Creating volumes

This page explains how to create Volume resources in your cluster. For more details, see the Kubernetes documentation about Volumes.

Using Volumes with Deployments

You can create a Deployment of Pods where each Pod contains one or more Volumes. The following Deployment manifest describes a Deployment of three Pods that each have an emptyDir Volume.

In this example:

  • The metadata: name field specifies a Deployment named volumes-example-deployment.
  • The Pod template specification includes a volumes field that describes an emptyDir volume named cache-volume.
  • The container specification includes a volumeMounts: field that specifies that the Volume named cache-volume is mounted at the file path /cache.
  • The manifest file is named volumes-demo.yaml.
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: volumes-example-deployment
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: demo
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: demo
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: test-container
        image: us-docker.pkg.dev/google-samples/containers/gke/hello-app:1.0
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /cache
          name: cache-volume
      volumes:
        - name: cache-volume
          emptyDir: {}

To create a Deployment from this manifest file, run the following command:

kubectl apply -f volumes-demo.yaml

Verify that your Deployment is running correctly and has the expected Volume with this command:

kubectl describe pods volumes-example-deployment

This prints information about each of the three Pods in the Deployment. The output shows that each Pod has a container, test-container, with the /cache mount:

Mounts:
  /cache from cache-volume (rw)

The output also shows that each Pod contains a Volume named cache-volume:

Volumes:
  cache-volume:
    Type:    EmptyDir (a temporary directory that shares a pod's lifetime)

For more information about creating Deployments, refer to Creating a Deployment.

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