Kubernetes Patterns, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14. Self Awareness

Some applications need to be self-aware and require information about themselves. The Self Awareness pattern describes the Kubernetes downward API that provides a simple mechanism for introspection and metadata injection to applications.

Problem

For the majority of use cases, cloud native applications are stateless and disposable without an identity relevant to other applications. However, sometimes even these kinds of applications need to have information about themselves and the environment they are running in. That may include information known only at runtime, such as the Pod name, Pod IP address, and the hostname on which the application is placed. Or, other static information defined at Pod level such as the specific resource requests and limits, or some dynamic information such as annotations and labels that could be altered by the user at runtime.

For example, depending on the resources made available to the container, you may want to tune the application thread-pool size, or change the garbage collection algorithm or memory allocation. You may want to use the Pod name and the hostname while logging information, or while sending metrics to a central server. You may want to discover other Pods in the same namespace with a specific label and join them into a clustered application. For these and other use cases, Kubernetes provides the downward API.

Solution

The requirements that we’ve described and the following solution are not specific only ...