All-Occasion Drivers

Originally, container platforms ran without persistent storage, but with users increasingly porting stateful applications to stateless container clusters, a solution for persistent storage was needed so containers could save data in a directory before crashing or stopping. This problem prompted the Container Storage Infrastructure (CSI) in 2019 to standardize a series of APIs that Kubernetes can use to request, modify, delete, and connect storage to one or multiple pods. Of course, storage vendors also provide CSI drivers that convert Kubernetes CSI API calls for the associated storage. CSI drivers control both legacy hardware storage systems and software-defined storage (SDS). In this article, I look at the most important open source CSI drivers suitable for small and medium-sized Kubernetes installations and specify their areas of application. A complete overview of all…