Concepts

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Annotations

You can use Kubernetes annotations to attach arbitrary non-identifying metadata to objects. Clients such as tools and libraries can retrieve this metadata.

Attaching metadata to objects

You can use either labels or annotations to attach metadata to Kubernetes objects. Labels can be used to select objects and to find collections of objects that satisfy certain conditions. In contrast, annotations are not used to identify and select objects. The metadata in an annotation can be small or large, structured or unstructured, and can include characters not permitted by labels.

Annotations, like labels, are key/value maps:

"metadata": {
  "annotations": {
    "key1" : "value1",
    "key2" : "value2"
  }
}

Here are some examples of information that could be recorded in annotations:

Instead of using annotations, you could store this type of information in an external database or directory, but that would make it much harder to produce shared client libraries and tools for deployment, management, introspection, and the like.

Syntax and character set

Annotations are key/value pairs. Valid annotation keys have two segments: an optional prefix and name, separated by a slash (/). The name segment is required and must be 63 characters or less, beginning and ending with an alphanumeric character ([a-z0-9A-Z]) with dashes (-), underscores (_), dots (.), and alphanumerics between. The prefix is optional. If specified, the prefix must be a DNS subdomain: a series of DNS labels separated by dots (.), not longer than 253 characters in total, followed by a slash (/).

If the prefix is omitted, the annotation Key is presumed to be private to the user. Automated system components (e.g. kube-scheduler, kube-controller-manager, kube-apiserver, kubectl, or other third-party automation) which add annotations to end-user objects must specify a prefix.

The kubernetes.io/ and k8s.io/ prefixes are reserved for Kubernetes core components.

What's next

Learn more about Labels and Selectors.

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