Downward API
It is sometimes useful for a container to have information about itself, without being overly coupled to Kubernetes. The downward API allows containers to consume information about themselves or the cluster without using the Kubernetes client or API server.
An example is an existing application that assumes a particular well-known environment variable holds a unique identifier. One possibility is to wrap the application, but that is tedious and error-prone, and it violates the goal of low coupling. A better option would be to use the Pod's name as an identifier, and inject the Pod's name into the well-known environment variable.
In Kubernetes, there are two ways to expose Pod and container fields to a running container:
Together, these two ways of exposing Pod and container fields are called the downward API.
Available fields
Only some Kubernetes API fields are available through the downward API. This section lists which fields you can make available.
You can pass information from available Pod-level fields using fieldRef.
At the API level, the spec for a Pod always defines at least one
Container.
You can pass information from available Container-level fields using
resourceFieldRef.
Information available via fieldRef
For some Pod-level fields, you can provide them to a container either as
an environment variable or using a downwardAPI volume. The fields available
via either mechanism are:
metadata.name- the pod's name
metadata.namespace- the pod's namespace
metadata.uid- the pod's unique ID
metadata.annotations['<KEY>']- the value of the pod's annotation named
<KEY>(for example,metadata.annotations['myannotation']) metadata.labels['<KEY>']- the text value of the pod's label named
<KEY>(for example,metadata.labels['mylabel'])
The following information is available through environment variables but not as a downwardAPI volume fieldRef:
spec.serviceAccountName- the name of the pod's service account
spec.nodeName- the name of the node where the Pod is executing
status.hostIP- the primary IP address of the node to which the Pod is assigned
status.hostIPs- the IP addresses is a dual-stack version of
status.hostIP, the first is always the same asstatus.hostIP. status.podIP- the pod's primary IP address (usually, its IPv4 address)
status.podIPs- the IP addresses is a dual-stack version of
status.podIP, the first is always the same asstatus.podIP
The following information is available through a downwardAPI volume
fieldRef, but not as environment variables:
metadata.labels- all of the pod's labels, formatted as
label-key="escaped-label-value"with one label per line metadata.annotations- all of the pod's annotations, formatted as
annotation-key="escaped-annotation-value"with one annotation per line
Information available via resourceFieldRef
These container-level fields allow you to provide information about requests and limits for resources such as CPU and memory.
resource: limits.cpu- A container's CPU limit
resource: requests.cpu- A container's CPU request
resource: limits.memory- A container's memory limit
resource: requests.memory- A container's memory request
resource: limits.hugepages-*- A container's hugepages limit
resource: requests.hugepages-*- A container's hugepages request
resource: limits.ephemeral-storage- A container's ephemeral-storage limit
resource: requests.ephemeral-storage- A container's ephemeral-storage request
Fallback information for resource limits
If CPU and memory limits are not specified for a container, and you use the downward API to try to expose that information, then the kubelet defaults to exposing the maximum allocatable value for CPU and memory based on the node allocatable calculation.
What's next
You can read about downwardAPI volumes.
You can try using the downward API to expose container- or Pod-level information: