Creating instances

This page shows you how to create a Filestore instance by using either the Cloud Console or the gcloud tool.

Instructions for creating an instance

Cloud Console

You can create a Filestore instance using the Cloud Console by performing the following steps. High Scale SSD quota starts at 0 and you must first make and be approved for a High Scale SSD quota increase request before you can create a High Scale SSD instance.

In the Cloud Console, go to the Filestore instances page.

Go to the Filestore instances page
Click Create Instance
Enter all required fields and optional fields as needed based on the instructions in the following sections of this page.
Click Create.

gcloud

Before you begin

To use the gcloud tool, you must either install the Cloud SDK or use the Cloud Shell that's built into the Cloud Console:

Go to the Cloud Console

`gcloud` command for creating an Filestore instance

You can create a Filestore instance by running the instances create command. If you wish to create a High Scale SDD instance, you must run gcloud beta filestore instances create. Additionally, High Scale SSD quota starts at 0 and you must make and be approved for High Scale SSD quota increase request before you can create a High Scale tier instance.

gcloud [beta] filestore instances create instance-id \
    --[project=project-id] \
    --[zone=zone] \
    --tier=tier \
    --file-share=name="file-share-name",capacity=file-share-size \
    --network=name="vpc-network",[reserved-ip-range="reserved-ip-address"]
    --[labels=key=value,[key=value,…]]

where:

instance-id is the instance ID of the Filestore instance you want to create. See Naming your instance.
project-id is the project ID of the Cloud project that contains the Filestore instance. You can skip this flag if the Filestore instance is in the gcloud default project. You can set the default project by running:
```
 gcloud config set project project-id
```
zone is the zone where the Filestore instance resides. See Selecting a location. Run the gcloud filestore zones list command to get a list of supported zones. You can skip this flag if the Filestore instance is in the gcloud default zone. You can set the default zone by running:
```
 gcloud config set filestore/zone zone
```
tier can have the values of BASIC_HDD, BASIC_SSD, or HIGH_SCALE_SSD. If you are not specifying beta in the command, then you must use 'STANDARDforBASID_HDDandPREMIUMforBASIC_SSD`. See Service tiers for more information.
file-share-name is the name you specify for the NFS file share that is served from the instance. See Naming the file share.
file-share-size is the size you want for the file share. The minimum file share size is 1 tibibyte (TiB) for a BASIC_HDD tier instance, 2.5 TiB for a BASIC_SSD tier instance, and 60 TiB for a HIGH_SCALE_SSD tier instance. See Allocating capacity.
vpc-network is the name of the VPC network you want the instance to use. See Selecting the authorized network. You can't specify a legacy network for the vpc-network value. If necessary, create a new VPC network to use by following the instructions at Creating a new auto mode VPC network.
reserved-ip-address is the IP address range for the Filestore instance. See Configuring a reserved IP address. We recommend that you skip this flag to allow Filestore to automatically find a free IP address range and assign it to the instance.
key is a label that you want to add. Adding labels is not required when creating a Filestore instance. You can also add, delete, or update labels after you create an instance. For details, see Managing labels.
value is the value for a label.

Example

The following command creates an instance with the following characteristics:

ID is render1.
Project is myproject.
Zone is us-central1-c.
Tier is BASIC_HDD.
File share name is NFSvol.
File share size is 2 TiB.
VPC network is default.
Reserved IP address range is 10.0.7.0/29.
Grants read and write access with root squashed to the client with IP address 10.0.2.0.

gcloud beta filestore instances create render1 \
    --project=myproject \
    --zone=us-central1-c \
    --tier=BASIC_HDD \
    --network=name="default",reserved-ip-range="10.0.7.0/29"
    --flags-file=nfs-export-options.json

nfs-export-options.json file contents:

