How to remove "Completed" or "Failed" pods generated during workload creation in TAP

Products

• VMware Tanzu Application Platform

Issue/Introduction

There are several interim pods generated during workload creation in TAP. These pods are created for various purposes, such as fetching source code, building application container image, or writing configuration to a destination (git or registry) for further deployment to a run cluster.

The kubectl get pods command is normally overwhelmed by completed pods over time, thus hindering the effective monitoring and control of live pods.

🛶 Pods
   NAME                                        READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
   tanzu-java-web-app-build-11-###-pod        0/1     Completed   0          6d12h
   tanzu-java-web-app-build-12-###-pod        0/1     Completed   0          22h
   tanzu-java-web-app-build-31-###-pod        0/1     Completed   0          60d
   tanzu-java-web-app-config-writer-6###-pod  0/1     Completed   0          21d
   tanzu-java-web-app-config-writer-7###-pod  0/1     Completed   0          6d12h
   tanzu-java-web-app-config-writer-a###-pod  0/1     Completed   0          60d
   tanzu-java-web-app-config-writer-g###-pod  0/1     Completed   0          45d

Resolution

To remove those "Completed" Pods, we shall clean up Pods either in "Succeeded" or "Failed" status.

• Deleting Succeeded Pods

kubectl delete pod --field-selector=status.phase==Succeeded

• Deleting Failed Pods

kubectl delete pod --field-selector=status.phase==Failed

We can also combine the commands to delete both succeeded and failed pods at once. This ensures the removal of both completed and failed pods from our cluster.

kubectl delete pod --field-selector=status.phase==Succeeded,status.phase==Failed