Kubernetes: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Labels and Annotations

Kubernetes was made to grow with you as your application scales in both size and complexity. With this in mind, labels and annotations were added as foundational concepts. Labels and annotations let you work in sets of things that map to how you think about your application. You can organize, mark, and cross-index all of your resources to represent the groups that make the most sense for your application.

Labels are key/value pairs that can be attached to Kubernetes objects such as Pods and ReplicaSets. They can be arbitrary, and are useful for attaching identifying information to Kubernetes objects. Labels provide the foundation for grouping objects.

Annotations, on the other hand, provide a storage mechanism that resembles labels: annotations are key/value pairs designed to hold nonidentifying information that can be leveraged by tools and libraries.

Labels

Labels provide identifying metadata for objects. These are fundamental qualities of the object that will be used for grouping, viewing, and operating.

Note

The motivations for labels grew out of Google’s experience in running large and complex applications. There were a couple of lessons that emerged from this experience. See the great site reliability book Site Reliability Engineering by Betsy Beyer et al. (O’Reilly) for some deeper background on how Google approaches production systems.

The first lesson is that production abhors a singleton. When deploying software, users will often start ...