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Persistent Volumes

This document describes the current state of PersistentVolumes in Kubernetes. Familiarity with volumes is suggested.

• Introduction
• Lifecycle of a volume and claim
• Types of Persistent Volumes
• Persistent Volumes
• PersistentVolumeClaims
• Claims As Volumes
• Raw Block Volume Support
• Volume Snapshot and Restore Volume from Snapshot Support
• Volume Cloning
• Writing Portable Configuration

Introduction

Managing storage is a distinct problem from managing compute instances. The PersistentVolume subsystem provides an API for users and administrators that abstracts details of how storage is provided from how it is consumed. To do this, we introduce two new API resources: PersistentVolume and PersistentVolumeClaim.

A PersistentVolume (PV) is a piece of storage in the cluster that has been provisioned by an administrator or dynamically provisioned using Storage Classes. It is a resource in the cluster just like a node is a cluster resource. PVs are volume plugins like Volumes, but have a lifecycle independent of any individual Pod that uses the PV. This API object captures the details of the implementation of the storage, be that NFS, iSCSI, or a cloud-provider-specific storage system.

A PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) is a request for storage by a user. It is similar to a Pod. Pods consume node resources and PVCs consume PV resources. Pods can request specific levels of resources (CPU and Memory). Claims can request specific size and access modes (e.g., they can be mounted once read/write or many times read-only).

While PersistentVolumeClaims allow a user to consume abstract storage resources, it is common that users need PersistentVolumes with varying properties, such as performance, for different problems. Cluster administrators need to be able to offer a variety of PersistentVolumes that differ in more ways than just size and access modes, without exposing users to the details of how those volumes are implemented. For these needs, there is the StorageClass resource.

See the detailed walkthrough with working examples.

Lifecycle of a volume and claim

PVs are resources in the cluster. PVCs are requests for those resources and also act as claim checks to the resource. The interaction between PVs and PVCs follows this lifecycle:

Provisioning

There are two ways PVs may be provisioned: statically or dynamically.

Static

A cluster administrator creates a number of PVs. They carry the details of the real storage, which is available for use by cluster users. They exist in the Kubernetes API and are available for consumption.

Dynamic

When none of the static PVs the administrator created match a user’s PersistentVolumeClaim, the cluster may try to dynamically provision a volume specially for the PVC. This provisioning is based on StorageClasses: the PVC must request a storage class and the administrator must have created and configured that class for dynamic provisioning to occur. Claims that request the class "" effectively disable dynamic provisioning for themselves.

To enable dynamic storage provisioning based on storage class, the cluster administrator needs to enable the DefaultStorageClass admission controller on the API server. This can be done, for example, by ensuring that DefaultStorageClass is among the comma-delimited, ordered list of values for the --enable-admission-plugins flag of the API server component. For more information on API server command-line flags, check kube-apiserver documentation.

Binding

A user creates, or in the case of dynamic provisioning, has already created, a PersistentVolumeClaim with a specific amount of storage requested and with certain access modes. A control loop in the master watches for new PVCs, finds a matching PV (if possible), and binds them together. If a PV was dynamically provisioned for a new PVC, the loop will always bind that PV to the PVC. Otherwise, the user will always get at least what they asked for, but the volume may be in excess of what was requested. Once bound, PersistentVolumeClaim binds are exclusive, regardless of how they were bound. A PVC to PV binding is a one-to-one mapping.

Claims will remain unbound indefinitely if a matching volume does not exist. Claims will be bound as matching volumes become available. For example, a cluster provisioned with many 50Gi PVs would not match a PVC requesting 100Gi. The PVC can be bound when a 100Gi PV is added to the cluster.

Using

Pods use claims as volumes. The cluster inspects the claim to find the bound volume and mounts that volume for a Pod. For volumes that support multiple access modes, the user specifies which mode is desired when using their claim as a volume in a Pod.

Once a user has a claim and that claim is bound, the bound PV belongs to the user for as long as they need it. Users schedule Pods and access their claimed PVs by including a persistentVolumeClaim in their Pod’s volumes block. See below for syntax details.

Storage Object in Use Protection

The purpose of the Storage Object in Use Protection feature is to ensure that Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) in active use by a Pod and Persistent Volume (PVs) that are bound to PVCs are not removed from the system, as this may result in data loss.

Note: PVC is in active use by a Pod when a Pod object exists that is using the PVC.

If a user deletes a PVC in active use by a Pod, the PVC is not removed immediately. PVC removal is postponed until the PVC is no longer actively used by any Pods. Also, if an admin deletes a PV that is bound to a PVC, the PV is not removed immediately. PV removal is postponed until the PV is no longer bound to a PVC.

