Annotate a Service

Service Catalog lists all the services in your cluster, including helpful information like the owner, a description of the service, links to documentation, and more.

This information is all sourced from annotations set on the services. Annotations can be set either via kubectl or via Kubernetes YAML files.

Annotate via kubectl

Find a service you would like to annotate in your Service Catalog list that does not have an owner yet listed.

Take a note of the service name and run this command, filling in the service name and your name:

kubectl annotate svc <service name> a8r.io/owner="<your name>"

Refresh your browser and you should see the owner field updated.

If an annotation already exists for that key you will get an error; add the --overwrite flag:

kubectl annotate --overwrite svc <service name> a8r.io/owner="<your name>"

If your service is in a namespace other than default, you must specify it with the --namespace flag:

kubectl annotate svc <service name> --namespace <namespace> a8r.io/owner="<your name>"

While this is a quick and effective way to set a single annotation on a service, it doesn't scale well to setting multiple annotations. It also doesn't follow GitOps best practices as normally such resource updates should be stored in version control and applied via a deployment pipeline.

To accomplish this, you can annotate instead using YAML.

Annotate via YAML

Open the YAML config file of one of your services.

Navigate to the metadata property and locate the annotations property directly beneath it.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: your_service_name
  annotations:

If you cannot find an annotations property, add one to your config in the location shown.

Now add the following annotation, filling in your repo URL:

a8r.io/repository: "<repo URL>"

Your updated Service config should look something like this:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  Name: your_service_name
  annotations:
    a8r.io/repository: "https://github.com/datawire/ambassador"

Now apply this updated YAML to your cluster:

kubectl apply -f my_service.yaml

This YAML file can now be added to version control using your organization's practices.