Handling cronjobs in a Pod with multiple containers - kubernetes

Question

I have a requirement in which I need to create a cronjob in kubernetes but the pod is having multiple containers (with single container its working fine).
Is it possible?
The requirement is something like this:
1. First container: Run the shell script to do a job.
2. Second container: run fluentbit conf to parse the log and send it.
Previously I thought to have a deployment in place and that is working fine but since that deployment was used just for 10 mins jobs I thought to make it a cron job.
Any help is really appreciated.
Also about the cronjob I am not sure if a pod can support multiple containers to do that same.
Thank you,
Sunny

Answer 1

Yes you can create a cronjob with multiple containers. CronJob is an abstraction on top of pod. So in the pod spec you can have multiple containers just like you can have in a normal pod. As an example
apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
name: hello
namespace: default
spec:
schedule: "*/1 * * * *"
jobTemplate:
spec:
template:
spec:
containers:
- name: hello
image: busybox
args:
- /bin/sh
- -c
- date; echo Hello from the Kubernetes cluster
- name: app
image: alpine
command:
- echo
- Hello World!
restartPolicy: OnFailure

Answer 2

I need to agree with the answer provided by #Arghya Sadhu. It shows how you can run multi container Pod with a CronJob. Before the answer I would like to give more attention to the comment provided by #Chris Stryczynski:
It's not clear whether the containers are run in parallel or sequentially
It is not entirely clear if the workload that you are trying to run:
The requirement is something like this:
First container: Run the shell script to do a job.
Second container: run fluentbit conf to parse the log and send it.
could be used in parallel (both running at the same time) or require sequential approach (after X completed successfully, run Y).
If the workload could be run in parallel the answer provided by #Arghya Sadhu is correct, however if one workload is depending on another, I'd reckon you should be using initContainers instead of multi container Pods.
The example of a CronJob that implements the initContainer could be following:
apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
name: hello
spec:
schedule: "*/1 * * * *"
jobTemplate:
spec:
template:
spec:
restartPolicy: Never
containers:
- name: ubuntu
image: ubuntu
command: [/bin/bash]
args: ["-c","cat /data/hello_there.txt"]
volumeMounts:
- name: data-dir
mountPath: /data
initContainers:
- name: echo
image: busybox
command: ["bin/sh"]
args: ["-c", "echo 'General Kenobi!' > /data/hello_there.txt"]
volumeMounts:
- name: data-dir
mountPath: "/data"
volumes:
- name: data-dir
emptyDir: {}
This CronJob will write a specific text to a file with an initContainer and then a "main" container will display its result. It's worth to mention that the main container will not start if the initContainer won't succeed with its operations.
$ kubectl logs hello-1234567890-abcde
General Kenobi!
Additional resources:
Linchpiner.github.io: K8S multi container pods

Answer 3

Whats about sidecar container for logging as second container which keep running without exit code. Even the job might run the state of the job still failed.