7edf0312
      controller: true
      blockOwnerDeletion: true