nais

Nais Platform Skill

Patterns and procedures for deploying, configuring, and troubleshooting applications on Nais (Kubernetes on GCP).

When to Use

• Creating or modifying Nais manifests
• Adding GCP resources (PostgreSQL, Kafka, buckets)
• Configuring access policies and ingress
• Troubleshooting pod startup failures or crashes
• Understanding pod lifecycle and graceful shutdown

Commands

# Check pod status
kubectl get pods -n <namespace> -l app=<app-name>

# View pod logs (add -f to follow)
kubectl logs -n <namespace> -l app=<app-name> --tail=100 -f

# Describe pod (events, errors)
kubectl describe pod -n <namespace> <pod-name>

# View Nais app status
kubectl get app -n <namespace> <app-name> -o yaml

# Restart deployment (rolling)
kubectl rollout restart deployment/<app-name> -n <namespace>

# Port-forward for local debugging
kubectl port-forward -n <namespace> svc/<app-name> 8080:80

Nais Manifest Structure

Every Nais application requires:

apiVersion: nais.io/v1alpha1
kind: Application
metadata:
  name: app-name
  namespace: team-namespace
  labels:
    team: team-namespace
spec:
  image: {{ image }} # Replaced by CI/CD
  port: 8080

  # Observability (required)
  prometheus:
    enabled: true
    path: /metrics

  # Health checks (required)
  liveness:
    path: /isalive
    initialDelay: 5
  readiness:
    path: /isready
    initialDelay: 5

  # Resources (required)
  resources:
    requests:
      cpu: 50m
      memory: 256Mi
    limits:
      memory: 512Mi

Pod Lifecycle and Graceful Shutdown

When Kubernetes terminates a pod on NAIS:

1. K8s notifies load balancer and pod simultaneously — LB starts draining connections
2. NAIS preStop hook runs sleep 5 — gives LB time to stop routing new traffic
3. App receives SIGTERM — no new requests arrive from LB
4. App drains in-flight requests and exits
5. After terminationGracePeriodSeconds (default 30s): SIGKILL

Key insight: Readiness probes are NOT involved in shutdown. Your app just needs to handle SIGTERM, finish in-flight requests, and exit cleanly.