K8S Storage
Last updated
Last updated
On-disk files in a Container are ephemeral, which presents some problems for non-trivial applications when running in Containers. First, when a Container crashes, kubelet will restart it, but the files will be lost - the Container starts with a clean state. We need the storage to persist those data, especially for stateful application in K8S. Second, when running Containers together in a Pod it is often necessary to share files between those Containers. A storage is a good approach for this case.
At its core, a volume is just a directory, possibly with some data in it, which is accessible to the Containers in a Pod. How that directory comes to be, the medium that backs it, and the contents of it are determined by the particular volume type used. PV is a type of volume.
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., can be mounted once read/write or many times read-only).
A very good Youtube video describes the differences between PVC and PV:
Two PVCs cannot be linked to the same PV
Two Pods could reference to the same PVC
Other references:
