microshift-power

Power- and thermal-aware workload control for single-node MicroShift on battery-powered, thermally-constrained, or intermittently-powered edge devices.

When battery or thermal headroom drops, microshift-power gracefully sheds workloads via the Kubernetes Eviction API while protecting what matters.

Lightweight by design — targets 20m CPU / 32Mi RAM idle so it stays out of the way on the same hardware whose power it's protecting.

Features

• Battery and thermal aware
• Hysteresis state machine
• Pod priority classes
• Per-pod escape hatches
• PDB-respecting evictions
• Optional admission webhook
• Protected system namespaces
• Prometheus metrics
• RPM + systemd add-on

Use cases

• Beehive weight remote site
• Solar-powered telecom remote site (or meshcore repeaters)
• Vehicle-mounted compute
• Solar-powered agricultural sensor gateway

State machine

Each band has separate enterBelow / exitAbove thresholds; the gap is the hysteresis band that prevents flapping at the threshold ±1 %.

Annotations

Key	Where	Effect
power.microshift.io/priority	pod	critical / standard / best-effort (overrides namespace default)
power.microshift.io/min-battery-percent	pod	Don't evict on battery grounds while battery ≥ N. Thermal eviction still wins.
power.microshift.io/grace-period-seconds	pod	Per-pod eviction grace period; 0 = immediate.
power.microshift.io/default-priority	namespace label	Default priority for pods in the namespace.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: log-shipper
  annotations:
    power.microshift.io/priority: best-effort
spec:
  containers: [...]

Configuration

Host config at /etc/microshift-power/config.yaml. Example below; the state thresholds match the built-in defaults but the thermal.zones list is illustrative — there are no default zones, and an omitted thermal block leaves the thermal axis permanently Normal (the controller relies on the battery axis alone). Configure zones for any device you want to gate on temperature.

apiVersion: microshift-power/v1
kind: PolicyConfig
states:
  conserve:  { enterBelow: 60, exitAbove: 70 }
  critical:  { enterBelow: 30, exitAbove: 40 }
  emergency: { enterBelow: 15, exitAbove: 25 }
classes:
  best-effort: { evictInState: [Conserve, Critical, Emergency], blockAdmissionInState: [Critical, Emergency] }
  standard:    { evictInState: [Critical, Emergency],            blockAdmissionInState: [Emergency] }
  critical:    { evictInState: [],                                blockAdmissionInState: [] }
thermal:
  zones:
    - { name: cpu-thermal, conserveAboveCelsius: 75, criticalAboveCelsius: 85, emergencyAboveCelsius: 95 }
defaultPriority: standard
admissionWebhook: { enabled: true }

Protected namespaces (kube-*, openshift-*, microshift-*), DaemonSet pods, and static pods are never evicted.

Install

RPM + systemd, matching the MicroShift add-on convention (microshift-gitops, microshift-multus, microshift-ai-model-serving). The controller runs as a systemd unit on the same node as MicroShift.

sudo dnf copr enable mmahut/microshift-power
sudo dnf install microshift-power
sudo systemctl enable --now microshift-power.service
sudo systemctl restart microshift.service   # picks up manifests.d/

# Verify
systemctl status microshift-power
oc -n microshift-power get all

The RPM installs:

• /usr/bin/microshift-power
• /usr/lib/systemd/system/microshift-power.service
• /etc/microshift-power/config.yaml (edit and systemctl restart)
• /usr/lib/microshift/manifests.d/050-microshift-power/ (Service + ValidatingWebhookConfiguration; MicroShift applies on next start)

Examples in examples/ cover four real-world scenarios: beehive weight remote site, telecom remote site, vehicle-mounted, and a solar-powered agricultural gateway using namespace-default labels.

Examples use oc, the OpenShift CLI shipped with MicroShift. kubectl works identically if you prefer it.

Probe (without installing)

make build

# Real hardware (Linux)
./bin/microshift-power probe

# Synthetic fixture (any OS)
./bin/microshift-power probe \
  --fake-file=pkg/power/fake/testdata/scenario-low-battery.yaml

License

Apache-2.0