Creating volumes

This page explains how to create Volume resources in your cluster. Refer to the Volumes Overview for more information on Volumes in Kubernetes and their use with Google Kubernetes Engine.

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.

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: gcr.io/google-samples/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.

What's next

• Learn about PersistentVolumes, PersistentVolumeClaims, and dynamic storage provisioning