Sleep Mode & Auto Delete

vCluster Platform provides two powerful features to reduce Kubernetes cost:

• Sleep Mode which puts namespaces to sleep when nobody is using them, i.e. purging all pods while keeping all resources inside the namespaces during periods of inactivity
• Auto-Delete which deletes namespaces that have been idle for a while

Both of these feature typically rely on Loft's inactivity detection.

Working with Sleep Mode

With sleep mode, you can put namespaces to sleep which means that Loft will set replicas: 0 for all replica-controlled resources such as Deployments and StatefulSets inside the namespace. This means that Kubernetes will delete all pods but the entire configuration of resources within the namespace is still there.

Sleep mode can be:

• Invoked manually
• Triggered by an inactivity timeout (no one has ran a kubectl command or accessed an ingress in this namespace for X minutes)
• Scheduled using a CRON syntax

Manual + Automatic Sleep / Wake-up

Start Sleep (manual)

UI

1. In the Projects > NameSpaces view, hover over the row of the namespace that you want to put to sleep

2. Click on the button to put the namespace to Sleep

3. Notice how the Status column shows that the namespace is now sleeping.

Automatic Wakeup

Note that the namespace will automatically wake up again, once you run a kubectl command or send a Kubernetes request via another tool to the namespace.

CLI

To put a namespace to sleep using vCluster CLI, run:

vcluster platform sleep namespace [name]

Automatic Wakeup

Note that the namespace will automatically wake up again, once you run a kubectl command or send a Kubernetes request via another tool to the namespace.

Automatic Sleep Mode (individual namespace)

1. In the Projects > Namespaces view, hover over the namespace that you want to configure automatic sleep mode for

2. Click on the Edit button to Edit the namespace

3. In the drawer that appears on the right, expand the Sleep Mode section. This only works for namespaces without a template, if you want to change the sleep mode configuration for a namespace created by a template, please do the changes in the Templates view

4. Use the Sleep After Inactivity field to specify the time to wait before putting the namespace to sleep if there is no more user activity in this namespace

5. On the very bottom, click on the button to save the changes

Wake up namespace

UI

1. In the Projects > Namespaces view, hover over the Status column of the namespace that you want to wake up

2. While hovering over the row, you will see a tooltip appear that provide information about the sleep state of this namespace

3. Click on the button to wakeup the namespace

4. Notice how the Status column shows that the namespace is now running again.

CLI

To wake up a sleeping namespace using vCluster CLI, run:

vcluster platform wakeup namespace [name]

Scheduled Sleep / Wake-up

Scheduled Sleep & Wake-Up (individual namespace)

1. In the Projects > Namespaces view, hover over namespace that you want to configure automatic sleep mode for

2. Click on the Edit button to Edit the namespace

3. In the drawer that appears on the right, expand the Sleep Mode namespace. This only works for namespaces without a template, if you want to change the sleep mode configuration for a namespace created by a template, please do the changes in the Templates view

4. Expand the Sleep & Wake-Up Schedule section

5. Use the Sleep Schedule field and/or the Wake-Up Schedule field to specify the Cronjob Times when the respective namespace should be put to sleep or woken up

6. On the very bottom, click on the button to save the changes

Working with Auto-Delete

Loft lets you configure an auto-delete for namespaces that have not been used for a certain period of time (inactivity).

Configure Auto-Delete Timeout

1. In the Projects > Namespaces view, hover over the namespace that you want to configure auto-delete for

2. Click on the Edit button to Edit the namespace

3. In the drawer that appears on the right, expand the Sleep Mode section. This only works for namespaces without a template, if you want to change the auto delete configuration for a namespace created by a template, please do the changes in the Templates view

4. Use the Delete After Inactivity field to specify the time to wait before deleting the namespace if there was no more user activity within this namespace

5. On the very bottom, click on the button to save the changes

Inactivity Detection

All requests that are made through vCluster Platform count as activity in the namespace.

If your kube-context points to Loft's API server as a proxy before the actual connected cluster's API server, every kubectl request will be an activity and reset the inactivity timeout.

Ingress Requests

For ingress-nginx based ingresses, activity detection also works automatically. Other ingress controllers are currently not supported. For nginx based ingresses, Loft will add a special annotation to each ingress that will track activity and reset the timer as soon as a request is made to that ingress.

Ingress Wakeup

Loft supports waking up a namespace through an ingress independent of the underlying ingress controller. Just navigate to the ingress host and you should see a Loft wakeup page for the namespace.

Advanced Configuration

Exclude Resources From Sleep

Loft allows you to specify resources that should not sleep within a namespace by providing the annotation sleepmode.loft.sh/exclude: 'true' on either a Deployment, StatefulSet, ReplicaSet or Pod. For example the following Deployment would not sleep if the namespace is sleeping:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: test
  annotations:
    sleepmode.loft.sh/exclude: 'true'
spec:
  replicas: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: test
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: test
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: busybox
          image: busybox
          command:
            - sleep
            - '3600'

Long-Living Connections

It's possible that certain requests such as kubectl exec or kubectl port-forward keep an active connection open to the namespace that prevents it from sleeping. This is wanted in most cases since the namespace shouldn't start sleeping when someone is still clearly using it, however there are cases where the connection might be idle (someone left the laptop open, but is not using it anymore) in which you want to terminate such connections and put the namespace to sleep.

There are multiple ways to approach this problem of active connections preventing a namespace from sleeping:

1. You can tell loft to timeout idle streaming connections (such as kubectl exec, kubectl port-forward etc.) after a certain time period with the annotation loft.sh/streaming-connection-idle-timeout: '3600' on a cluster. With this annotation set, loft will close connections automatically that are idle after the given seconds. By default, Loft will not timeout any connections. This will only apply to new opened connections to that cluster and not affect already running connections.



Set annotation on cluster

2. Tell loft to ignore all active connections for determining namespace activity via the annotation sleepmode.loft.sh/ignore-active-conntections: 'true'. This will put a namespace to sleep even though there still might be open connections such as kubectl exec or kubectl port-forward.
3. Configure your kubelets with the flag --streaming-connection-idle-timeout duration(see docs). This behaves essentially as option 1, however this configuration is Loft independent.

Ignoring Other Types of Activity

Annotation	Behavior	Format
"sleepmode.loft.sh/ignore-all"	ignore all activity	"true" OR "false"
"sleepmode.loft.sh/ignore-ingresses"	ignore requests to associated ingresses	"true" OR "false"
"sleepmode.loft.sh/ignore-groups"	ignore requests with a specific apigroup	"apps,group2,group3"
"sleepmode.loft.sh/ignore-vclusters"	ignore requests to specific vclusters	"vcluster1,vcluster2,vcluster3"
"sleepmode.loft.sh/ignore-resources"	ignore requests to specific resource types	"pods,resource2,resource3"
"sleepmode.loft.sh/ignore-verbs"	ignore requests with specific verbs	"create,verb1,verb2"
"sleepmode.loft.sh/ignore-resource-verbs"	ignore requests with specific verbs to specific resources	"myresource.mygroup=create update delete, myresource2.mygroup=create update"
"sleepmode.loft.sh/ignore-resource-names"	ignore requests to specific resources with specific names	"myresource.mygroup=name1 name2,..."
"sleepmode.loft.sh/ignore-active-connections"	ignore active connections	"true" OR "false"
"sleepmode.loft.sh/ignore-user-agents"	ignore specific useragents with trailling wildcard support	"kubectl*,argo,useragent3"