Organizing workloads with namespaces

Namespaces isolate groups of resources within a single cluster: resource names must be unique within a namespace but not across namespaces, and scoping applies only to namespaced objects such as Deployments and Services — not cluster-wide objects such as StorageClasses, Nodes, and PersistentVolumes. Namespaces cannot be nested, each resource lives in exactly one, and they divide cluster resources between users through resource quota. They are meant for environments with many users spread across teams or projects; clusters with a few to tens of users should not need them, and slightly different resources such as versions of the same software are better distinguished with labels within one namespace. A cluster starts with default, kube-node-lease, kube-public, and kube-system; avoid the kube- prefix, which is reserved for system namespaces. Scope: Kubernetes. Reviewed October 4, 2026.