About Filestore support for Google Kubernetes Engine

Filestore instances are fully managed file servers on Google Cloud that you can use as durable storage with ReadWriteMany access for your Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters.

  • As a type of durable or non-ephemeral storage, your data persists beyond the lifecycle of your GKE Pods.

  • As durable storage with ReadWriteMany access, your GKE PersistentVolumes can be mounted as read-write by many nodes.

  • Unlike the single read-write access mode inherent to Persistent Disk, Filestore instances are accessible from multiple GKE nodes simultaneously. This lets you initiate Pods on any available GKE node, giving you greater efficiency of your GKE clusters.

  • As a type of file storage, Filestore supports multiple concurrent application instances accessing the same file system, simultaneously.

For more information, see Deploy a stateful workload with Filestore.

Filestore and the GKE Filestore CSI driver

The GKE Filestore CSI driver is the primary way for you to use Filestore instances with GKE and provides the following benefits:

  • You have access to fully-managed NFS storage through the Kubernetes APIs (kubectl).

  • You can use the GKE Filestore CSI driver to dynamically provision your PersistentVolumes.

  • You can use the GKE Filestore CSI driver to create CSI volume snapshots which subsequently create Filestore backups.

For a detailed list of benefits, see Access instances with the GKE Filestore CSI driver.

Filestore multishares for GKE

Filestore multishares for GKE combined with the GKE Filestore CSI driver, version 1.27 or later, provides the following benefits:

  • Provides a comprehensive view of your PersistentVolumes as one pool of storage.

  • Supports dynamic volume provisioning, scaling share and instance capacity up or down as needed.

  • Supports multiple shares with smaller, more flexible sizing for improved utilization and cost efficiency of each Filestore instance.

For more information, see Filestore multishares for GKE.

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