Expose Pod information using an volume

2 min read | by Jordi Prats

We can choose to expose some of the Pod's information as volumes or environment variables using DownwardAPIVolumeFile. It can expose both Pod fields and Container fields

We'll have to check the DownwardAPIVolumeFile documentation for which fields can be exposed.

At the time of this writing, for fieldRef we can only expose labels and annotations beside it's name and namespace:

Required: Selects a field of the pod: only annotations, labels, name and namespace are supported.

An example pod with a downwardAPI Volume would look like as follows:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-podinfo
  labels:
    example-label: demo
  annotations:
    example-annotation: demo
spec:
  containers:
    - name: client-container
      image: alpine
      command: ["sleep", "infinity"]
      volumeMounts:
        - name: podinfo
          mountPath: /etc/podinfo
  volumes:
    - name: podinfo
      downwardAPI:
        items:
          - path: "labels"
            fieldRef:
              fieldPath: metadata.labels
          - path: "annotations"
            fieldRef:
              fieldPath: metadata.annotations

If we apply this manifest we will be able to see that the Volume contains two files, one for annotations and another one for labels:

$ kubectl apply -f podinfo.yaml 
pod/test-podinfo created
$ kubectl get pods
NAME           READY   STATUS    RESTARTS      AGE
sloop-0        1/1     Running   2 (32h ago)   43d
test-podinfo   1/1     Running   0             13s
$ kubectl exec -it test-podinfo -- ls /etc/podinfo
annotations  labels

On the labels file we will only have the labels we have defined:

$ kubectl exec -it test-podinfo -- cat /etc/podinfo/labels
example-label="demo"

But for the annotations file we will also be able to see all the annotations that the Pod has (not just the ones we have defined):

$ kubectl exec -it test-podinfo -- cat /etc/podinfo/annotations
example-annotation="demo"
kubectl.kubernetes.io/last-applied-configuration="{\"apiVersion\":\"v1\",\"kind\":\"Pod\",\"metadata\":{\"annotations\":{\"example-annotation\":\"demo\"},\"labels\":{\"example-label\":\"demo\"},\"name\":\"test-podinfo\",\"namespace\":\"default\"},\"spec\":{\"containers\":[{\"command\":[\"sleep\",\"infinity\"],\"image\":\"alpine\",\"name\":\"client-container\",\"volumeMounts\":[{\"mountPath\":\"/etc/podinfo\",\"name\":\"podinfo\"}]}],\"volumes\":[{\"downwardAPI\":{\"items\":[{\"fieldRef\":{\"fieldPath\":\"metadata.labels\"},\"path\":\"labels\"},{\"fieldRef\":{\"fieldPath\":\"metadata.annotations\"},\"path\":\"annotations\"}]},\"name\":\"podinfo\"}]}}\n"
kubernetes.io/config.seen="2022-01-04T21:04:45.076278440Z"
kubernetes.io/config.source="api"

Posted on 05/01/2022

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