Allocate Devices to Workloads with DRA

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.35 [stable](enabled by default)

This page shows you how to allocate devices to your Pods by using dynamic resource allocation (DRA). These instructions are for workload operators. Before reading this page, familiarize yourself with how DRA works and with DRA terminology like ResourceClaims and ResourceClaimTemplates. For more information, see Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA).

About device allocation with DRA

As a workload operator, you can claim devices for your workloads by creating ResourceClaims or ResourceClaimTemplates. When you deploy your workload, Kubernetes and the device drivers find available devices, allocate them to your Pods, and place the Pods on nodes that can access those devices.

Before you begin

You need to have a Kubernetes cluster, and the kubectl command-line tool must be configured to communicate with your cluster. It is recommended to run this tutorial on a cluster with at least two nodes that are not acting as control plane hosts. If you do not already have a cluster, you can create one by using minikube or you can use one of these Kubernetes playgrounds:

Your Kubernetes server must be at or later than version v1.34.

To check the version, enter kubectl version.

  • Ensure that your cluster admin has set up DRA, attached devices, and installed drivers. For more information, see Set Up DRA in a Cluster.

Identify devices to claim

Your cluster administrator or the device drivers create DeviceClasses that define categories of devices. You can claim devices by using Common Expression Language to filter for specific device properties.

Get a list of DeviceClasses in the cluster:

kubectl get deviceclasses

The output is similar to the following:

NAME                 AGE
driver.example.com   16m

If you get a permission error, you might not have access to get DeviceClasses. Check with your cluster administrator or with the driver provider for available device properties.

Claim resources

You can request resources from a DeviceClass by using ResourceClaims. To create a ResourceClaim, do one of the following:

  • Manually create a ResourceClaim if you want multiple Pods to share access to the same devices, or if you want a claim to exist beyond the lifetime of a Pod.
  • Use a ResourceClaimTemplate to let Kubernetes generate and manage per-Pod ResourceClaims. Create a ResourceClaimTemplate if you want every Pod to have access to separate devices that have similar configurations. For example, you might want simultaneous access to devices for Pods in a Job that uses parallel execution.

If you directly reference a specific ResourceClaim in a Pod, that ResourceClaim must already exist in the cluster. If a referenced ResourceClaim doesn't exist, the Pod remains in a pending state until the ResourceClaim is created. You can reference an auto-generated ResourceClaim in a Pod, but this isn't recommended because auto-generated ResourceClaims are bound to the lifetime of the Pod that triggered the generation.

To create a workload that claims resources, select one of the following options:

Review the following example manifest:

dra/resourceclaimtemplate.yaml 
apiVersion: resource.k8s.io/v1
kind: ResourceClaimTemplate
metadata:
  name: example-resource-claim-template
spec:
  spec:
    devices:
      requests:
      - name: gpu-claim
        exactly:
          deviceClassName: example-device-class
          selectors:
            - cel:
                expression: |-
                  device.attributes["driver.example.com"].type == "gpu" &&
                  device.capacity["driver.example.com"].memory == quantity("64Gi")

This manifest creates a ResourceClaimTemplate that requests devices in the example-device-class DeviceClass that match both of the following parameters:

  • Devices that have a driver.example.com/type attribute with a value of gpu.
  • Devices that have 64Gi of capacity.

To create the ResourceClaimTemplate, run the following command:

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/dra/resourceclaimtemplate.yaml

Review the following example manifest:

dra/resourceclaim.yaml 
apiVersion: resource.k8s.io/v1
kind: ResourceClaim
metadata:
  name: example-resource-claim
spec:
  devices:
    requests:
    - name: single-gpu-claim
      exactly:
        deviceClassName: example-device-class
        allocationMode: All
        selectors:
        - cel:
            expression: |-
              device.attributes["driver.example.com"].type == "gpu" &&
              device.capacity["driver.example.com"].memory == quantity("64Gi")

This manifest creates ResourceClaim that requests devices in the example-device-class DeviceClass that match both of the following parameters:

  • Devices that have a driver.example.com/type attribute with a value of gpu.
  • Devices that have 64Gi of capacity.

To create the ResourceClaim, run the following command:

kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/dra/resourceclaim.yaml

Request devices in workloads using DRA

To request device allocation, specify a ResourceClaim or a ResourceClaimTemplate in the resourceClaims field of the Pod specification. Then, request a specific claim by name in the resources.claims field of a container in that Pod. You can specify multiple entries in the resourceClaims field and use specific claims in different containers.

  1. Review the following example Job:

    dra/dra-example-job.yaml 
    apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: example-dra-job
spec:
  completions: 10
  parallelism: 2
  template:
    spec:
      restartPolicy: Never
      containers:
      - name: container0
        image: ubuntu:24.04
        command: ["sleep", "9999"]
        resources:
          claims:
          - name: separate-gpu-claim
      - name: container1
        image: ubuntu:24.04
        command: ["sleep", "9999"]
        resources:
          claims:
          - name: shared-gpu-claim
      - name: container2
        image: ubuntu:24.04
        command: ["sleep", "9999"]
        resources:
          claims:
          - name: shared-gpu-claim
      resourceClaims:
      - name: separate-gpu-claim
        resourceClaimTemplateName: example-resource-claim-template
      - name: shared-gpu-claim
        resourceClaimName: example-resource-claim

    Each Pod in this Job has the following properties:

    • Makes a ResourceClaimTemplate named separate-gpu-claim and a ResourceClaim named shared-gpu-claim available to containers.
    • Runs the following containers:
      • container0 requests the devices from the separate-gpu-claim ResourceClaimTemplate.
      • container1 and container2 share access to the devices from the shared-gpu-claim ResourceClaim.

  2. Create the Job:

    kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/dra/dra-example-job.yaml

Try the following troubleshooting steps:

  1. When the workload does not start as expected, drill down from Job to Pods to ResourceClaims and check the objects at each level with kubectl describe to see whether there are any status fields or events which might explain why the workload is not starting.
  2. When creating a Pod fails with must specify one of: resourceClaimName, resourceClaimTemplateName, check that all entries in pod.spec.resourceClaims have exactly one of those fields set. If they do, then it is possible that the cluster has a mutating Pod webhook installed which was built against APIs from Kubernetes < 1.32. Work with your cluster administrator to check this.

Clean up

To delete the Kubernetes objects that you created in this task, follow these steps:

  1. Delete the example Job:

    kubectl delete -f https://k8s.io/examples/dra/dra-example-job.yaml

  2. To delete your resource claims, run one of the following commands:

    • Delete the ResourceClaimTemplate:

      kubectl delete -f https://k8s.io/examples/dra/resourceclaimtemplate.yaml

    • Delete the ResourceClaim:

      kubectl delete -f https://k8s.io/examples/dra/resourceclaim.yaml

What's next


Last modified July 02, 2025 at 6:43 PM PST: DRA: core update for 1.34 (36162b1107)