is it possible to have two different folders to mount on the same filestore instance?

Question

I am trying to connect a filestore instance to my GKE cluster. I have two deployments on my GKE cluster, writing to two separate volume claims. What i want to know is:

• is it possible for me to have a central nfs with my one google filestore instance?
• how can i make folders inside the filestore instance and have my pods talk to it without interference?

The other option i see is i create two different filestores - this seems to solve my problem, but I am currently setting up my cluster architecture and it seems like a huge waste of resources (I have ~ 1TB data, but my pods use around 50GB each - so i was thinking of partitioning, but the GCP docs are too cryptic)

Any other suggestions to what i am trying to achieve is also welcome :)

Answer 1

Filestore volumes support ReadWriteMany so you can mount the same PV on multiple pods for write access. You'd create a single PersistentVolumeClaim with accessModes set to ReadWriteMany:

kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: sharedpvc
spec:
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteMany
  storageClassName: standard-rwx
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 1Ti

and then mount it in each of your deployments

volumes:
  - name: shared
    persistentVolumeClaim:
      claimName: sharedpvc

So the same Filestore instance is now mounted on the pods/deployments, but you still need to use your own mechanism to ensure pods don't clobber each other's data. There are two options here I'd consider:

• use a separate prefix for all files written for each deployment
• create a directory within the volume for each deployment

You can't create separate partitions and you can't limit the storage size for each deployment. But this way you can have multiple pods writing to the same instance rather than creating multiple 1TB instances.