Customizing Kf Features

Learn to configure your Kf cluster’s settings.

Build Retention

You can control how many Kf Builds are kept before being garbage collected.

kubectl patch \
kfsystem kfsystem \
--type='json' \
-p="[{'op': 'replace', 'path': '/spec/kf/config/buildRetentionCount', 'value': 1}]"

Task Retention

You can control how many Kf Tasks are kept before being garbage collected.

kubectl patch \
kfsystem kfsystem \
--type='json' \
-p="[{'op': 'replace', 'path': '/spec/kf/config/taskRetentionCount', 'value': 1}]"

Enable or Disable the Istio Sidecar

If you do not require the Istio sidecar for the Build pods, then they can be disabled by setting the value to true. Enable by setting the value to false.

kubectl patch \
kfsystem kfsystem \
--type='json' \
-p="[{'op': 'replace', 'path': '/spec/kf/config/buildDisableIstioSidecar', 'value': true}]"

Enable or Disable Routing Retries

Allows enabling/disbaling retries in the VirtualServices that route traffic to Apps. Kf leaves this value unset by default and it’s inherited from Istio.

Istio’s default retry mechanism attempts to make up for instability inherent in service meshes, however allowing retries requires the contents of the payload to be buffered within Envoy. This may fail for large payloads and the buffering will need to be disabled at the expense of some stability.

Values for routeDisableRetries:

false Inherit Istio’s retry settings. (Default)
true Set retries to 0.

kubectl patch \
    kfsystem kfsystem \
    --type='json' \
    -p="[{'op':'add','path':'/spec/kf/config/routeDisableRetries','value':true}]"

Enable or Disable Routing Hosts Ignoring Any Port Numbers

Allows enabling/disabling routing hosts ignoring any specified port number. By default hosts are matched using the exact value specified in the route Host (e.g a request with a Host header value of example.com:443 does not match with preconfigured route Host example.com). By enabling, ports are ignored and only hosts are used (e.g example.com:443 matches example.com)

Note: Feature will only work in clusters with istio 1.15+. In older versions it will function as though it where disabled.

Values for routeHostIgnoringPort:

false Will match the Host header in request to the exact configured route Host. (Default)
true Will use regexp to match to the configured route Host ignoring any port specified in the Host header of the request.

kubectl patch \
    kfsystem kfsystem \
    --type='json' \
    -p="[{'op':'add','path':'/spec/kf/config/routeHostIgnoringPort','value':true}]"

Build Pod Resource Limits

The default pod resource size can be increased from the default to accommodate very large builds. The units for the value are in Mi or Gi.

Note: This is only applicable for built-in Tasks (which is normal for a kf push build). For V2 buildpack builds, this will be set on two steps and one for V3 buildpacks or Dockerfiles. This means that for a V2 build the required Pod size will be double the limit. For example, if the memory limit is 1Gi, then the pod will require 2Gi.

kubectl patch \
kfsystem kfsystem \
--type='json' \
-p="[{'op': 'replace', 'path': '/spec/kf/config/buildPodResources', 'value': {'limits': {'memory': '234Mi'}}}]"

Read Kubernetes container resource docs for more information about container resource management.

Robust Build Snapshots

Kf uses Kaniko to build the final application containers in the v2 buildpack lifecycle. To produce image layers, Kaniko needs to take “snapsohts” of the image which requires iterating over all files in the image and checking if they’ve changed.

The fast mode checks for file attribute changes (like timestamps and size) and the slow mode checks full file hashes to determine if a file changed.

Kf apps aren’t expected to overwrite operating system files in their build, so fast mode should be used to reduce disk pressure.

Note: This value should be set to false in Kaniko versions older than v1.15.0.

Values for buildKanikoRobustSnapshot:

false Will use a fast snapshot mode for v2 builds. (Default)
true Will use a robust snapshot mode for v2 builds to catch uncommon cases.

kubectl patch \
kfsystem kfsystem \
--type='json' \
-p="[{'op': 'replace', 'path': '/spec/kf/config/buildKanikoRobustSnapshot', 'value': true}]"

Self Signed Certificates for Service Brokers

If you want to use self signed certificates for TLS (https instead of http) for the service broker URL, the Kf controller requires the CA certificate. To configure Kf for this scenario, create an immutable Kubernetes secret in the kf namespace and update the kfsystem.spec.kf.config.secrets.controllerCACerts.name object to point to it.

Create a secret to store the self-signed certificate.
Note: Customize the secret name if desired, or leave the default name of cacerts. Replace /path/to/cert/certs.pem with the path to the self-signed certificate.
```
 kubectl create secret generic cacerts -nkf --from-file /path/to/cert/certs.pem
 
```

Make the secret immutable.

 kubectl patch -nkf secret cacerts \
     --type='json' \
     -p="[{'op':'add','path':'/immutable','value':true}]"

Update kfsystem to point to the secret.

kubectl patch \
  kfsystem kfsystem \
  --type='json' \
  -p="[{'op':'add','path':'/spec/kf/config/secrets','value':{'controllerCACerts':{'name':'<var>cacerts</var>'}}}]"

Set CPU minimums and ratios

Application default CPU ratios and minimums can be set in the operator.

