Automatic Clean-up for Finished Jobs

TTL-after-finished controller provides a TTL (time to live) mechanism to limit the lifetime of resource objects that have finished execution. TTL controller only handles Jobs.

TTL-after-finished Controller

The TTL-after-finished controller is only supported for Jobs. A cluster operator can use this feature to clean up finished Jobs (either Complete or Failed) automatically by specifying the .spec.ttlSecondsAfterFinished field of a Job, as in this example. The TTL-after-finished controller will assume that a job is eligible to be cleaned up TTL seconds after the job has finished, in other words, when the TTL has expired. When the TTL-after-finished controller cleans up a job, it will delete it cascadingly, that is to say it will delete its dependent objects together with it. Note that when the job is deleted, its lifecycle guarantees, such as finalizers, will be honored.

The TTL seconds can be set at any time. Here are some examples for setting the .spec.ttlSecondsAfterFinished field of a Job:

• Specify this field in the job manifest, so that a Job can be cleaned up automatically some time after it finishes.
• Set this field of existing, already finished jobs, to adopt this new feature.
• Use a mutating admission webhook to set this field dynamically at job creation time. Cluster administrators can use this to enforce a TTL policy for finished jobs.
• Use a mutating admission webhook to set this field dynamically after the job has finished, and choose different TTL values based on job status, labels, etc.

Caveat

Updating TTL Seconds

Note that the TTL period, e.g. .spec.ttlSecondsAfterFinished field of Jobs, can be modified after the job is created or has finished. However, once the Job becomes eligible to be deleted (when the TTL has expired), the system won't guarantee that the Jobs will be kept, even if an update to extend the TTL returns a successful API response.

Time Skew

Because TTL-after-finished controller uses timestamps stored in the Kubernetes jobs to determine whether the TTL has expired or not, this feature is sensitive to time skew in the cluster, which may cause TTL-after-finish controller to clean up job objects at the wrong time.

Clocks aren't always correct, but the difference should be very small. Please be aware of this risk when setting a non-zero TTL.

What's next

• Clean up Jobs automatically

• Design doc