How to structure your namespaces

You have significant flexibility to decide how many namespaces to use and how to set them up. See the Kubernetes Namespace documentation for some basic information. You can also search and find many “Best Practices for Namespaces” documents published on the web.

Some considerations for Keptn:

• Keptn primarily operates on Kubernetes Workload resources and KeptnApp KeptnApp resources that are activated and defined by annotations to each workload.

• KeptnMetricsProvider resources need to be located in the same namespace as the associated KeptnMetric resources. But KeptnEvaluationDefinition resources that are used for pre- and post-deployment can reference metrics from any namespace. So you can create KeptnMetrics in a centralized namespace (such as keptn-system) and access those metrics in evaluations on all namespaces in the cluster.

• Analysis related resources ( Analysis, AnalysisDefinition, and AnalysisValueTemplate) reference each other via a name and, optionally, a namespace field. The Analysis resource references the AnalysisDefinition resource, which then references the AnalysisValueTemplate resources.

  • If the namespace in the reference is not set explicitly, the AnalysisDefinition and AnalysisValueTemplate resources must reside in the same namespace as the Analysis resource.
  • If the namespace in the reference is set for the resources, the Analysis, AnalysisDefinition, and AnalysisValueTemplate resources can each reside in different namespaces.

  This provides configuration options such as the following:

  • You can have one namespace with all of your AnalysisDefinition and AnalysisValueTemplate resources and reuse them in the different namespaces where you run analyses.

  • You can have everything strictly namespaced and always put the AnalysisDefinition, AnalysisValueTemplate and the Analysis resources into the same namespace, without adding the explicit namespace selectors when creating references between those objects.

• Each KeptnApp resource identifies the namespace to which it belongs. If you configure multiple namespaces, you can have KeptnApp resources with the same name in multiple namespaces without having them conflict.

• You do not need separate namespaces for separate versions of your application. The KeptnApp resource includes fields to define the version as well as a revision (used if you have to rerun a deployment but want to retain the version number).

So, possible namespace designs run the gamut:

• Run all your Keptn work in a single namespace
• Create a separate namespace for each logical grouping of your Keptn work
• Create a separate namespace for each workload