Learn how to use a Kubernetes namespace strategy to organize your clusters better and control your cloud costs.
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When you’re running a relatively small cluster, you might get away with having no structure in place for it. But with time, your cluster will inevitably scale to dozens of pods and hundreds of containers. If you keep running them carefree, you’ll deal with a mess sooner rather than later. Here’s your golden ticket to get out of this chaos: Kubernetes namespace.
By keeping your cluster organized with namespaces, labels, and annotations, you’ll avoid the performance, maintenance, and security issues that come together in a package with the lack of control over the deployed objects and services.
Keep reading to learn how to use Kubernetes namespaces to organize your clusters and optimize them for cost.
When you create a physical Kubernetes cluster, you’ll get one workable namespace on top of it by default. This is where you create Kubernetes objects. But as your project grows, having a single namespace will quickly become an issue.
A namespace functions like a virtual cluster, and Kubernetes lets you create multiple such virtual clusters in a single physical cluster. By configuring multiple namespaces, you’ll free your team members from the burden of working with a single namespace. This will improve your cluster’s manageability, performance, and security.
But don’t rush away to create a bunch of random namespaces. What you need is a namespace strategy.
How do you build a namespace strategy? You’re not going to like this, but “it depends.”
I’ve seen many different namespace strategies out there. They usually depend on factors like team size, team structure, and project complexity.
A small team dealing with a few microservices can easily get away with that one namespace you get in Kubernetes by default. But the same setup will cause massive issues in a fast-growing company with multiple services. In this scenario, it’s better to create sub-teams and give each a separate namespace.
In larger companies, there may be many widely dispersed teams. Team A might be working on a project that Team B isn’t even aware of. But they all use resources in the same Kubernetes namespace. When Team A deploys its project to that namespace, it risks impacting the work of Team B.
What these teams need is isolation and team-based access security on separate namespaces.
