This topic describes the management of pods, including limiting their run-once duration, and how much bandwidth they can use.

Limiting Run-once Pod Duration

OpenShift Container Platform relies on run-once pods to perform tasks such as deploying a pod or performing a build. Run-once pods are pods that have a RestartPolicy of Never or OnFailure.

The cluster administrator can use the RunOnceDuration admission control plug-in to force a limit on the time that those run-once pods can be active. Once the time limit expires, the cluster will try to actively terminate those pods. The main reason to have such a limit is to prevent tasks such as builds to run for an excessive amount of time.

Configuring the RunOnceDuration Plug-in

The plug-in configuration should include the default active deadline for run-once pods. This deadline is enforced globally, but can be superseded on a per-project basis.

          apiVersion: v1
          kind: RunOnceDurationConfig
          activeDeadlineSecondsOverride: 3600 (1)
1 Specify the global default for run-once pods in seconds.

Specifying a Custom Duration per Project

In addition to specifying a global maximum duration for run-once pods, an administrator can add an annotation (openshift.io/active-deadline-seconds-override) to a specific project to override the global default.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Project
    openshift.io/active-deadline-seconds-override: "1000" (1)
1 Overrides the default active deadline seconds for run-once pods to 1000 seconds. Note that the value of the override must be specified in string form.

Limiting the Bandwidth Available to Pods

You can apply quality-of-service traffic shaping to a pod and effectively limit its available bandwidth. Egress traffic (from the pod) is handled by policing, which simply drops packets in excess of the configured rate. Ingress traffic (to the pod) is handled by shaping queued packets to effectively handle data. The limits you place on a pod do not affect the bandwidth of other pods.

To limit the bandwidth on a pod:

  1. Write an object definition JSON file, and specify the data traffic speed using kubernetes.io/ingress-bandwidth and kubernetes.io/egress-bandwidth annotations. For example, to limit both pod egress and ingress bandwidth to 10M/s:

    Example 1. Limited Pod Object Definition
        "kind": "Pod",
        "spec": {
            "containers": [
                    "image": "openshift/hello-openshift",
                    "name": "hello-openshift"
        "apiVersion": "v1",
        "metadata": {
            "name": "iperf-slow",
            "annotations": {
                "kubernetes.io/ingress-bandwidth": "10M",
                "kubernetes.io/egress-bandwidth": "10M"
  2. Create the pod using the object definition:

    oc create -f <file_or_dir_path>

Setting Pod Disruption Budgets

A pod disruption budget is part of the Kubernetes API, which can be managed with oc commands like other object types. They allow the specification of safety constraints on pods during operations, such as draining a node for maintenance.

Starting in OpenShift Container Platform 3.4, pod disruption budgets is a feature in Technology Preview, available only for users with cluster-admin privileges.

PodDisruptionBudget is an API object that specifies the minimum number or percentage of replicas that must be up at a time. Setting these in projects can be helpful during node maintenance (such as scaling a cluster down or a cluster upgrade) and is only honored on voluntary evictions (not on node failures).

A PodDisruptionBudget object’s configuration consists of the following key parts:

  • A label selector, which is a label query over a set of pods.

  • An availability level, which specifies the minimum number of pods that must be available simultaneously.

The following is an example of a PodDisruptionBudget resource:

apiVersion: policy/v1beta1 (1)
kind: PodDisruptionBudget
  name: my-pdb
  selector:  (2)
      foo: bar
  minAvailable: 2  (3)
1 PodDisruptionBudget is part of the policy/v1beta1 API group.
2 A label query over a set of resources. The result of matchLabels and matchExpressions are logically conjoined.
3 The minimum number of pods that must be available simultaneously. This can be either an integer or a string specifying a percentage (for example, 20%).

If you created a YAML file with the above object definition, you could add it to project with the following:

$ oc create -f </path/to/file> -n <project_name>

You can check for pod disruption budgets across all projects with the following:

$ oc get poddisruptionbudget --all-namespaces

another-project   another-pdb   4               bar=foo
test-project      my-pdb        2               foo=bar

The PodDisruptionBudget is considered healthy when there are at least minAvailable pods running in the system. Every pod above that limit can be evicted.