Namespaces
Namespaces provide a scope for Kubernetes resources, carving up your cluster in smaller units. You can think of it as a workspace you're sharing with other users. Many resources such as pods and services are namespaced. Others, such as nodes, are not namespaced, but are instead treated as cluster-wide. As a developer, you'll usually use an assigned namespace, however admins may wish to manage them, for example to set up access control or resource quotas.
Like other resources, the get subcommand displays a list of all namespaces a user has access to in a cluster (both the full resource type name namespace
and the abbreviation ns
can be used):
kubectl get ns
On a simple minikube installation, the result shows:
NAME STATUS AGE
default Active 17h
kube-node-lease Active 17h
kube-public Active 17h
kube-system Active 17h
You can learn more about a namespace using the describe
verb:
kubectl describe ns default
If no changes were made to the minikube cluster, the output should look like the following:
Name: default
Labels: <none>
Annotations: <none>
Status: Active
No resource quota.
No LimitRange resource.
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openshift-evangelists/kbe/main/specs/ns/ns.yaml
Once the namespace is created, it will appear in the list of available namespaces:
kubectl get ns
kubectl create namespace test
command.test
, run:
kubectl apply --namespace=test -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openshift-evangelists/kbe/main/specs/ns/pod.yaml
Note that using above method the namespace becomes a runtime property. In other words, you can deploy the same pod or service into multiple namespaces (for example, dev and prod). Hard-coding the namespace directly in the metadata
section as shown in the following is possible, but causes less flexibility when deploying your apps:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: podintest
namespace: test
To list namespaced objects, such as our pod podintest
, pass the --namespace
variable to the get call:
kubectl get pods --namespace=test
You can remove the namespace (and everything inside of it) with:
kubectl delete ns test
If you're an admin, you might want to check out the docs for more info how to handle namespaces.