   {
  "--file-share":
    {
      "capacity": "102400",
      "name": "my_vol",
      "nfs-export-options": [
        {
          "access-mode": "READ_WRITE",
          "ip-ranges": [
            "10.0.0.0/29",
            "10.2.0.0/29"
          ],
          "squash-mode": "ROOT_SQUASH",
          "anon_uid": 1003,
          "anon_gid": 1003
        },
        {
          "access-mode": "READ_ONLY",
          "ip-ranges": [
            "192.168.0.0/24"
          ],
          "squash-mode": "NO_ROOT_SQUASH"
        }
      ]
    }
}

Naming your instance

The name of your Filestore instance, or instance ID, is used to identify the instance and is used in gcloud commands. Instance IDs must comply with the <label> element of RFC 1035. Specifically, they must:

Be between 1-63 characters long.
Begin with a lowercase letter.
Consist of dashes, lowercase letters, or digits.
End with lowercase letters or digits.

The instance ID must be unique in the Cloud project and zone where it's located. Once an instance is created, its instance ID cannot be changed.

Selecting a service tier

The service tier of a Filestore instance is a combination of its Instance type and Storage type. Once an instance is created, its service tier cannot be changed.

Instance type

Select the instance type that best matches your needs. If you don't anticipate needing more than 63.9 TiB of storage on the instance, we recommend selecting Basic. However, High Scale tier provides higher overall performance in multi-client scenarios. If your workloads are performance-critical and spread over multiple clients, you may still choose to deploy a High Scale tier instance for its performance benefits. The following table highlights the differences between Basic and High Scale instance types:

Feature	Basic	High Scale
Capacity	`1-63.9TiB`	`60-320TiB`
Scalability	Capacity can be scaled up during runtime in `1GiB` increments or its multiples.	Capacity can be scaled up or down during runtime in `10TiB` increments or its multiples.
Performance	Static with performance step at `10TiB`.	Scales linearly with capacity.

High Scale SSD tier instances take anywhere between 15 minutes and one hour to create, depending on the instance size.

Filestore quota is consumed when instance creation starts but you are not billed for the instance during this time.

For more information about service tiers, see the Service tiers page.

Storage type

Select HDD or SSD based on your performance needs. We recommend using SSD for performance-critical workloads. HDD is not available for High Scale instances. The following table highlights the speed difference between Basic HDD, Basic SSD, and High Scale SSD tier instances. The performance of High Scale SSD tier instances automatically scales with the capacity of the instance.

Specification	Basic HDD	Basic SSD	High Scale SSD
Read IOPS	`1-10 TiB` capacity: 600 `10+ TiB` capacity: 1,000	60,000	90,000-480,000
Write IOPS	`1-10 TiB` capacity: 1,000 `10+ TiB` capacity: 5,000	25,000	30,000-160,000
Read Tput (MB/s)	`1-10 TiB` capacity: 100 `10+ TiB` capacity: 180	1,200	3,000-16,000
Write Tput (MB/s)	`1-10 TiB` capacity: 100 `10+ TiB` capacity: 120	350	660-3,520

For more information about performance, see the Performance page.

Allocating capacity

Since the capacity of Filestore instances can be scaled up without affecting runtime and you are charged based on the allocated size of the instance, you can set the capacity to the amount you currently need when you create the instance. As you approach your capacity limit, you can scale up the capacity as needed. To learn about how you can monitor the capacity of your instances, see Monitoring instances.

You can specify the capacity in whole numbers using either GiB or TiB. The default unit is GiB.

The following table shows the instance sizes available for each tier:

Tier	Minimum size	Maximum size	Minimum increment
Basic HDD	`1TiB` (`1024GiB`)	`63.9TiB` (`65433GiB`)	`1GiB`
Basic SSD	`2.5TiB` (`2560GiB`)	`63.9TiB` (`65433GiB`)	`1GiB`
High Scale SSD	`60TiB` (`61440GiB`)	`320TiB` (`327680GiB`)	`10TiB`

The size of Basic tier instances can be any whole gibibyte value or its tebibyte equivalent that's between the minimum and maximum instance size. The size of High Scale tier instances can be any value between the minimum and maximum instance size that is a multiple of 10 tebibytes or its gibibyte equivalent. For information on units, see Storage size units.

