How to distribute multiple environment variables among pods in k8s? - kubernetes

I want to spawn multiple containers of the same type, but each pod with a different (unique) environment variable (which is a private key).
How could I achieve this without introducing an additional service?

All the Pod replicas in the deployment will have the same environment variables and no unique value to identify a particular Pod. As mentioned by #David Maze creating multiple deployments with a different Secret attached is a better workaround.
Dividing single deployment into multiple sets of deployments and services would be the simplest solution. In each deployment you can have different environment variables.
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.

Related

In Kubernetes, what is the real purpose of replicasets?

I am aware about the hierarchical order of k8s resources. In brief,
service: a service is what exposes the application to outer world (or with in cluster). (The service types like, CluserIp, NodePort, Ingress are not so much relevant to this question. )
deployment: a deployment is what is responsible to keep a set of pods running.
replicaset: a replica set is what a deployment in turn relies on to keep the set of pods running.
pod: - a pod consist of a container or a group of container
container - the actual required application is run inside the container.
The thing i want to empasise in this question is, why we have replicaset. Why don't the deployment directly handle or take responsibility of keeping the required number of pods running. But deployment in turn relies on replicset for this.
If k8s is designed this way there should be definitely some benefit of having replicaset. And this is what i want to explore/understand in depth.
Both essentially serves the same purpose. Deployments are a higher abstraction and as the name suggests it deals with creating, maintining and upgrading the deployment (collection of pods) as a whole.
Whereas, ReplicationControllers or Replica sets primary responsibility is to maintain a set of identical replicas (which you can achieve declaratively using deployments too, but internally it creates a resplicaset to enable this).
More specifically, when you are trying to perform a "rolling" update to your deployment, such as updating the image versions, the deployment internally creates a new replica set and performs the rollout. during the rollout you can see two replicasets for the same deployment.
So in other words, Deployment needs the lower level "encapsulation" of Replica sets to achive this.

Run different replica count for different containers within same pod

I have a pod with 2 closely related services running as containers. I am running as a StatefulSet and have set replicas as 5. So 5 pods are created with each pod having both the containers.
Now My requirement is to have the second container run only in 1 pod. I don't want it to run in 5 pods. But my first service should still run in 5 pods.
Is there a way to define this in the deployment yaml file for Kubernetes? Please help.
a "pod" is the smallest entity that is managed by kubernetes, and one pod can contain multiple containers, but you can only specify one pod per deployment/statefulset, so there is no way to accomplish what you are asking for with only one deployment/statefulset.
however, if you want to be able to scale them independently of each other, you can create two deployments/statefulsets to accomplish this. this is imo the only way to do so.
see https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/ for more information.
Containers are like processes,
Pods are like VMs,
and Statefulsets/Deployments are like the supervisor program controlling the VM's horizontal scaling.
The only way for your scenario is to define the second container in a new deployment's pod template, and set its replicas to 1, while keeping the old statefulset with 5 replicas.
Here are some definitions from documentations (links in the references):
Containers are technologies that allow you to package and isolate applications with their entire runtime environment—all of the files necessary to run. This makes it easy to move the contained application between environments (dev, test, production, etc.) while retaining full functionality. [1]
Pods are the smallest, most basic deployable objects in Kubernetes. A Pod represents a single instance of a running process in your cluster. Pods contain one or more containers. When a Pod runs multiple containers, the containers are managed as a single entity and share the Pod's resources. [2]
A deployment provides declarative updates for Pods and ReplicaSets. [3]
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. [4]
Based on all that information - this is impossible to match your requirements using one deployment/Statefulset.
I advise you to try the idea #David Maze mentioned in a comment under your question:
If it's possible to have 4 of the main application container not having a matching same-pod support container, then they're not so "closely related" they need to run in the same pod. Run the second container in a separate Deployment/StatefulSet (also with a separate Service) and you can independently control the replica counts.
References:
Documentation about Containers
Documentation about Pods
Documentation about Deployments
Documentation about StatefulSet

Set environment variable for a single pod in a cluster

I have n instances of my micro-service running as kubernetes pods but as there's some scheduling logic in the application code, I would like only one of these pods to execute the code.
In Spring applications, a common approach is to activate scheduled profile -Dspring.profiles.active=scheduled for only instance & leave it deactivated for the remaining instances. I'd like to know how one can accomplish this in kubernetes.
Note: I am familiar with the approach where a kubernetes cron job can invoke an end point so that only one instances picked by load balancer executes the scheduled code. However, I would like to know if it's possible to configure kubernetes specification in such a way that only one pod has an environment variable set.
You can create deployment with 1 replica with the required environment variable and another deployment with as many replicas you want without that variable. You may also set the same labels on both deployments so that Service can load balance traffic between pods from both deployments if you need it.

Why don't Kubernetes deployments support services?

I'm new to K8s, so still trying to get my head around things. I've been looking at deployments and can appreciate how useful they will be. However, I don't understand why they don't support services (only replica sets and pods).
Why is this? Does this mean that services would typically be deployed outside of a deployment?
To answer your question, Kubernetes deployments are used for managing stateless services running in the cluster instead of StatefulSets which are built for the stateful application run-time. Actually, with deployments you can describe the update strategy and road map for all underlying objects that have to be created during implementation.Therefore, we can distinguish separate specification fields for some objects determination, like needful replica number of Pods, template for Pod by describing a list of containers that should be in the Pod, etc.
However, as #P Ekambaram already mention in his answer, Services represent abstraction layer of network communication model inside Kubernetes cluster, and they declare a way to access Pods within a cluster via corresponded Endpoints. Services are separated from deployment object manifest specification, because of their mission to dynamically provide specific network behavior for the nested Pods without affecting or restarting them in case of any communication modification via appropriate Service Types.
Yes, services should be deployed as separate objects. Note that deployment is used to upgrade or rollback the image and works above ReplicaSet
Kubernetes Pods are mortal. They are born and when they die, they are not resurrected. ReplicaSets in particular create and destroy Pods dynamically (e.g. when scaling out or in). While each Pod gets its own IP address, even those IP addresses cannot be relied upon to be stable over time. This leads to a problem: if some set of Pods (let’s call them backends) provides functionality to other Pods (let’s call them frontends) inside the Kubernetes cluster, how do those frontends find out and keep track of which backends are in that set?
Services.come to the rescue.
A Kubernetes Service is an abstraction which defines a logical set of Pods and a policy by which to access them. The set of Pods targeted by a Service is (usually) determined by a Label Selector
Something I've just learnt that is somewhat related to my question: multiple K8s objects can be included in the same yaml file, separate by ---. Something like:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Deployment
# other stuff here
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
# other stuff here
i think it intends to decoupled and fine-grained.

It's possible to create pods with different resources limit in one deployment?

it's possible to create one deployment with four pods, each pod is identical to each other except the memory limit of their containers.
If it can be done, how is the yaml file look like.
This is not possible with a single deployment.
You can reach a similar effect by creating multiple deployments.
A deployment specifies the template of a single Pod. You cannot define multiple Pods in a single deployment