Kubernetes: How to delete PODs based on age/creation time

Question

Is it possible to delete POD in kubernetes based on creation time or age?

Example : I would like to delete all PODs which are older than 1 day. These PODs are orphaned , therefore no new PODs will be created.

Answer 1

This command will delete all PODs older than one day :

kubectl get pods -o go-template --template '{{range .items}}{{.metadata.name}} {{.metadata.creationTimestamp}}{{"\n"}}{{end}}' | awk '$2 <= "'$(date -d 'yesterday' -Ins --utc | sed 's/+0000/Z/')'" { print $1 }' | xargs --no-run-if-empty kubectl delete pod

This command will delete all PODs older than 4 hours :

kubectl get pods -o go-template --template '{{range .items}}{{.metadata.name}} {{.metadata.creationTimestamp}}{{"\n"}}{{end}}' | awk '$2 <= "'$(date -d'now-4 hours' -Ins --utc | sed 's/+0000/Z/')'" { print $1 }' | xargs --no-run-if-empty kubectl delete pod

Answer 2

We could do this with awk by doing a regex [0-9]+d directly on the AGE ($5, 5th column) column and then printing the corresponding NAME ($1, first column) column

kubectl delete pod $(kubectl get pod | awk 'match($5,/[0-9]+d/) {print $1}')

Test first to see what's matching:

kubectl get pod | awk 'match($5,/[0-9]+d/) {print $0}'

$0 means all columns

Answer 3

You can either add a liveness probe to track how long the pod alive and kill it when it's longer a certain period. Or you can schedule a CronJob

Answer 4

modified to work on mac:

# try the gnu versions: gxargs
brew install findutils coreutils


kubectl get pods -o go-template -n gui2 --template '{{range .items}}{{.metadata.name}} {{.metadata.creationTimestamp}}{{"\n"}}{{end}}' | awk '$2 <= "'$(gdate -d '21 days ago' -Ins --utc | sed 's/+0000/Z/')'" { print $1 }' | gxargs --no-run-if-empty kubectl delete pod

Answer 5

Here is an alternative answer that uses kubectl, jq, and xargs.

It works locally for me on Mac, but I also uses it in a Kubernetes cronjob that runs debian-slim, so I think it works on both Mac and Linux.

The time is set in seconds (86400s here for 1 day).

kubectl get pod -o json | jq -r --argjson timestamp 86400 '.items[] | select (.metadata.creationTimestamp | sub("\\..*";"Z") | sub("\\s";"T") | fromdate < now - $timestamp).metadata.name' | xargs -r -L1 kubectl delete pod ;

Answer 6

Here's a variant of the answer by dansl1982 above that will delete all pods with a particular label in all namespaces.

kubectl get pods -A -l app=my-api -o go-template --template '{{range .items}}{{.metadata.namespace}} {{.metadata.name}} {{.metadata.creationTimestamp}}{{"\n"}}{{end}}' | awk '$3 <= "'$(date -d'now-4 hours' -Ins --utc | sed 's/+0000/Z/')'" { print $1 " " $2 }' | xargs -L 1 --no-run-if-empty kubectl delete pod -n $1 $2

Answer 7

No answer here by itself was complete for what I needed, so I took bits of (and upvoted) several answers, then mashed them together to delete completed pods older than a day, from various namespaces.

Here's what worked for me:

kubectl get pod --all-namespaces --field-selector=status.phase==Succeeded \
 | awk 'match($6,/[0-9]+d/) {print $1, $2}' \
 | xargs -L 1 --verbose --no-run-if-empty kubectl delete pod -n $1 $2

• kubectl to find for completed pods in all namespaces,
• awk to filter pods that finished a day or more ago (any age string ending with a d),
• xargs to run (and output) kubectl delete against each pod, specifying the pod's namespace.

Answer 8

Here is another answer by showing the custom field when get pods and filter by the .metadata.creationTimestamp

kubectl delete pod -n foo $(kubectl get pods -n foo --field-selector=status.phase=Failed -o=custom-columns=NAME:.metadata.name,AGE:.metadata.creationTimestamp --no-headers=true --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp | awk '$2 <= "'$(gdate -d '10 days ago' -Ins | sed 's/+0000/Z/')'" { print $1 }')

Based on the above command -o=custom-columns=NAME: has been used for the custom columns.