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PersistentVolume

A PersistentVolume (PV) is a piece of storage in the cluster that has been provisioned by an administrator or dynamically provisioned using Storage Classes.

API Reference

PV’s are used by pods via the pod’s volumes spec, just like regular volumes. They are not intended to be interchangable with volumes, you can think of a PersistentVolume as a specific type of volume, that is detached from a pod’s lifecycle, and exist even if the pod is shutdown.

The PersistentVolume construct represents a pre-existing volume in the cluster.

Types

Each type is implmented as its own construct, exposing both common properties as well as type specific ones. Currently the supported types are:

  • AwsElasticBlockStorePersistentVolume
  • AzureDiskPersistentVolume
  • GCEPersistentDiskPersistentVolume

For example, to create a PV from an existing AWS EBS volume:

import * as kplus from 'cdk8s-plus-28';
import * as cdk8s from 'cdk8s';

const vol = new kplus.AwsElasticBlockStorePersistentVolume(chart, 'Volume', {
  // must exist in aws
  volumeId: 'vol1234',

  // assign the volume to small-ebs storage class
  storageClassName: 'small-ebs',

  // what is the volume storage
  storage: cdk8s.Size.gibibytes(50),
});

Note that this does not actually create a new volume, it merely manifests an existing volume in AWS as a Kubernetes resource.

Reserve

See https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/persistent-volumes/#reserving-a-persistentvolume

Once the PV is defined, you can reserve it:

const claim = vol.reserve();

This method creates a new PersistentVolumeClaim and performs a bi-directional binding that reserves the volume for usage. You can use the claim to mount a volume onto a container like usual:

container.mount('/data', kplus.Volume.fromPersistentVolumeClaim(claim));

You can also directly mount a persistent volume, which will implicitly reserve it and create a volume from the created claim:

const vol = new kplus.AwsElasticBlockStorePersistentVolume(chart, 'Volume', { volumeId: 'vol1234' });
container.mount('/data', vol);

Bind

Binding is a part of the reservation process, but it only creates a one directional link. You can use it to bind a PV to an existing PVC. Note however that if the PVC is not bound to the PV, there’s no guarantee this volume will indeed be given that specific claim.

const claim = kplus.PersistentVolumeClaim.fromClaimName('claim');

// will modify the vol resource to refer to the claim.
// but no the other way around.
vol.bind(claim);