Change timezone

[janis-ax]

Hey,

First amazing project! Thanks, all contributors.

I wondered why my K8S Cronjob was not running at the expected time and found out that the default timezone is UTC.
What's the best way to change the timezone cluster-wide? E.g. to CEST?

Is it recommended to add the feature into the variables?
Thanks, anyway!

[mysticaltech]

@janis-ax Thanks for your kind words. Here's what GPT-4 says about your question above, I think it answers it well:

By default, Kubernetes uses UTC for all timestamps and time-related operations. It's recommended to keep this default setting for consistency and to avoid potential issues. Changing the time zone of a cluster-wide environment could lead to confusing behavior and unexpected results.

However, if you still need to change it for specific workloads like CronJobs, you could set the time zone at the container level. This would not affect the entire cluster but just the individual containers.

There are several ways to set the timezone for a container:

Using an environment variable:

You can set an environment variable TZ in your Dockerfile or in your Kubernetes yaml:

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
            env:
            - name: TZ
              value: Europe/Berlin
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

[janis-ax]

Thanks for the prompt answer and yes seems ChatGPT is right. I added the TZ into the cronjob. :-)