Introduction

In the previous chapter, we created various kinds of pods and managed their life cycles. Once we start working with different pods, ideally, we would want to organize, group, and filter them based on certain properties. To do that, we need to add some information to our pods so that we can later use that information to organize them. We have already seen the use of the name and namespace fields as metadata for the pods. In addition to those fields, we can also add key-value pairs to the pods in order to add extra information as labels and annotations.

In this chapter, we will assign metadata to these pods in order to identify the pods through queries based on some metadata and then add additional unstructured metadata. We will cover labels and annotations in detail and examine the differences between them. We will use both labels and annotations and see when to use one or the other.