Kubernetes – Labels, Selectors & Annotations

Labels

Labels are key/value pairs that are used to add metadata to Kubernetes objects. They can be used to select and group subsets of objects in the cluster. Labels are added to an object in the metadata.labels section of the object descriptor as shown in the two Pod definitions below.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
 name: dev-pod
 labels:
   app: my-service
   environment: dev
spec:
  containers:
    - name: nginx-container
      image: nginx
      imagePullPolicy: Always

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
 name: prod-pod
 labels:
   app: my-service
   environment: prod
spec:
  containers:
    - name: nginx-container
      image: nginx
      imagePullPolicy: Always

After creating the above Pods run kubectl get pods --show-labels to see the labels associated with each.

Selectors

Selectors are used to identify and select a set of objects based on their labels.

Equality & Inequality Selectors

Running kubectl get pods -l environment=dev will output Pods where label environment is dev.

You can also use negation to list Pods not matching a selector. For example kubectl get pods -l environment!=dev will output Pods where label environment is not dev.

Set Based Selectors

You can use a Set based selector to find Pods matching a group of values. For example kubectl get pods -l' environment in (dev,prod)' --show-labels will output Pods where label environment is dev or prod.

Chained Selectors

Chained selectors allow you to aggregate the results of multiple selectors using a comma separated list like this

kubectl get pods -l app=my-service,environment=dev --show-labels.

Annotations

Annotations are similar to selectors in that they allow you to associate metadata with a Kubernetes object. Unlike Selectors though, annotations can’t be used to select or group objects. Some sample use cases for annotations are specifying contact info for the object maintainer or the Git commit hash of the object.

Annotations are added to an object in the metadata.annotations section of the object descriptor and are visible in the Pod metadata when you run a describe like this kubectl describe pod annotation-pod.

The sample code for these notes is available in Github.