Once created, the size of Basic tier instances only can be scaled up, while the size of High Scale tier instances can be scaled up or down. For more information, see Scaling capacity.

Total capacity quota

Every project is allocated separate capacity quotas for Basic and High Scale instances for each Google Cloud region. Once you have reached your quota limit, you will not be able to create more Filestore instances or increase the capacity of your existing instances. To see your available quota, go to the Quotas page in the Google Cloud console:

Go to the Quotas page

For information on requesting more quota, see Requesting quota increases.

Naming the file share

A file share is the directory on a Filestore instance where all shared files are stored. It is also the thing that you mount or map to on the client VM.

The name of the file share must comply with the following:

Be between 1-16 characters long.
Begin with a letter.
Consist of uppercase or lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores.
End with a letter or number.

Selecting the authorized network

The authorized network is the VPC network in your Cloud project that the Filestore instance peers to when it is created. Compute Engine VMs must be on the same network as the Filestore instance to access the shared files stored on that instance. Once an instance is created, its authorized network cannot be changed.

If you are using a shared VPC service project, you cannot directly create Filestore instances on the shared VPC network. For details, see Known issues.

If the applications you plan to use with this Filestore instance require NFS file locking, and you are choosing either:

A VPC network other than the default network.
The default VPC network with changed firewall rules.

then you may need to open up the ports used by Filestore in the network you choose. For more information, see Configuring firewall rules.

Selecting a location

Location refers to the Region and Zone where the Filestore instance is located. For the best performance and to avoid cross-regional networking charges, ensure that the Filestore instance is located in the same region as the Compute Engine VMs that need to access them.

For more information about regions and zones, see Geography and regions.

Configuring IP-based access control

By default, a Filestore instance grants root level read and write access to all clients, including Compute Engine VMs and GKE clusters, that share the same Cloud project and VPC network. If you want to restrict access, you can do so by creating rules that grant specific access levels to clients based on their IP address. Once the rules are added, all IP addresses and ranges that are not specified in a rule are revoked access.

The following table describes the privileges of each access level. These access levels are only used in the Cloud Console. In the gcloud tool and the API, you must specify the rule configurations directly.

Access level	Rule configuration	Description
admin	read-write no-root-squash	The client can view and modify all files, folders, and metadata as a root user. It can also grant ownership to files or folders by setting its `uid` and `gid`, thereby granting access to clients that do not have root level access to the file share.
admin-viewer	read-only no-root-squash	The client can view all files, folders, and metadata as a root user but cannot modify them.
editor	read-write root-squash	The client can view and modify the files, folders, and metadata according to its assigned `uid` and `gid`.
viewer	read-only root-squash	The client can view the files, folders, and metadata according to its assigned `uid` and `gid`.

root-squash maps all requests from uid 0 and gid 0 to anon_uid and anon_gid, respectively. This removes root level access from clients that attempt to access the file share as a root user.

When creating IP-based access rules, you must specify an internal IP address or range and the access level granted. When creating an instance, at least one rule must grant admin access. This rule can be removed once the instance is created. In the Cloud Console, you can create up to 10 different rules involving up to 64 different IP addresses or ranges.

In the gcloud tool, you can configure up to 64 different IP addresses or CIDR blocks per Filestore instance across a maximum of 10 different rules. A rule is defined as the combination of the access-mode, squash-mode, and anon_uid/anon_gid configurations. The anon_uid and anon_gid fields have default values of 65534 and can only be configured through the API and the gcloud tool.

Example

Here's an example of three different IP-based access rules:

access-mode=READ_ONLY, squash-mode=ROOT_SQUASH, anon_uid=10000.
access-mode=READ_WRITE, squash-mode=ROOT_SQUASH, anon_gid=150.
access-mode=READ_WRITE, squash-mode=NO_ROOT_SQUASH.