You can see that a PVC is protected when the PVC’s status is Terminating and the Finalizers list includes kubernetes.io/pvc-protection:

kubectl describe pvc hostpath
Name:          hostpath
Namespace:     default
StorageClass:  example-hostpath
Status:        Terminating
Volume:
Labels:        <none>
Annotations:   volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-class=example-hostpath
               volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-provisioner=example.com/hostpath
Finalizers:    [kubernetes.io/pvc-protection]
...

You can see that a PV is protected when the PV’s status is Terminating and the Finalizers list includes kubernetes.io/pv-protection too:

kubectl describe pv task-pv-volume
Name:            task-pv-volume
Labels:          type=local
Annotations:     <none>
Finalizers:      [kubernetes.io/pv-protection]
StorageClass:    standard
Status:          Available
Claim:
Reclaim Policy:  Delete
Access Modes:    RWO
Capacity:        1Gi
Message:
Source:
    Type:          HostPath (bare host directory volume)
    Path:          /tmp/data
    HostPathType:
Events:            <none>

Reclaiming

When a user is done with their volume, they can delete the PVC objects from the API that allows reclamation of the resource. The reclaim policy for a PersistentVolume tells the cluster what to do with the volume after it has been released of its claim. Currently, volumes can either be Retained, Recycled, or Deleted.

Retain

The Retain reclaim policy allows for manual reclamation of the resource. When the PersistentVolumeClaim is deleted, the PersistentVolume still exists and the volume is considered “released”. But it is not yet available for another claim because the previous claimant’s data remains on the volume. An administrator can manually reclaim the volume with the following steps.

1. Delete the PersistentVolume. The associated storage asset in external infrastructure (such as an AWS EBS, GCE PD, Azure Disk, or Cinder volume) still exists after the PV is deleted.
2. Manually clean up the data on the associated storage asset accordingly.
3. Manually delete the associated storage asset, or if you want to reuse the same storage asset, create a new PersistentVolume with the storage asset definition.

Delete

For volume plugins that support the Delete reclaim policy, deletion removes both the PersistentVolume object from Kubernetes, as well as the associated storage asset in the external infrastructure, such as an AWS EBS, GCE PD, Azure Disk, or Cinder volume. Volumes that were dynamically provisioned inherit the reclaim policy of their StorageClass, which defaults to Delete. The administrator should configure the StorageClass according to users’ expectations; otherwise, the PV must be edited or patched after it is created. See Change the Reclaim Policy of a PersistentVolume.

Recycle

Warning: The Recycle reclaim policy is deprecated. Instead, the recommended approach is to use dynamic provisioning.

If supported by the underlying volume plugin, the Recycle reclaim policy performs a basic scrub (rm -rf /thevolume/*) on the volume and makes it available again for a new claim.

However, an administrator can configure a custom recycler Pod template using the Kubernetes controller manager command line arguments as described here. The custom recycler Pod template must contain a volumes specification, as shown in the example below:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pv-recycler
  namespace: default
spec:
  restartPolicy: Never
  volumes:
  - name: vol
    hostPath:
      path: /any/path/it/will/be/replaced
  containers:
  - name: pv-recycler
    image: "k8s.gcr.io/busybox"
    command: ["/bin/sh", "-c", "test -e /scrub && rm -rf /scrub/..?* /scrub/.[!.]* /scrub/*  && test -z \"$(ls -A /scrub)\" || exit 1"]
    volumeMounts:
    - name: vol
      mountPath: /scrub

However, the particular path specified in the custom recycler Pod template in the volumes part is replaced with the particular path of the volume that is being recycled.

Expanding Persistent Volumes Claims

Support for expanding PersistentVolumeClaims (PVCs) is now enabled by default. You can expand the following types of volumes:

• gcePersistentDisk
• awsElasticBlockStore
• Cinder
• glusterfs
• rbd
• Azure File
• Azure Disk
• Portworx
• FlexVolumes
• CSI

You can only expand a PVC if its storage class’s allowVolumeExpansion field is set to true.

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: gluster-vol-default
provisioner: kubernetes.io/glusterfs
parameters:
  resturl: "http://192.168.10.100:8080"
  restuser: ""
  secretNamespace: ""
  secretName: ""
allowVolumeExpansion: true

To request a larger volume for a PVC, edit the PVC object and specify a larger size. This triggers expansion of the volume that backs the underlying PersistentVolume. A new PersistentVolume is never created to satisfy the claim. Instead, an existing volume is resized.

