Namespace for State Storage

Overview ¶

To show list of deployed applications (via kapp ls), kapp manages metadata ConfigMap for each saved application. Each metadata ConfigMap contains generated label used to label all application resources. Additionally kapp creates ConfigMap per each deploy to record deployment history (seen via kapp app-change list -a app1).

--app-namespace flag allows to control which namespace is used for finding and storing metadata ConfigMaps. If namespace is not explicitly specified the app-wide namespace is used as specified by -n or --namespace); if -n is not specified your current namespace is selected from kube config (typically ~/.kube/config).

There are currently two approaches to deciding which namespace to use for storing metadata ConfigMaps:

• for each application, keep metadata ConfigMap and app resources themselves in the same namespace. That namespace will have to be created before running kapp deploy since kapp will first want to create a ConfigMap representing application.

  $ kubectl create ns app1
  $ kapp deploy -n app1 -f config.yml
  $ kapp ls -n app1
  

• create a dedicated namespace to store metadata ConfigMaps representing apps, and have kapp create Namespace resources for applications from their config. With this approach namespace management (creation and deletion) is tied to a particular app configuration which makes it a bit easier to track Namespaces via configuration.

   $ kubectl create ns apps
   $ kapp deploy --app-namespace apps -f app1/config.yml
   $ kapp deploy --app-namespace apps -f app2/config.yml
   $ kapp ls -n apps
  

  for example, app1/config.yml may look like this:

  apiVersion: v1
  kind: Namespace
  metadata:
    name: app1
  ---
  apiVersion: apps/v1
  kind: Deployment
  metadata:
    name: dep
    namespace: app1
  ...
  

Note: It’s currently not possible to have kapp place app ConfigMap resource into Namespace that kapp creates for that application.

App Changes ¶

As mentioned above, app changes (stored as ConfigMap) are stored in state namespace. App changes do not store any information necessary for kapp to operate, but rather act as informational records. There is currently no cap on how many app changes are kept per app.

To remove older app changes, use kapp app-change gc -a app1 which by default will keep 200 most recent changes (as of v0.12.0). Alternatively use --app-changes-max-to-keep flag on the deploy command to control number of changes kept at the time of deploy.