To create IP-based access control rules using the gcloud tool, use the --flag-file flag with the instances create or instances update commands and point it to a json configuration file. For example, if the json configuration file is name nfs-export-options.json, the flag would be:

--flag-file=nfs-export-options.json

Example json configuration file:

   {
  "--file-share":
    {
      "capacity": "102400",
      "name": "my_vol",
      "nfs-export-options": [
        {
          "access-mode": "READ_WRITE",
          "ip-ranges": [
            "10.0.0.0/29",
            "10.2.0.0/29"
          ],
          "squash-mode": "ROOT_SQUASH",
          "anon_uid": 1003,
          "anon_gid": 1003
        },
         {
          "access-mode": "READ_ONLY",
          "ip-ranges": [
            "192.168.0.0/24"
          ],
          "squash-mode": "NO_ROOT_SQUASH"
        }
      ]
    }
}

ip-ranges is the IP address or range to grant access to. You can specify multiple IP addresses or ranges by separating them with a comma. Example: 10.0.1.0,10.0.2.0,...
access-mode is the access level to grant to the client(s) whose IP address falls within ip-range. It can have the values of READ_WRITE or READ_ONLY. The default value is READ_WRITE.
squash-mode can have the values ROOT_SQUASH or NO_ROOT_SQUASH. ROOT_SQUASH removes root level access to the client(s) whose IP address falls within ip-range, while NO_ROOT_SQUASH enables root access. The default value is NO_ROOT_SQUASH.
anon_uid is the user ID value that you want to map to anon_uid. The default value is 65534.
anon_gid is the group ID value that you want to map to anon_gid. The default value is 65534.

Optional fields

Adding an instance description

An instance description allows you to write descriptions, notes, or simple instructions for yourself and other users. For example, you can include information about:

The types of files stored in the instance.
Who has access to the instance.
Instructions for how to get access to the instance.
What the instance is used for.

Instance descriptions are limited to 2048 characters in length. There are no restrictions on the characters that are allowed. Once a Filestore instance is created, you can update its instance description any time as needed. For information on updating instance descriptions, see Editing instances.

Adding labels

Labels are key-value pairs that you can use to group related instances and store metadata about an instance. Labels can be added, deleted, or modified at any time. For more information, see Managing labels.

Configuring a reserved IP address range

The IP address range must be a subset of one of the internal IP address ranges (10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16) with a block size of 29 for Basic tier instances and a block size of 23 for High Scale tier instances. The IP address range you choose must not overlap with any existing subnets from the selected VPC network, or with the reserved IP address ranges for any existing Filestore instances in that network.

You can see the IP address ranges for the subnets of your network by going to the VPC Network page in the Google Cloud console:

Go to the VPC network page

You can get the reserved IP address range for any Filestore instance on the Filestore instances page in the Google Cloud console:

Go to the Filestore instances page

Examples of valid Filestore instance IP address ranges are 10.0.0.0/29 for a Basic tier instance and 172.16.1.0/23 for a High Scale tier instance.

What's next

Retrieve the instance details to get the instance's IP address. You need this in order to access the Filestore file share from clients.
Mount the Filestore file share on a Compute Engine VM instance.
Access the Filestore file share from a Google Kubernetes Engine cluster.
Troubleshoot instance creation issues related to Filestore.

Creating instances

Instructions for creating an instance

Cloud Console

gcloud

Before you begin

gcloud command for creating an Filestore instance

Example

Naming your instance

Selecting a service tier

Instance type

Storage type

Allocating capacity

Total capacity quota

Naming the file share

Selecting the authorized network

Selecting a location

Configuring IP-based access control

Example

Optional fields

Adding an instance description

Adding labels

Configuring a reserved IP address range

What's next

`gcloud` command for creating an Filestore instance