Architecture

This document describes the high-level architecture of kube-rs.

This is intended for contributors or people interested in architecture.

Overview

The kube-rs repository contains 5 main crates, examples and tests.

The main crate that users generally import is kube, and it's a straight facade crate that re-exports from the four other crates:

• kube_core -> re-exported as core
• kube_client -> re-exported as api + client + config + discovery
• kube_derive -> re-exported as CustomResource
• kube_runtime -> re-exported as runtime

In terms of dependencies between these 4:

• kube_core is used by kube_runtime, kube_derive and kube_client
• kube_client is used by kube_runtime
• kube_runtime is the highest level abstraction

The extra indirection crate kube is there to avoid cyclic dependencies between the client and the runtime (if the client re-exported the runtime then the two crates would be cyclically dependent).

NB: We refer to these crates by their crates.io name using underscores for separators, but the folders have dashes as separators.

When working on features/issues with kube-rs you will generally work inside one of these crates at a time, so we will focus on these in isolation, but talk about possible overlaps at the end.

Kubernetes Ecosystem Considerations

The Rust ecosystem does not exist in a vaccum as we take heavy inspirations from the popular Go ecosystem. In particular:

• core module contains invariants from apimachinery that is preseved across individual apis
• client::Client is a re-envisioning of a generic client-go
• runtime::Controller abstraction follows conventions in controller-runtime
• derive::CustomResource derive macro for CRDs is loosely inspired by kubebuilder's annotations

We do occasionally diverge on matters where following the go side is worse for the rust language, but when it comes to choosing names and finding out where some modules / functionality should reside; a precedent in client-go, apimachinery, controller-runtime and kubebuilder goes a long way.

Generated Structs

We do not maintain the kubernetes types generated from the swagger.json or the protos at present moment, and we do not handle client-side validation of fields relating to these types (that's left to the api-server).

We generally use k8s-openapi's Rust bindings for Kubernetes' builtin types types, see:

• github.com:k8s-openapi
• docs.rs:k8s-openapi

We also maintain an experimental set of Protobuf bindings, see k8s-pb.

Crate Overviews

kube-core

This crate only contains types relevant to the Kubernetes API, abstractions analogous to what you'll find inside apimachinery, and extra Rust traits that help us with generics further down in kube-client.

Starting out with the basic type modules first:

• metadata: the various metadata types; ObjectMeta, ListMeta, TypeMeta
• request + response + subresource: a sans-IO style http interface for the API
• watch: a generic enum and behaviour for the watch api
• params: generic parameters passed to sans-IO request interface (ListParams etc, called ListOptions in apimachinery)

Then there are traits

• crd: a versioned CustomResourceExt trait for kube-derive
• object generic conveniences for iterating over typed lists of objects, and objects following spec/status conventions
• resource: a Resource trait for kube-client's Api + a convenience ResourceExt trait for users

The most important export here is the Resource trait and its impls. It is a pretty complex trait, with an associated type called DynamicType (that is default empty). Every ObjectMeta-using type that comes from k8s-openapi gets a blanket impl of Resource so we can use them generically (in kube_client::Api).

Finally, there are two modules used by the higher level discovery module (in kube-client) and they have similar counterparts in apimachinery/restmapper + apimachinery/group_version:

• discovery: types returned by the discovery api; capabilities, verbs, scopes, key info
• gvk: partial type information to infer api types

The main type here from these two modules is ApiResource because it can also be used to construct a kube_client::Api instance without compile-time type information (both DynamicObject and Object has Resource impls where DynamicType = ApiResource).

kube-client

config

Contains logic for determining the runtime environment (local kubeconfigs or in-cluster) so that we can construct our Config from either source.