CSI Volume expansion

Support for expanding CSI volumes is enabled by default but it also requires a specific CSI driver to support volume expansion. Refer to documentation of the specific CSI driver for more information.

Resizing a volume containing a file system

You can only resize volumes containing a file system if the file system is XFS, Ext3, or Ext4.

When a volume contains a file system, the file system is only resized when a new Pod is using the PersistentVolumeClaim in ReadWrite mode. File system expansion is either done when a Pod is starting up or when a Pod is running and the underlying file system supports online expansion.

FlexVolumes allow resize if the driver is set with the RequiresFSResize capability to true. The FlexVolume can be resized on Pod restart.

Resizing an in-use PersistentVolumeClaim

Note: Expanding in-use PVCs is available as beta since Kubernetes 1.15, and as alpha since 1.11. The ExpandInUsePersistentVolumes feature must be enabled, which is the case automatically for many clusters for beta features. Refer to the feature gate documentation for more information.

In this case, you don’t need to delete and recreate a Pod or deployment that is using an existing PVC. Any in-use PVC automatically becomes available to its Pod as soon as its file system has been expanded. This feature has no effect on PVCs that are not in use by a Pod or deployment. You must create a Pod that uses the PVC before the expansion can complete.

Similar to other volume types - FlexVolume volumes can also be expanded when in-use by a Pod.

Note: FlexVolume resize is possible only when the underlying driver supports resize.

Note: Expanding EBS volumes is a time-consuming operation. Also, there is a per-volume quota of one modification every 6 hours.

Types of Persistent Volumes

PersistentVolume types are implemented as plugins. Kubernetes currently supports the following plugins:

• GCEPersistentDisk
• AWSElasticBlockStore
• AzureFile
• AzureDisk
• CSI
• FC (Fibre Channel)
• FlexVolume
• Flocker
• NFS
• iSCSI
• RBD (Ceph Block Device)
• CephFS
• Cinder (OpenStack block storage)
• Glusterfs
• VsphereVolume
• Quobyte Volumes
• HostPath (Single node testing only – local storage is not supported in any way and WILL NOT WORK in a multi-node cluster)
• Portworx Volumes
• ScaleIO Volumes
• StorageOS

Persistent Volumes

Each PV contains a spec and status, which is the specification and status of the volume.

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: pv0003
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 5Gi
  volumeMode: Filesystem
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Recycle
  storageClassName: slow
  mountOptions:
    - hard
    - nfsvers=4.1
  nfs:
    path: /tmp
    server: 172.17.0.2

Capacity

Generally, a PV will have a specific storage capacity. This is set using the PV’s capacity attribute. See the Kubernetes Resource Model to understand the units expected by capacity.

Currently, storage size is the only resource that can be set or requested. Future attributes may include IOPS, throughput, etc.

Volume Mode

Prior to Kubernetes 1.9, all volume plugins created a filesystem on the persistent volume. Now, you can set the value of volumeMode to block to use a raw block device, or filesystem to use a filesystem. filesystem is the default if the value is omitted. This is an optional API parameter.

Access Modes

A PersistentVolume can be mounted on a host in any way supported by the resource provider. As shown in the table below, providers will have different capabilities and each PV’s access modes are set to the specific modes supported by that particular volume. For example, NFS can support multiple read/write clients, but a specific NFS PV might be exported on the server as read-only. Each PV gets its own set of access modes describing that specific PV’s capabilities.

The access modes are:

• ReadWriteOnce – the volume can be mounted as read-write by a single node
• ReadOnlyMany – the volume can be mounted read-only by many nodes
• ReadWriteMany – the volume can be mounted as read-write by many nodes

In the CLI, the access modes are abbreviated to:

• RWO - ReadWriteOnce
• ROX - ReadOnlyMany
• RWX - ReadWriteMany

Important! A volume can only be mounted using one access mode at a time, even if it supports many. For example, a GCEPersistentDisk can be mounted as ReadWriteOnce by a single node or ReadOnlyMany by many nodes, but not at the same time.

Class

A PV can have a class, which is specified by setting the storageClassName attribute to the name of a StorageClass. A PV of a particular class can only be bound to PVCs requesting that class. A PV with no storageClassName has no class and can only be bound to PVCs that request no particular class.

In the past, the annotation volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-class was used instead of the storageClassName attribute. This annotation is still working; however, it will become fully deprecated in a future Kubernetes release.

