How to automatically remove completed Kubernetes Jobs created by a CronJob?

Josh Newman picture Josh Newman · Dec 29, 2016 · Viewed 68.1k times · Source

Is there a way to automatically remove completed Jobs besides making a CronJob to clean up completed Jobs?

The K8s Job Documentation states that the intended behavior of completed Jobs is for them to remain in a completed state until manually deleted. Because I am running thousands of Jobs a day via CronJobs and I don't want to keep completed Jobs around.

Answer

JJC picture JJC · Mar 30, 2017

You can now set history limits, or disable history altogether, so that failed or successful CronJobs are not kept around indefinitely. See my answer here. Documentation is here.

To set the history limits:

The .spec.successfulJobsHistoryLimit and .spec.failedJobsHistoryLimit fields are optional. These fields specify how many completed and failed jobs should be kept. By default, they are set to 3 and 1 respectively. Setting a limit to 0 corresponds to keeping none of the corresponding kind of jobs after they finish.

The config with 0 limits would look like:

apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: hello
spec:
  schedule: "*/1 * * * *"
  successfulJobsHistoryLimit: 0
  failedJobsHistoryLimit: 0
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: hello
            image: busybox
            args:
            - /bin/sh
            - -c
            - date; echo Hello from the Kubernetes cluster
          restartPolicy: OnFailure