Use Alibaba Cloud storage services - Elastic Container Instance

You can use Alibaba Cloud storage services such as disks, File Storage NAS (NAS), and Object Storage Service (OSS) in Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) based on the Container Storage Interface (CSI) plug-in. This topic describes the type of Alibaba Cloud storage services, storage plug-ins, and how to use Alibaba Cloud storage services in ACK.

Alibaba Cloud storage services

Alibaba Cloud provides low-cost, high-reliability, and high-availability storage services based on various storage resources, such as blocks, files, and objects. You can select suitable cloud storage services based on the storage requirements of your business load, and factors such as data volume, data access frequency, IOPS, and throughput. This section describes the commonly used Alibaba Cloud storage services.

Disk
Disks are block-level Elastic Block Storage (EBS) devices that use a distributed multi-replica mechanism to ensure low latency, high performance, high durability, and high reliability. You can create, release, and resize disks based on your business requirements. For more information, see Disks.
NAS
NAS is a distributed file system that supports both the Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block (SMB) protocols and provides shared access, elastic scalability, high reliability, and high performance. For more information, see What is NAS?
OSS
OSS is a secure, cost-effective, and highly reliable Alibaba Cloud storage service that allows users to store large volumes of unstructured data, such as images, and audio and video data. For more information, see What is OSS?

For more information, see Alibaba Cloud storage services.

Storage plug-ins

ACK supports the CSI and FlexVolume storage plugins. FlexVolum is discontinued.

Important

FlexVolume is not supported in newly created ACK clusters that run Kubernetes 1.20 or later. For more information, see FlexVolume overview.

The Kubernetes community recommends the CSI plug-in. CSI consists of the following components:

CSI-Plugin: allows you to mount and unmount volumes.
CSI-Provisioner: automatically creates disk volumes and NAS volumes.

Use Alibaba Cloud storage services in ACK

Service	Description	References for ACK clusters	References for ACK Serverless clusters
Disk	Disks cannot be shared. A disk can be mounted only to a single pod. Both statically and dynamically provisioned volumes can be mounted to pods.	Disk volume overview	Disk volume overview
NAS	NAS file system can be shared. A NAS file system can be mounted to multiple pods. Both statically and dynamically provisioned volumes can be mounted to pods in ACK clusters, whereas only statically provisioned volumes can be mounted to pods in ACK Serverless clusters. Note All pods that run in ACK Serverless clusters are Elastic Container Instance-based pods. You cannot mount a NAS file system as a dynamically provisioned volume to pods in ACK Serverless clusters because Elastic Container Instance does not support privileged permissions.	NAS volume overview	NAS volume overview
OSS	OSS buckets can be shared. An OSS bucket can be mounted to multiple pods. Only statically provisioned volumes can be mounted to pods.	OSS volume overview	Mount an OSS bucket as a volume