Filestore Multishares for GKE

Filestore Multishares for GKE allocates up to ten shares across a single Enterprise tier instance.

Why Filestore Multishares for GKE?

Filestore is a managed file storage service for applications that require a shared file system interface for data. A Filestore instance is a fully managed network-attached storage (NAS) system you can use with your GKE instances.

Filestore Multishares for GKE combined with the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Filestore CSI driver provides the following benefits:

Supports regional storage resilient to zone outages.
Allocates up to ten shares across a single Filestore Enterprise tier instance.
- Each share maps to a unique Persistent Volume (PV) in GKE.
- Ranges in share capacity from 100 GiB to 1 TiB, is defined in the Persistent Volume Claim (PVC), and reflected in the Persistent Volume (PV).
Supports greater flexibility for organizations that require both smaller volumes for multiple clients and multi-writer access across a shared network.
Supports dynamic volume provisioning, scaling share and instance capacity up or down as needed.
- If the application workload exceeds ten PVCs, the GKE Filestore CSI driver reflexively creates more Filestore instances and allocates the necessary shares dynamically across instances.
- When you delete a Persistent Volume, the GKE Filestore CSI driver reclaims the allocated share storage and removes the share. The GKE Filestore CSI driver also deletes the Filestore instance if all associated shares have been deleted.
- When you create, delete, or edit the capacity of a PV, the GKE Filestore CSI driver adds or reclaims capacity of the associated Filestore instance to accommodate the capacity of all shares. The size of the Filestore instance can fluctuate in increments of 256 GiB.
- Supports shared performance of the underlying Filestore Multishare Enterprise instance, giving higher throughput for specific GKE PVs when needed.
- Supports upscaling of PV capacity based on workload demands with near-zero downtime.

StorageClasses and dynamic volume provisioning

In order to access the Filestore Multishares feature, you must first enable the GKE Filestore CSI driver, version 1.23 or later. Once enabled, you can take advantage of GKE StorageClasses to leverage an automated process called dynamic volume provisioning to effectively manage the lifecycle of your PVs and PVCs.

The GKE Filestore CSI driver creates StorageClasses to meet your specific needs. The following table compares Filestore Enterprise Multishares performance in contrast with other single share options:

Service tier	Number of shares per instance	GKE PVC size	Filestore capacity	Incremental change	Deployment	Access mode
Basic HDD	One	1 TiB to 64 TiB	1 TiB to 64 TiB	1 GiB	Zonal	read/write many
Basic SSD	One	2.5 TiB to 64 TiB	2.5 TiB to 64 TiB	1 GiB	Zonal	read/write many
High Scale SSD	One	10 TiB to 100 TiB	10 TiB to 100 TiB	2.5 TiB	Zonal	read/write many
Enterprise	One	1 TiB to 10 TiB	1 TiB to 10 TiB	256 GiB	Regional	read/write many
Enterprise with Multishares	Up to ten	100 GiB to 1 TiB	Pool of Filestore instances, each 1 TiB to 10 TiB in size Each Filestore instance hosts up to 10 PVs (shares), each 100 GiB to 1 TiB in size	256 GiB per instance 1 GiB per PVC (share)	Regional	read/write many

For a more detailed comparison of service tier options, see Service tiers.

Monitoring

For information on how to monitor instance performance, see Monitoring instances and quota.

Feature limitations

The Filestore Multishares for GKE feature is limited to the Filestore Enterprise service tier.
Each Filestore Enterprise instance can host up to ten shares or GKE Persistent Volumes. Exceeding ten PVCs triggers the GKE Filestore CSI driver to create more Filestore instances and allocate those shares dynamically across instances. Creating a new Filestore share or PV may, in some instances, take extra time. If your application requires fast PV creation, include the following specification in the StorageClass YAML file:

volumeBindingMode: Immediate
Snapshots are not yet supported for Filestore Multishares. If needed, you can use a single share Filestore StorageClass to manually create snapshots through the Filestore API.
Multishare instances and associated shares can take several minutes to create and are not visible until create operations are complete.
Some PersistentVolume (PV) delete operations can take significant time to finish. Create or Expansion operations of PVCs for the same storage class may be blocked during this time.
The GKE Filestore CSI driver is supported for clusters using Linux.

Pricing

Once billing is enabled, charges apply based on the underlying Filestore Enterprise service tier. With shared capacity across multiple smaller volumes, users can benefit from a dramatic reduction in storage costs.

For more information see Enterprise tier and Allocating capacity.

Filestore SLA

Filestore offers 99.99% regional availability backed by the Filestore SLA.