About the Managed Lustre CSI driver

The GKE Managed Lustre Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver is a GKE-managed solution designed to integrate Google Cloud's high-performance, parallel file system service, Google Cloud Managed Lustre, with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters. This integration is designed for demanding workloads that require persistent, scalable, and high-throughput storage, particularly those in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and high performance computing (HPC).

By utilizing the Managed Lustre CSI driver, you can provision, manage, and access Managed Lustre instances directly through standard Kubernetes Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) and Persistent Volumes (PVs). The driver acts as the control plane, automating the lifecycle management of Managed Lustre instances in response to CSI calls, including creating, deleting, mounting, and unmounting volumes on GKE nodes.

The Managed Lustre CSI driver supports both dynamically provisioned persistent volumes (where the driver creates the Managed Lustre instance based on the PVC) and statically provisioned persistent volumes (for connecting to pre-existing Managed Lustre instances). It provides an efficient way for your Kubernetes applications to fully use the performance capabilities of Managed Lustre.

Benefits

The Managed Lustre CSI driver offers several advantages for integrating high-performance storage with your Kubernetes workloads:

  • You gain access to fully Managed Lustre file systems as your workload storage through the Kubernetes APIs.
  • The driver supports the ReadWriteMany, ReadOnlyMany, and ReadWriteOnce access modes.
  • You can use the driver to create and connect to new Managed Lustre instances as PersistentVolumes.
  • Your Kubernetes workloads can access existing Managed Lustre instances without requiring the manual installation of any Managed Lustre software, including kernel modules or client utilities.

Limitations

When using the Managed Lustre CSI driver, be aware of the following limitations:

  • Mounting multiple volumes from different Managed Lustre instances with the same filesystem name on a single node is not supported.
  • Only Container-Optimized OS (COS) nodes are supported. The minimum supported GKE node version is 1.33.2-gke.1072000 or later.
  • Only x86_64 architecture nodes are supported.
  • The Managed Lustre CSI driver does not support custom GKE node imagess.

Requirements

To use the Managed Lustre CSI driver, your cluster must meet these requirements:

  • You need GKE cluster version 1.33.2-gke.1072000 or later.
  • You must have installed the latest version of the Google Cloud CLI, with a minimum supported version of 523.0.0 or later.
  • The CSI driver must be enabled in your GKE cluster. The driver is disabled by default in both Standard and Autopilot clusters. You can enable it during cluster creation or on an existing cluster.
  • Your GKE cluster should run in the same VPC network as the Managed Lustre instance.

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