Ephemerate

This project is designed to allow K8s admins/developers to place lifetimes on namespaces in their cluster. This is accomplished by an operator and a CRD defining the parameters for ephemeration. The operator will register the CRD with the K8s API and then will poll for the Ephemerator custom object on an interval (in seconds) defined by EPHEMERATE_INTERVAL in the environment of the operator's pod. If you want to want to register a Ephemerator but not activate it, give it the annotation 'ephmerators.tessellate.io/enabled': 'false' and it will be ignored (or you can omit the label altogether). If the 'ephmerators.tessellate.io/enabled' annotation is set to 'true', the operator will activate the ephemerator.

The operator and custom objects must be cluster scoped. This helps save on requests to the K8s API to get all the namespaces, as well as saves on the complexity of watching many different namespaces.

Defining a lifetime

Lifetimes are defined with either a map of time units and their values, or as a date/time (24hr)/timezone map. Valid time units are [minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years]. See the examples below for more information.

A good list of timezone strings can be seen here

A note about actual vs. expected lifetimes

Because ephemerate occurs on a user defined interval, it is possible that the actual lifetime of a namespace may be more than the expected/defined lifetime. This is due to how to timers in kopf get registered and the evaluation interval. If you define a duration or until in the spec that is less than the evaluation interval, it will get deleted on the next timer evaluation. It is recommended to set durations in multiples of your evaluation interval.

Sample Ephemerators

apiVersion: tessellate.io/v1alpha1
kind: Ephemerator
metadata:
    name: my-ephemerator
    annotations:
        ephemerators.tessellate.io/enabled: 'true'
spec:
    namespaceToWatch: my-namespace
    lifetime: 
        duration:
            years: 1
            months: 2
            weeks: 3
            days: 4
            hours: 5
            minutes: 6

apiVersion: tessellate.io/v1alpha1
kind: Ephemerator
metadata:
    name: my-ephemerator
    annotations:
        ephemerators.tessellate.io/enabled: 'true'
spec:
    namespaceToWatch: thanksgiving
    lifetime: 
        until:
            date: '2021-11-25'
            time: '12:00:00'
            timezone: 'America/Phoenix'

Cleanup

As ephemerate is installed via helm, it should be uninstalled the same way; the only caveat is that any active ephemerators should be deleted before uninstalling so that helm can actually delete the CRD for you. Kopf adds finalizers to the custom objects so kubectl/k8s dashboard/etc. will not be able to delete them without the operator running.