Object Names and IDs

Each object in your cluster has a Name that is unique for that type of resource. Every Kubernetes object also has a UID that is unique across your whole cluster.

For example, you can only have one Pod named myapp-1234 within the same namespace, but you can have one Pod and one Deployment that are each named myapp-1234.

For non-unique user-provided attributes, Kubernetes provides labels and annotations.

Names

A client-provided string that refers to an object in a resource URL, such as /api/v1/pods/some-name.

Only one object of a given kind can have a given name at a time. However, if you delete the object, you can make a new object with the same name.

Below are three types of commonly used name constraints for resources.

DNS Subdomain Names

Most resource types require a name that can be used as a DNS subdomain name as defined in RFC 1123. This means the name must:

• contain no more than 253 characters
• contain only lowercase alphanumeric characters, '-' or '.'
• start with an alphanumeric character
• end with an alphanumeric character

DNS Label Names

Some resource types require their names to follow the DNS label standard as defined in RFC 1123. This means the name must:

• contain at most 63 characters
• contain only lowercase alphanumeric characters or '-'
• start with an alphanumeric character
• end with an alphanumeric character

Path Segment Names

Some resource types require their names to be able to be safely encoded as a path segment. In other words, the name may not be "." or ".." and the name may not contain "/" or "%".

Here's an example manifest for a Pod named nginx-demo.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: nginx-demo
spec:
  containers:
  - name: nginx
    image: nginx:1.14.2
    ports:
    - containerPort: 80

Note: Some resource types have additional restrictions on their names.

UIDs

A Kubernetes systems-generated string to uniquely identify objects.

Every object created over the whole lifetime of a Kubernetes cluster has a distinct UID. It is intended to distinguish between historical occurrences of similar entities.

Kubernetes UIDs are universally unique identifiers (also known as UUIDs). UUIDs are standardized as ISO/IEC 9834-8 and as ITU-T X.667.

What's next

• Read about labels in Kubernetes.
• See the Identifiers and Names in Kubernetes design document.