• Config is the source-agnostic type (with all the information needed by our Client)
• Kubeconfig is for loading from ~/.kube/config or from any number of kubeconfig like files set by KUBECONFIG evar.
• Config::from_cluster_env reads environment variables that are injected when running inside a pod

In general this module has similar functionality to the upstream client-go/clientcmd module.

client

The Client is one of the most complicated parts of kube-rs, because it has the most generic interface. People can mock the Client, people can replace individual components and force inject headers, people can choose their own tls stack, and - in theory - use whatever http clients they want.

Generally, the Client is created from the properties of a Config to create a particular hyper::Client with a pre-configured amount of tower::Layers (see TryFrom<Config> for Client), but users can also pass in an arbitrary tower::Service (to fully customise or to mock). The signature restrictions on Client::new is commensurately large.

The tls module contains the openssl or rustls interfaces to let users pick their tls stacks. The connectors created in that module is passed to hyper::Client based on feature selection.

The Client can be created from a particular type of using the properties in the Config to configure its layers. Some of our layers come straight from tower-http:

• tower_http::DecompressionLayer to deal with gzip compression
• tower_http::TraceLayer to propagate http request information onto tracing spans.
• tower_http::AddAuthorizationLayer to set bearer tokens / basic auth (when needed)

but we also have our own layers in the middleware module:

• BaseUriLayer prefixes Config::base_url to requests
• AuthLayer configures either AddAuthorizationLayer or AsyncFilterLayer<RefreshableToken> depending on authentication method in the kubeconfig. AsyncFilterLayer<RefreshableToken> is like AddAuthorizationLayer, but with a token that's refreshed when necessary.

(The middleware module is kept small to avoid mixing the business logic (client::auth openid connect oauth provider logic) with the tower layering glue.)

The exported layers and tls connectors are mainly exposed through the config_ext module's ConfigExt trait which is only implemented by Config (because the config has all the properties needed for this in general, and it helps minimise our api surface).

Finally, the Client manages other key aspects of IO the protocol such as:

• Client::connect performs an HTTP Upgrade for specialised verbs
• Client::request handles 90% of all requests
• Client::request_events handles streaming watch events using tokio_utils's FramedRead codec
• Client::request_status handles Either<T, Status> responses from kubernetes

api

The generic Api type and its methods.

Builds on top of the Request / Response interface in kube_core by parametrising over a generic type K that implement Resource (plus whatever else is needed).

The Api absorbs a Client on construction and is then configured with its Scope (through its ::namespaced / ::default_namespaced or ::all constructors).

For dynamic types (Object and DynamicObject) it has slightly more complicated constructors which have the _with suffix.

The core_methods and most subresource methods generally follow this recipe:

• create Request
• store the kubernetes verb in the [http::Extensions] object
• call the request with the Client and tell it what type(s) to deserialize into

Some subresource methods (behind the ws feature) use the remote_command module's AttachedProcess interface expecting a duplex stream to deal with specialised websocket verbs (exec and attach) and is calling Client::connect first to get that stream.

discovery

Deals with dynamic discovery of what apis are available on the api-server.
Normally this can be used to discover custom resources, but also certain standard resources that vary between providers.

The Discovery client can be used to do a full recursive sweep of api-groups into all api resources (through filter/exclude -> run) and then the users can periodically re-run to keep the cache up to date (as kubernetes is being upgraded behind the scenes).

The discovery module also contains a way to run smaller queries through the oneshot module; e.g. resolving resource name when having group version kind, resolving every resource within one specific group, or even one group at a pinned version.

The equivalent Go logic is found in client-go/discovery

kube-derive

The smallest crate. A simple derive proc_macro to generate Kubernetes wrapper structs and trait impls around a data struct.

Uses darling to parse #[kube(attrs...)] then uses syn and quote to produce a suitable syntax tree based on the attributes requested.

It ultimately contains a lot of ugly json coercing from attributes into serialization code, but this is code that everyone working with custom resources need.

