The Big Picture

Storing and retrieving data is critical to most real-world business applications. Fortunately, the Kubernetes persistent volume subsystem lets us connect enterprise-grade storage systems that provide advanced data management services such as backup and recovery, replication, snapshots, and more.

Kubernetes supports a variety of external storage systems. These include enterprise-class storage systems from providers such as EMC, NetApp, and all the major cloud providers. The hands-on examples later in the chapter are designed for Kubernetes clusters on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and won't work on other platforms. However, the principles and workflows apply to most Kubernetes environments.

Types of storage

Kubernetes supports many types of storage from many different providers. These include block, file, and object storage from various external systems that can be in the cloud or our on-premises datacenters.