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Feature Gates

This page contains an overview of the various feature gates an administrator can specify on different Kubernetes components.

• Overview
• Using a Feature

Overview

Feature gates are a set of key=value pairs that describe alpha or experimental features. An administrator can use the --feature-gates command line flag on each component to turn a feature on or off. Each component supports a set of feature gates unique to that component. Use -h flag to see a full set of feature gates for all components.
To set feature gates for a component, such as kubelet, use the --feature-gates flag assigned to a list of feature pairs:

--feature-gates="...,DynamicKubeletConfig=true"

The following table is a summary of the feature gates that you can set on different Kubernetes components.

• The “Since” column contains the Kubernetes release when a feature is introduced or its release stage is changed.
• The “Until” column, if not empty, contains the last Kubernetes release in which you can still use a feature gate.

Using a Feature

Feature Stages

A feature can be in Alpha, Beta or GA stage. An Alpha feature means:

• Disabled by default.
• Might be buggy. Enabling the feature may expose bugs.
• Support for feature may be dropped at any time without notice.
• The API may change in incompatible ways in a later software release without notice.
• Recommended for use only in short-lived testing clusters, due to increased risk of bugs and lack of long-term support.

A Beta feature means:

• Enabled by default.
• The feature is well tested. Enabling the feature is considered safe.
• Support for the overall feature will not be dropped, though details may change.
• The schema and/or semantics of objects may change in incompatible ways in a subsequent beta or stable release. When this happens, we will provide instructions for migrating to the next version. This may require deleting, editing, and re-creating API objects. The editing process may require some thought. This may require downtime for applications that rely on the feature.
• Recommended for only non-business-critical uses because of potential for incompatible changes in subsequent releases. If you have multiple clusters that can be upgraded independently, you may be able to relax this restriction.

Note: Please do try Beta features and give feedback on them! After they exit beta, it may not be practical for us to make more changes.

A GA feature is also referred to as a stable feature. It means:

• The corresponding feature gate is no longer needed.
• Stable versions of features will appear in released software for many subsequent versions.

Feature Gates

Each feature gate is designed for enabling/disabling a specific feature:

• Accelerators: Enable Nvidia GPU support when using Docker
• AdvancedAuditing: Enable advanced auditing
• AffinityInAnnotations(deprecated): Enable setting Pod affinity or anti-affinitys.
• AllowExtTrafficLocalEndpoints: Enable a service to route external requests to node local endpoints.
• APIListChunking: Enable the API clients to retrieve (LIST or GET) resources from API server in chunks.
• APIResponseCompression: Compress the API responses for LIST or GET requests.
• AppArmor: Enable AppArmor based mandatory access control on Linux nodes when using Docker. See AppArmor Tutorial for more details.
• AttachVolumeLimit: Enable volume plugins to report limits on number of volumes that can be attached to a node. See dynamic volume limits for more details.
• BlockVolume: Enable the definition and consumption of raw block devices in Pods. See Raw Block Volume Support for more details.
• BoundServiceAccountTokenVolume: Migrate ServiceAccount volumes to use a projected volume consisting of a ServiceAccountTokenVolumeProjection. Check Service Account Token Volumes for more details.
• CPUCFSQuotaPeriod: Enable nodes to change CPUCFSQuotaPeriod.
• CPUManager: Enable container level CPU affinity support, see CPU Management Policies.
• CRIContainerLogRotation: Enable container log rotation for cri container runtime.
• CSIBlockVolume: Enable external CSI volume drivers to support block storage. See the csi raw block volume support documentation for more details.
• CSIDriverRegistry: Enable all logic related to the CSIDriver API object in csi.storage.k8s.io.
• CSIMigration: Enables shims and translation logic to route volume operations from in-tree plugins to corresponding pre-installed CSI plugins
• CSIMigrationAWS: Enables shims and translation logic to route volume operations from the AWS-EBS in-tree plugin to EBS CSI plugin
• CSIMigrationGCE: Enables shims and translation logic to route volume operations from the GCE-PD in-tree plugin to PD CSI plugin
• CSIMigrationOpenStack: Enables shims and translation logic to route volume operations from the Cinder in-tree plugin to Cinder CSI plugin
• CSINodeInfo: Enable all logic related to the CSINodeInfo API object in csi.storage.k8s.io.
• CSIPersistentVolume: Enable discovering and mounting volumes provisioned through a CSI (Container Storage Interface) compatible volume plugin. Check the csi volume type documentation for more details.
• CSIInlineVolume: Enable CSI volumes to be directly embedded in Pod specifications instead of a PersistentVolume.
• CustomPodDNS: Enable customizing the DNS settings for a Pod using its dnsConfig property. Check Pod’s DNS Config for more details.
• CustomResourceSubresources: Enable /status and /scale subresources on resources created from CustomResourceDefinition.
• CustomResourceValidation: Enable schema based validation on resources created from CustomResourceDefinition.
• CustomResourceWebhookConversion: Enable webhook-based conversion on resources created from CustomResourceDefinition.
• DebugContainers: Enable running a “debugging” container in a Pod’s namespace to troubleshoot a running Pod.
• DevicePlugins: Enable the device-plugins based resource provisioning on nodes.
• DryRun: Enable server-side dry run requests.
• DynamicAuditing: Enable dynamic auditing
• DynamicKubeletConfig: Enable the dynamic configuration of kubelet. See Reconfigure kubelet.
• DynamicProvisioningScheduling: Extend the default scheduler to be aware of volume topology and handle PV provisioning. This feature is superceded by the VolumeScheduling feature completely in v1.12.
• DynamicVolumeProvisioning(deprecated): Enable the dynamic provisioning of persistent volumes to Pods.
• EnableEquivalenceClassCache: Enable the scheduler to cache equivalence of nodes when scheduling Pods.
• ExpandInUsePersistentVolumes: Enable expanding in-use PVCs. See Resizing an in-use PersistentVolumeClaim.
• ExpandPersistentVolumes: Enable the expanding of persistent volumes. See Expanding Persistent Volumes Claims.
• ExperimentalCriticalPodAnnotation: Enable annotating specific pods as critical so that their scheduling is guaranteed.
• ExperimentalHostUserNamespaceDefaultingGate: Enabling the defaulting user namespace to host. This is for containers that are using other host namespaces, host mounts, or containers that are privileged or using specific non-namespaced capabilities (e.g. MKNODE, SYS_MODULE etc.). This should only be enabled if user namespace remapping is enabled in the Docker daemon.
• GCERegionalPersistentDisk: Enable the regional PD feature on GCE.
• HugePages: Enable the allocation and consumption of pre-allocated huge pages.
• HyperVContainer: Enable Hyper-V isolation for Windows containers.
• Intializers: Enable the dynamic admission control as an extension to the built-in admission controllers. When the Initializers admission controller is enabled, this feature is automatically enabled.
• KubeletConfigFile: Enable loading kubelet configuration from a file specified using a config file. See setting kubelet parameters via a config file for more details.
• KubeletPluginsWatcher: Enable probe-based plugin watcher utility to enable kubelet to discover plugins such as CSI volume drivers.
• KubeletPodResources: Enable the kubelet’s pod resources grpc endpoint. See Support Device Monitoring for more details.
• LocalStorageCapacityIsolation: Enable the consumption of local ephemeral storage and also the sizeLimit property of an emptyDir volume.
• MountContainers: Enable using utility containers on host as the volume mounter.
• MountPropagation: Enable sharing volume mounted by one container to other containers or pods. For more details, please see mount propagation.
• NodeLease: Enable the new Lease API to report node heartbeats, which could be used as a node health signal.
• PersistentLocalVolumes: Enable the usage of local volume type in Pods. Pod affinity has to be specified if requesting a local volume.
• PodPriority: Enable the descheduling and preemption of Pods based on their priorities.
• PodReadinessGates: Enable the setting of PodReadinessGate field for extending Pod readiness evaluation. For more details, please see Pod readiness gate.
• ProcMountType: Enables control over ProcMountType for containers.
• PVCProtection: Enable the prevention of a PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) from being deleted when it is still used by any Pod. More details can be found here.
• ResourceLimitsPriorityFunction: Enable a scheduler priority function that assigns a lowest possible score of 1 to a node that satisfies at least one of the input Pod’s cpu and memory limits. The intent is to break ties between nodes with same scores.
• ResourceQuotaScopeSelectors: Enable resource quota scope selectors.
• RotateKubeletClientCertificate: Enable the rotation of the client TLS certificate on the kubelet. See kubelet configuration for more details.
• RotateKubeletServerCertificate: Enable the rotation of the server TLS certificate on the kubelet. See kubelet configuration for more details.
• RunAsGroup: Enable control over the primary group ID set on the init processes of containers.
• RuntimeClass: Enable the RuntimeClass feature for selecting container runtime configurations.
• ScheduleDaemonSetPods: Enable DaemonSet Pods to be scheduled by the default scheduler instead of the DaemonSet controller.
• SCTPSupport: Enables the usage of SCTP as protocol value in Service, Endpoint, NetworkPolicy and Pod definitions
• ServerSideApply: Enables the Sever Side Apply (SSA) path at the API Server.
• ServiceNodeExclusion: Enable the exclusion of nodes from load balancers created by a cloud provider. A node is eligible for exclusion if annotated with “alpha.service-controller.kubernetes.io/exclude-balancer” key.
• StorageObjectInUseProtection: Postpone the deletion of PersistentVolume or PersistentVolumeClaim objects if they are still being used.
• StreamingProxyRedirects: Instructs the API server to intercept (and follow) redirects from the backend (kubelet) for streaming requests. Examples of streaming requests include the exec, attach and port-forward requests.
• SupportIPVSProxyMode: Enable providing in-cluster service load balancing using IPVS. See service proxies for more details.
• SupportPodPidsLimit: Enable the support to limiting PIDs in Pods.
• Sysctls: Enable support for namespaced kernel parameters (sysctls) that can be set for each pod. See sysctls for more details.
• TaintBasedEvictions: Enable evicting pods from nodes based on taints on nodes and tolerations on Pods. See taints and tolerations for more details.
• TaintNodesByCondition: Enable automatic tainting nodes based on node conditions.
• TokenRequest: Enable the TokenRequest endpoint on service account resources.
• TokenRequestProjection: Enable the injection of service account tokens into a Pod through the projected volume.
• TTLAfterFinished: Allow a TTL controller to clean up resources after they finish execution.
• VolumeScheduling: Enable volume topology aware scheduling and make the PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) binding aware of scheduling decisions. It also enables the usage of local volume type when used together with the PersistentLocalVolumes feature gate.
• VolumeSnapshotDataSource: Enable volume snapshot data source support.
• VolumeSubpathEnvExpansion: Enable subPathExpr field for expanding environment variables into a subPath.
• WindowsGMSA: Enables passing of GMSA credential specs from pods to container runtimes.

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