Values are set in CPU units. Units are typically expressed in millicpus (m), or thousandths of a CPU.

The spec.kf.config.appCPUMin property specifies a minimum amount of CPU per application, even if the developer has specified less.

kubectl patch \
    kfsystem kfsystem \
    --type='json' \
    -p="[{'op':'add','path':'/spec/kf/config/appCPUMin','value':'<var>200m</var>'}]"

The spec.kf.config.appCPUPerGBOfRAM property specifies a default amount of CPU to give each app per GB or RAM requested.

You can choose different approaches based on the desired outcome:

Choose the ratio of CPU to RAM for the cluster’s nodes if you want to maximize utilization.
Choose a ratio of 1 CPU to 4 GB of RAM which typically works well for I/0 or memory bound web applications.

kubectl patch \
    kfsystem kfsystem \
    --type='json' \
    -p="[{'op':'add','path':'/spec/kf/config/appCPUPerGBOfRAM','value':'<var>250m</var>'}]"

Set buildpacks using git tags

Buildpacks can support pinning by using git tags instead of automatically sourcing the latest buildpack from a git repository.

Note: Buildpacks can be added using the kfsystem operator and kubectl patch.

Add a new buildpack as follows and use a git tag to specify which version of the buildpack the app should use. Otherwise the buildpack will default to the latest version.

For example, to pin Golang buildpack version 1.9.49 do:

kubectl patch \
kfsystem kfsystem \
--type='json' \
 -p='[{"op":"add","path":"data/spec/kf/config/spaceBuildpacksV2","value":[{"name":"go_buildpack_v1.9.49","url":"https://github.com/cloudfoundry/go-buildpack.git#v1.9.49"}]}]'

This command will add the following to the config-defaults configmaps resource:

data:
  SpaceBuildpacksV2: |
    - name: go_buildpack_v1.9.49
      url: https://github.com/cloudfoundry/go-buildpack.git#v1.9.49

The kubectl patch command will replace all the existing buildpacks in the config-defaults configmaps. If the user would like the existing buildpacks to remain, these too need to be included in the command.

To get the list of existing buildpacks in the configmaps run the following command:

kubectl describe configmaps config-defaults -n kf

Set ProgressDeadlineSeconds

ProgressDeadlineSeconds can be set in the kfsystem operator.

kubectl patch \
    kfsystem kfsystem \
    --type='json' \
    -p="[{'op':'add','path':'/spec/kf/config/progressDeadlineSeconds','value':100}]"

Set TerminationGracePeriodSeconds

TerminationGracePeriodSeconds can be set in the kfsystem operator.

kubectl patch \
    kfsystem kfsystem \
    --type='json' \
    -p="[{'op':'add','path':'/spec/kf/config/terminationGracePeriodSeconds','value':200}]"

Enable/Disable App Start Command Lookup

Allows enabling/disbaling start command lookup in the App reconciler. This behavior requires the reconciler to fetch container configuration for every app from the container registry and enables displaying the start command on kf push and in kf app.

Enabling this behavior on a large cluster may make the reconcilation times for Apps slow.

Values for appDisableStartCommandLookup:

false Enable start command lookup. (Default)
true Disable start command lookup.

kubectl patch \
    kfsystem kfsystem \
    --type='json' \
    -p="[{'op':'add','path':'/spec/kf/config/appDisableStartCommandLookup','value':true}]"

Enable/Disable Kubernetes service Account (KSA) overrides

Allows enabling/disbaling the ability to override the Kubernetes Service Account for Apps via annotation.

Values for appEnableServiceAccountOverride:

false Don’t allow overriding service account. (Default)
true Allow developers to override KSAs for their Apps.

kubectl patch \
    kfsystem kfsystem \
    --type='json' \
    -p="[{'op':'add','path':'/spec/kf/config/appEnableServiceAccountOverride','value':true}]"

Set default Kf Task timeout

Kf uses Tekton TaskRuns as its mechanism to run Kf Tasks. Tekton may impose a default timeout on TaskRuns that differs depending on the version of Tekton you have installed.

You can override this setting either on the Tekton configmap – which will set the value for both Kf Tasks and Builds or on the Kf operator to apply the value only to Tasks.

The following values are supported:

null - Inherit the value from Tekton (Default).
Value <= 0 - Tasks get an infinite timeout.
Value >= 0 - Tasks get the given timeout.

Consider setting a long, but non-infinite timeout to prevent improperly programmed tasks from consuming resources.

kubectl patch \
    kfsystem kfsystem \
    --type='json' \
    -p="[{'op':'add','path':'/spec/kf/config/taskDefaultTimeoutMinutes','value':-1}]"

Enable/Disbale NFS in Kf Tasks

You can enable/disable the ability for Tasks run from Apps to mount NFS volumes.

Mounting NFS volumes requires FUSE which grants Task Pods with NFS additional system privileges on the node and may be a security concern.

kubectl patch \
    kfsystem kfsystem \
    --type='json' \
    -p="[{'op':'add','path':'/spec/kf/config/taskDisableVolumeMounts','value':true}]"

Last modified January 3, 2024: Increased source package size limit to 3 GB (#1068) (5ead659)