Deployments, Local PVs

Deployments

Where possible, I converted my Kubernetes StatefulSets to Deployments. Because that’s what you do.

Local Persistent Volumes

The evolution of my cluster has been something like this:

  1. Single node
  2. Multi-node with Longhorn StorageClass
  3. Single node with Longhorn StorageClass
  4. Single node with no StorageClass, using HostPath for pod storage

This isn’t intrinsically bad, but it does cause problems with Helm charts.

  1. Install the Helm release
  2. A PersistentVolumeClaim is created
  3. Shit doesn’t work because no PersistentVolume gets made

My terrible workaround for this was to install a Helm chart, then go and edit the Deployment/StatefulSet to use hostPath.

This is not a good way of doing things, primarily because an upgrade to the installed Helm release blows away my hostPath modifications and then my service stops working. Because of this, things which I have installed using Helm are infrequently updated, which is bad.

So, I did a bit of research, and came across this blog post. This seemed to address my problems exactly. Then, I read the documentation. And it worked! This is how things should be done in the future:

  1. Install the Helm release
  2. Check the PersistantVolumeClaims that it made
  3. Manually create PersistentVolumes corresponding to the PVCs
  4. PVCs bind to the PVs and pods come up as expected!

This creates some a lot of rework, but should facilitate easier maintenance going forward. For each installed Helm release:

  1. Adjust answers/values.yaml with good storage capacity
  2. Re-install Helm release
  3. Check the PersistentVolumeClaims that were created
  4. Create corresponding local PersistentVolumes
  5. Sleep well knowing that keeping my services up-to-date just got a lot easier.

Also need to apply the same treatment to services installed via manifests. Time consuming, but not difficult.

tl;dr – hostPath BAD, local volumes GOOD.

sig-storage-local-static-provisioner looks to be a thing to help with local volume management. I’ll test this in a VM before throwing into my running cluster.


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