Dynamic provisioner for local volumes

Warning: this project is not actively maintained anymore. We recommend the following alternatives:

• TopoLVM goes beyond what this project attempts to achieve. It dynamically provisions LVM-based volumes, implements the CSI interface, while accounting for each host total storage capacity.
• Sig-storage local static provisioner automatically creates static PersistentVolumes based on the devices available to each host.
• OpenEBS is an advanced container attached storage solution for Kubernetes.

Important: this is an experimental project, not intended for production use cases. There is no public Docker image release available.

This projects allows the creation of PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) for local volumes. A PersistentVolume (PV) corresponding to this PVC will dynamically be created. A filesystem volume will dynamically be created and mounted on the host where the pod is scheduled.

Components

This project is composed of 3 main components:

• The provisioner: watches new PVC resources and creates matching PV resources on the apiserver. Cluster-wide deployment of a single pod.
• The driver client: binary deployed on k8s nodes that respects k8s flex interface. Called by kubelet when a scheduled pod needs a local persistent volume to be mounted. Contacts the driver daemon through a unix socket.
• The driver daemon: daemonset with one pod per k8s node. Listens to calls from the client. Creates a logical volume for the pod on the underlying host (eg. /mnt/storage/my-pvc), and bind mount it within the pod directory on the underlying host (eg. /var/lib/kubelet/pods/pod-id/volumes/elastic-local/my-pvc).

Development

To start, get a working development Kubernetes cluster using Minikube or GKE:

make -C ../operators bootstrap-minikube
# or
GCLOUD_PROJECT=my-project-id make -C ../operators bootstrap-gke

If you chose Minikube then attach a new disk to the virtual machine:

make minikube-attach-disk

Finally initialize a logical volume group:

make minikube-create-vg # or gke-create-vg

Usage

Build and push the Docker image:

make docker-build-push

Deploy on Kubernetes:

make deploy

Then you can create any PVC matching the elastic-local storage class and Pod using this PVC. Example:

kubectl apply -f config/pvc-sample.yaml -f config/pod-sample.yaml

Architecture

The provisioner only interacts with the APIServer: it watches any new PVC matching our StorageClass provisioner, and dynamically creates a matching PV.

When the pod gets scheduled on a host, the kubelet calls our driver binary in order to mount a volume in the given pod directory. In turn, our driver binary calls our driver daemon (HTTP through a unix domain socket). The driver daemons is responsible for creating the volume, creating an actual directory mount for it on the file system, then bind-mounting this directory into the given pod directory.

Limitations

• Thinly provisioned volumes are not supported on GKE
• We don't handle total storage capacity requirements.

Flex spec

We are doing implementation option 1 from the spec below :)

----------- Mandatory ------------
<driver executable> init // Performs driver initialisation
----------- Implementation option 1 -----------
<driver executable> attach <json options> <node name> // Attaching persistent volume to the host
<driver executable> waitforattach <mount device> <json options> // Waiting for volume to be attached (10 minutes timeout)
<driver executable> isattached <json options> <node name> // Check if the volume is attached
<driver executable> detach <mount device> <node name> // Detaching persistent volume from the host
<driver executable> mountdevice <mount dir> <mount device> <json options> // Mount the device to a global path so the pod can bind to it by Kubelet
<driver executable> unmountdevice <mount device> // Un-mount the device from global path
----------- Implementation option 2-----------
<driver executable> mount <mount dir> <json options> // This call-out implements both attach and mountdevice functions
<driver executable> unmount <mount dir> // This call-out implements both unmountdevice and detach functions