Reclaim Policy

Current reclaim policies are:

• Retain – manual reclamation
• Recycle – basic scrub (rm -rf /thevolume/*)
• Delete – associated storage asset such as AWS EBS, GCE PD, Azure Disk, or OpenStack Cinder volume is deleted

Currently, only NFS and HostPath support recycling. AWS EBS, GCE PD, Azure Disk, and Cinder volumes support deletion.

Mount Options

A Kubernetes administrator can specify additional mount options for when a Persistent Volume is mounted on a node.

Note: Not all Persistent Volume types support mount options.

The following volume types support mount options:

• AWSElasticBlockStore
• AzureDisk
• AzureFile
• CephFS
• Cinder (OpenStack block storage)
• GCEPersistentDisk
• Glusterfs
• NFS
• Quobyte Volumes
• RBD (Ceph Block Device)
• StorageOS
• VsphereVolume
• iSCSI

Mount options are not validated, so mount will simply fail if one is invalid.

In the past, the annotation volume.beta.kubernetes.io/mount-options was used instead of the mountOptions attribute. This annotation is still working; however, it will become fully deprecated in a future Kubernetes release.

Node Affinity

Note: For most volume types, you do not need to set this field. It is automatically populated for AWS EBS, GCE PD and Azure Disk volume block types. You need to explicitly set this for local volumes.

A PV can specify node affinity to define constraints that limit what nodes this volume can be accessed from. Pods that use a PV will only be scheduled to nodes that are selected by the node affinity.

Phase

A volume will be in one of the following phases:

• Available – a free resource that is not yet bound to a claim
• Bound – the volume is bound to a claim
• Released – the claim has been deleted, but the resource is not yet reclaimed by the cluster
• Failed – the volume has failed its automatic reclamation

The CLI will show the name of the PVC bound to the PV.

PersistentVolumeClaims

Each PVC contains a spec and status, which is the specification and status of the claim.

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: myclaim
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  volumeMode: Filesystem
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 8Gi
  storageClassName: slow
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      release: "stable"
    matchExpressions:
      - {key: environment, operator: In, values: [dev]}

Access Modes

Claims use the same conventions as volumes when requesting storage with specific access modes.

Volume Modes

Claims use the same convention as volumes to indicate the consumption of the volume as either a filesystem or block device.

Resources

Claims, like Pods, can request specific quantities of a resource. In this case, the request is for storage. The same resource model applies to both volumes and claims.

Selector

Claims can specify a label selector to further filter the set of volumes. Only the volumes whose labels match the selector can be bound to the claim. The selector can consist of two fields:

• matchLabels - the volume must have a label with this value
• matchExpressions - a list of requirements made by specifying key, list of values, and operator that relates the key and values. Valid operators include In, NotIn, Exists, and DoesNotExist.

All of the requirements, from both matchLabels and matchExpressions, are ANDed together – they must all be satisfied in order to match.

Class

A claim can request a particular class by specifying the name of a StorageClass using the attribute storageClassName. Only PVs of the requested class, ones with the same storageClassName as the PVC, can be bound to the PVC.

PVCs don’t necessarily have to request a class. A PVC with its storageClassName set equal to "" is always interpreted to be requesting a PV with no class, so it can only be bound to PVs with no class (no annotation or one set equal to ""). A PVC with no storageClassName is not quite the same and is treated differently by the cluster, depending on whether the DefaultStorageClass admission plugin is turned on.

• If the admission plugin is turned on, the administrator may specify a default StorageClass. All PVCs that have no storageClassName can be bound only to PVs of that default. Specifying a default StorageClass is done by setting the annotation storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class equal to true in a StorageClass object. If the administrator does not specify a default, the cluster responds to PVC creation as if the admission plugin were turned off. If more than one default is specified, the admission plugin forbids the creation of all PVCs.
• If the admission plugin is turned off, there is no notion of a default StorageClass. All PVCs that have no storageClassName can be bound only to PVs that have no class. In this case, the PVCs that have no storageClassName are treated the same way as PVCs that have their storageClassName set to "".

Depending on installation method, a default StorageClass may be deployed to a Kubernetes cluster by addon manager during installation.

When a PVC specifies a selector in addition to requesting a StorageClass, the requirements are ANDed together: only a PV of the requested class and with the requested labels may be bound to the PVC.

Note: Currently, a PVC with a non-empty selector can’t have a PV dynamically provisioned for it.

In the past, the annotation volume.beta.kubernetes.io/storage-class was used instead of storageClassName attribute. This annotation is still working; however, it won’t be supported in a future Kubernetes release.

