A Cron Job creates Jobs on a time-based schedule.

A CronJob object is just like an entry in crontab in Unix/Linux. It runs a job periodically on a given schedule.

You need a working Kubernetes cluster at version >= 1.8 (for CronJob).

For previous versions of the cluster (< 1.8) you need to explicitly enable batch/v2alpha1 API by passing –runtime-config=batch/v2alpha1=true to the API server.

Here is the manifest for Cronjob

apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: hello
spec:
  schedule: "*/1 * * * *"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: hello
            image: busybox
            args:
            - /bin/sh
            - -c
            - date; echo Hello from the Kubernetes cluster
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

Creating a Cron Job

$ kubectl create -f cronjob.yaml 
cronjob.batch "hello" created

$ kubectl get cronjobs hello
NAME      SCHEDULE      SUSPEND   ACTIVE    LAST SCHEDULE   AGE
hello     */1 * * * *   False     0         < none >        28s

$ kubectl get jobs --watch
NAME               DESIRED   SUCCESSFUL   AGE
hello-1550406120   1         1            35s
hello-1550406180   1         0         0s
hello-1550406180   1         0         0s
hello-1550406180   1         1         2s
hello-1550406240   1         0         0s
hello-1550406240   1         0         0s
hello-1550406240   1         1         1s
hello-1550406300   1         0         0s
hello-1550406300   1         0         0s
hello-1550406300   1         1         1s
hello-1550406120   1         1         3m

Deleting a Cron Job

$ kubectl delete cronjob hello
cronjob "hello" deleted

Writing a Cron Job Spec

As with all other Kubernetes configs, a cron job needs apiVersion, kind, and metadata fields.

Schedule

The .spec.schedule is a required field of the .spec. It takes a Cron format string, such as 0 * * * * or @hourly, as schedule time of its jobs to be created and executed.