How to share storage between Kubernetes pods?

Question

I am evaluating Kubernetes as a platform for our new application. For now, it looks all very exciting! However, I’m running into a problem: I’m hosting my cluster on GCE an

Answer 1

First of all. Kubernetes doesn't have integrated functionality to share storage between hosts. There are several options below. But first how to share storage if you already have some volumes set up.

To share a volume between multiple pods you'd need to create a PVC with access mode ReadWriteMany

kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
    name: my-pvc
spec:
    accessModes:
      - ReadWriteMany
    storageClassName: myvolume
    resources:
        requests:
            storage: 1Gi

After that you can mount it to multiple pods:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: myapp1
spec:
  containers:
...
      volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /data
          name: data
          subPath: app1
  volumes:
    - name: data
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: 'my-pvc'
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: myapp2
spec:
  containers:
...
      volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /data
          name: data
          subPath: app2
  volumes:
    - name: data
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: 'my-pvc'

Of course, persistent volume must be accessible via network. Otherwise you'd need to make sure that all the pods are scheduled to the node with that volume.

There are several volume types that are suitable for that and not tied to any cloud provider:

• NFS
• RBD (Ceph Block Device)
• CephFS
• Glusterfs
• Portworx Volumes

Of course, to use a volume you need to have it first. That is, if you want to consume NFS you need to setup NFS on all nodes in K8s cluster. If you want to consume Ceph, you need to setup Ceph cluster and so on.

The only volume type that supports Kubernetes out of the box is Portworks. There are instruction on how to set it up in GKE.

To setup Ceph cluster in K8s there's a project in development called Rook.

But this is all overkill if you just want a folder from one node to be available in another node. In this case just setup NFS server. It wouldn't be harder than provisioning other volume types and will consume much less cpu/memory/disk resources.