How to implement Kubernetes resource quotas

Clusters in Kubernetes have limited hardware resources available to them. Resource quotas in Kubernetes allow administrators to control resource usage per namespaceA pre-defined group that exists for isolation of resources and objects within a cluster., ensuring efficient cluster management. Here’s how to set up resource quotas in Kubernetes:

Setting the quota

First, prepare a YAML file to configure resource limits and requests. Below is a demo YAML file that limits CPU usage:

Then, we create a namespace where we’ll reserve the specified CPU quota, and create the ResourceQuota object:

Creating some pods

To test this quota, we’re going to make some test pods on this namespace:

We use the following command to create a pod from a YAML file:

Using the following command, we can see now that some amount of resources are being used within our defined limits:

Now we’re going to create a similar pod that will exceed the total CPU requests limit.

We’ll try to create a pod as before:

However, when we try to create this pod, it fails because the requested resources exceed our allocated CPU usage.

Below is an interactive folder and terminal where you can try out this demo and the commands given above. All required files are already there, so just click the "Run" button, and the terminal will open and set up a Kubernetes cluster for you to test with.

Conclusion

Setting up a resource quota in Kubernetes simply requires defining a namespace and a YAML file that assigns a quota to that namespace. Pods that are then run under that namespace will be limited to the quota that particular namespace has been defined with.