Jobs and CronJobs in Kubernetes

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A Job creates one or more Pods and ensures that a specified number of them successfully terminate. Kubernetes Jobs are created to run pods for a short period of time which are running for completion as opposed to different objects in Kubernetes like Replicasets, Replication Controllers, Demonesets, which is run continuously.

In Kubernetes , we have two types of jobs:

Run to completion
Cronjobs

Run to Completion job

Run to completion job are basically ensure that a specified number of pods are successfully complete its task and terminate. As pods successfully complete, the Job tracks the successful completions. When a specified number of successful completions is reached, the Job is complete.

Example of run to completion job

Create job.yml manifest file

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: simple-job
spec:
  completions: 5
  parallelism: 2
  ttlSecondsAfterFinished: 1
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: busybox
        image: busybox
        command: ["echo", "Kubernetes Job"]
      restartPolicy: Never

The above manifest file has following terms:

completions: This is set to a specified number means this job will run a specified number of pods for completing the task.
parallelism: This means that the number pods run in parallel to complete a task.
ttlSecondsAfterFinished: This is ttl controller which is used to clean up the completed job after a specified time.

2. Let’s deploy job using command:

$ kubectl create -f job.yml

3. To check the job status use command:

$ kubectl get jobs

NAME         COMPLETIONS   DURATION   AGE
simple-job   5/5           41s        104s

4. Checking for pods initiate by jobs:

$ kubectl get pods

NAME               READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
simple-job-6949g   0/1     Completed   0          105s
simple-job-829nb   0/1     Completed   0          118s
simple-job-c8l5g   0/1     Completed   0          2m13s
simple-job-hzwnd   0/1     Completed   0          111s
simple-job-p7rlh   0/1     Completed   0          2m13s

The above job completed all the tasks and then terminated.

Cron jobs

A CronJob creates Jobs on a repeating schedule.

One CronJob object is like one line of a crontab (cron table) file. It runs a job periodically on a given schedule, written in Cron format.

CronJobs are useful for creating periodic and recurring tasks, like running backups or sending emails.

CronJobs can also schedule individual tasks for a specific time, such as scheduling a Job for when your cluster is likely to be idle.

Example for cronjob

Create a cronjob.yml manifest:

apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: hello
spec:
  schedule: "*/1 * * * *"  # run every minute
  successfulJobsHistoryLimit: 1
  failedJobsHistoryLimit: 1
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: hello
            image: busybox
            args:
            - /bin/sh
            - -c
            - date; echo Hello from the Kubernetes cluster
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

This YAML will schedule a pod every one minute

schedule: schedule time of its jobs to be created and executed.

successfulJobsHistoryLimit: 1 failedJobsHistoryLimit: 1
It specifies how many completed and failed jobs should be kept in a cluster.

2. Let’s deploy job using command:

$ kubectl create -f cronjob.yml

3. To check the job status use command:

$ kubectl get cronjobs

NAME    SCHEDULE      SUSPEND   ACTIVE   LAST SCHEDULE   AGE
hello   */1 * * * *   False     0        <none>          36s

4. Checking for pods initiate by jobs:

$ kubectl get pods

NAME                     READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
hello-1603945620-pw2nr   0/1     Completed   0          63s
hello-1603945680-rv6h2   0/1     Completed   0          12s

You can see it basically run the job at every 1 minute.

5. Cleaning up the things

You can use following command to delete cronjobs:

$ kubectl delete cronjobs/hello

Conclusion

Kubernetes Jobs are used when you want to create pods that will do a specific task and then exit. Jobs use completion and parallelism parameters to control the patterns the pods run through. Job pods can run as a single task, several sequential tasks, or some parallel tasks in which the first task that finishes instructs the rest of the pods to complete and exit.