It has hooks into schemars when using JsonSchema to ensure the correct type of CRD schema is attached to the right part of the generated custom resource definition.

kube-runtime

The highest level crate that deals with the highest level abstractions (such as controllers/watchers/reflectors) and specific Kubernetes apis that need common care (finalisers, waiting for conditions, event publishing).

watcher

The watcher module contains state machine wrappers around Api::watch that will watch and auto-recover on allowable failures.
The watcher fn is the general purpose one that is similar to informers in Go land, and will watch a collection of objects. The watch_object is a specialised version of this that watches a single object.

reflector

The reflector module contains wrappers around watcher that will cache objects in memory.
The reflector fn wraps a watcher and a state Store that is updated on every event emitted by the watcher.

The reason for the difference between watcher::Event (created by watcher) and kube::api::WatchEvent (created by Api::watch) is that watcher will deals with desync errors and do a full relist whose result is then propagated as a single event, ensuring the reflector can do a single, atomic update to its state Store.

controller

The controller module contains the Controller type and its associated definitions.

The Controller is configured to watch one root object (configured via ::new), and several owned objects (via ::owns), and - once ::run - it will hit a users reconcile function for every change to the root object or any of its child objects (and internally it will traverse up the object tree - usually through owner references - to find the affected root object).

The user is then meant to provide an idempotent reconcile fn, that does not know what underlying object was changed, to ensure the state configured in its crd, is what can be seen in the world.

To manage this, a vector of watchers is converted into a set of streams of the same type by mapping the watchers so they have the same output type. This is why watches and owns differ: owns looks up OwnerReferences, but watches need you to define the relation yourself with a mapper. The mappers we support are trigger_owners, trigger_self, and the custom trigger_with.

Once we have combined the stream of streams we essentially have a flattened super stream with events from multiple watchers that will act as our input events. With this, the applier can start running its fairly complex machinery:

1. new input events get sent to the scheduler
2. scheduled events are then passed them through a Runner preventing duplicate parallel requests for the same object
3. when running, we send the affected object to the users reconciler fn and await that future
4. a) on success, prepare the users Action (generally a slow requeue several minutes from now)
5. b) on failure, prepare a Action based on the users error policy (generally a backoff'd requeue with shorter initial delay)
6. Map resulting Actions through an ad-hoc scheduler channel
7. Resulting requeue requests through the channel are picked up at the top of applier and merged with input events in step 1.

Ideally, the process runs forever, and it minimises unnecessary reconcile calls (like users changing more than one related object while one reconcile is already happening).

See controller internals for some more information on this.

finalizer

Contains a helper wrapper finalizer for a reconcile fn used by a Controller when a user is using finalizers to handle garbage collection.

This lets the user focus on simply selecting the type of behaviour they would like to exhibit based on whether the object is being deleted or it's just being regularly reconciled (through enum matching on finalizer::Event). This lets the user elide checking for potential deletion timestamps and manage the state machinery of metadata.finalizers through jsonpatching.

wait

Contains helpers for waiting for conditions, or objects to be fully removed (i.e. waiting for finalizers post delete).

These build upon watch_object with specific mappers.

events

Contains an event Recorder ala client-go/events that controllers can hook into, to publish events related to their reconciliations.

Crate Delineation and Overlaps

When working on the the client machinery, it's important to realise that there are effectively 5 layers involved:

1. Sans-IO request builder (in kube_core::Request)
2. IO (in kube_client::Client)
3. Typing (in kube_client::Api)
4. Helpers for using the API correctly (e.g.kube_runtime::watcher)
5. High-level abstractions for specific tasks (e.g. kube_runtime::controller)

At level 3, we essentially have what the K8s team calls a basic client. As a consequence, new methods/subresources typically cross 2 crate boundaries (kube_core, kube_client), and needs to touch 3 main modules.

Similarly, there are also the traits and types that define what an api means in kube_core like Resource and ApiResource.
If modifying these, then changes to kube-derive are likely necessary, as it needs to directly implement this for users.

These types of cross-crate dependencies are why we expose kube as a single versioned facade crate that users can upgrade atomically (without being caught in the middle of a publish cycle). This also gives us better compatibility with dependabot.