Claims As Volumes

Pods access storage by using the claim as a volume. Claims must exist in the same namespace as the Pod using the claim. The cluster finds the claim in the Pod’s namespace and uses it to get the PersistentVolume backing the claim. The volume is then mounted to the host and into the Pod.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: mypod
spec:
  containers:
    - name: myfrontend
      image: nginx
      volumeMounts:
      - mountPath: "/var/www/html"
        name: mypd
  volumes:
    - name: mypd
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: myclaim

A Note on Namespaces

PersistentVolumes binds are exclusive, and since PersistentVolumeClaims are namespaced objects, mounting claims with “Many” modes (ROX, RWX) is only possible within one namespace.

Raw Block Volume Support

The following volume plugins support raw block volumes, including dynamic provisioning where applicable:

• AWSElasticBlockStore
• AzureDisk
• FC (Fibre Channel)
• GCEPersistentDisk
• iSCSI
• Local volume
• RBD (Ceph Block Device)
• VsphereVolume (alpha)

Note: Only FC and iSCSI volumes supported raw block volumes in Kubernetes 1.9. Support for the additional plugins was added in 1.10.

Persistent Volumes using a Raw Block Volume

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: block-pv
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 10Gi
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  volumeMode: Block
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Retain
  fc:
    targetWWNs: ["50060e801049cfd1"]
    lun: 0
    readOnly: false

Persistent Volume Claim requesting a Raw Block Volume

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: block-pvc
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  volumeMode: Block
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi

Pod specification adding Raw Block Device path in container

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pod-with-block-volume
spec:
  containers:
    - name: fc-container
      image: fedora:26
      command: ["/bin/sh", "-c"]
      args: [ "tail -f /dev/null" ]
      volumeDevices:
        - name: data
          devicePath: /dev/xvda
  volumes:
    - name: data
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: block-pvc

Note: When adding a raw block device for a Pod, you specify the device path in the container instead of a mount path.

Binding Block Volumes

If a user requests a raw block volume by indicating this using the volumeMode field in the PersistentVolumeClaim spec, the binding rules differ slightly from previous releases that didn’t consider this mode as part of the spec. Listed is a table of possible combinations the user and admin might specify for requesting a raw block device. The table indicates if the volume will be bound or not given the combinations: Volume binding matrix for statically provisioned volumes:

Note: Only statically provisioned volumes are supported for alpha release. Administrators should take care to consider these values when working with raw block devices.

Volume Snapshot and Restore Volume from Snapshot Support

Volume snapshot feature was added to support CSI Volume Plugins only. For details, see volume snapshots.

To enable support for restoring a volume from a volume snapshot data source, enable the VolumeSnapshotDataSource feature gate on the apiserver and controller-manager.

Create Persistent Volume Claim from Volume Snapshot

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: restore-pvc
spec:
  storageClassName: csi-hostpath-sc
  dataSource:
    name: new-snapshot-test
    kind: VolumeSnapshot
    apiGroup: snapshot.storage.k8s.io
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi

Volume Cloning

Volume clone feature was added to support CSI Volume Plugins only. For details, see volume cloning.

To enable support for cloning a volume from a PVC data source, enable the VolumePVCDataSource feature gate on the apiserver and controller-manager.

Create Persistent Volume Claim from an existing pvc

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: cloned-pvc
spec:
  storageClassName: my-csi-plugin
  dataSource:
    name: existing-src-pvc-name
    kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi

Writing Portable Configuration

If you’re writing configuration templates or examples that run on a wide range of clusters and need persistent storage, it is recommended that you use the following pattern:

• Include PersistentVolumeClaim objects in your bundle of config (alongside Deployments, ConfigMaps, etc).
• Do not include PersistentVolume objects in the config, since the user instantiating the config may not have permission to create PersistentVolumes.
• Give the user the option of providing a storage class name when instantiating the template.
  • If the user provides a storage class name, put that value into the persistentVolumeClaim.storageClassName field. This will cause the PVC to match the right storage class if the cluster has StorageClasses enabled by the admin.
  • If the user does not provide a storage class name, leave the persistentVolumeClaim.storageClassName field as nil. This will cause a PV to be automatically provisioned for the user with the default StorageClass in the cluster. Many cluster environments have a default StorageClass installed, or administrators can create their own default StorageClass.
• In your tooling, watch for PVCs that are not getting bound after some time and surface this to the user, as this may indicate that the cluster has no dynamic storage support (in which case the user should create a matching PV) or the cluster has no storage system (in which case the user cannot deploy config requiring PVCs).

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