Benefits of using Annotations
- Human Service Discovery: We often realise the need for human service discovery when the production breaks or when we have better metrics to implement. Using annotations early helps in having human service discovery later.
- Building Versions: Using annotations is an essential part of the building an effective “version 0” of the services.
- Documentations: Annotations also helps in documenting the services so that is easier for others to understand the services.
- Tooling: Various Tools and Kubernetes client side libraries uses the metadata attached by Annotations.
- Versioning: As we discussed in the Introduction of the article, annotations can be used for providing version information, registry address, branch and Pull Request number in Git and image hashes.
- Integration With External Systems:Annotations can be used to store references or metadata required by external systems or services. This helps in integration with CI/CD pipelines, external databases, or configuration management systems.
How to Use Kubernetes Annotations?
Annotations are key-value pairs that are used to attach non-identifying metadata to Kubernetes objects. Various tools that are built over Kubernetes use this metadata attached by annotations to perform actions or enhance resource management. Labels and Annotations are used to attach metadata to Kubernetes objects. This makes annotations important for working with Kubernetes clusters. To learn more about Kubernetes cluster and its architecture refer to Kubernetes – Architecture.