Creating Google persistent disks from snapshots in Kubernetes

Question

I need to run pods on multiple nodes with very large (700GB) readonly dataset in Kubernetes. I tried using readonlymany, but it fails in multi-node setup, and in general was very unstable.

Is there a way for pods to create a new persistent disk from a snapshot, attach it to the pod, and destroy it when pod is destroyed? This would allow me to update snapshots once in a while with the new data.

Answer 1

You can manually provision a persistent disk using an existing image on GCP:

gcloud beta compute disks create --size=500GB --image=<snapshot-name>  my-data-disk

Then use it on your pod:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-pd
spec:
  containers:
  - image: k8s.gcr.io/test-webserver
    name: test-container
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /test-pd
      name: test-volume
  volumes:
  - name: test-volume
    # This GCE PD must already exist.
    gcePersistentDisk:
      pdName: my-data-disk
      fsType: ext4

The GCE storage class doesn't support snapshots so unfortunately, you can't do it with PVCs. More info here

Hope it helps.