Chapter 4. Understanding persistent storage

In response to requests from a developer defined in a PVC, a cluster administrator configures one or more dynamic provisioners that provision storage and a matching PV.

When you create a PVC, you request a specific amount of storage, specify the required access mode, and create a storage class to describe and classify the storage. The control loop in the master watches for new PVCs and binds the new PVC to an appropriate PV. If an appropriate PV does not exist, a provisioner for the storage class creates one.

The size of all PVs might exceed your PVC size. This is especially true with manually provisioned PVs. To minimize the excess, MicroShift binds to the smallest PV that matches all other criteria.

Claims remain unbound indefinitely if a matching volume does not exist or can not be created with any available provisioner servicing a storage class. Claims are bound as matching volumes become available. For example, a cluster with many manually provisioned 50Gi volumes would not match a PVC requesting 100Gi. The PVC can be bound when a 100Gi PV is added to the cluster.

Pods use claims as volumes. The cluster inspects the claim to find the bound volume and mounts that volume for a pod. For those volumes that support multiple access modes, you must specify which mode applies when you use the claim as a volume in a pod.

Once you have a claim and that claim is bound, the bound PV belongs to you for as long as you need it. You can schedule pods and access claimed PVs by including persistentVolumeClaim in the pod’s volumes block.

When you are finished with a volume, you can delete the PVC object from the API, which allows reclamation of the resource. The volume is considered released when the claim is deleted, but it is not yet available for another claim. The previous claimant’s data remains on the volume and must be handled according to policy.

The reclaim policy of a persistent volume tells the cluster what to do with the volume after it is released. A volume’s reclaim policy can be Retain, Recycle, or Delete.

When a persistent volume claim (PVC) is deleted, the underlying logical volume is handled according to the reclaimPolicy.

The reclaimed PV is now available for use by another PVC.

To change the reclaim policy of a persistent volume:

Generally, a persistent volume (PV) has a specific storage capacity. This is set by using the capacity attribute of the PV.

Currently, storage capacity is the only resource that can be set or requested. Future attributes may include IOPS, throughput, and so on.

LVMS is the only CSI plugin MicroShift supports. The hostPath and LVs built in to OpenShift Container Platform also support RWO.

Volumes can be found in one of the following phases:

You can view the name of the PVC that is bound to the PV by running the following command:

$ oc get pv <pv-claim>

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  annotations:
    storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class: "true"
  name: topolvm-provisioner
mountOptions:
  - uid=1500
  - gid=1500
parameters:
  csi.storage.k8s.io/fstype: xfs
provisioner: topolvm.io
reclaimPolicy: Delete
volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer
allowVolumeExpansion: true

Claims can optionally request a specific storage class by specifying the storage class’s name in the storageClassName attribute. Only PVs of the requested class, ones with the same storageClassName as the PVC, can be bound to the PVC. The cluster administrator can configure dynamic provisioners to service one or more storage classes. The cluster administrator can create a PV on demand that matches the specifications in the PVC.

The cluster administrator can also set a default storage class for all PVCs. When a default storage class is configured, the PVC must explicitly ask for StorageClass or storageClassName annotations set to "" to be bound to a PV without a storage class.

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

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

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 mounted to the host and into the pod, for example:

kind: Pod
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: mypod
spec:
  containers:
    - name: myfrontend
      image: dockerfile/nginx
      volumeMounts:
      - mountPath: "/var/www/html" 1
        name: mypd 2
  volumes:
    - name: mypd
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: myclaim 3