CSI Trident for Kubernetes

CSI overview

The container storage interface (CSI) is a standardized API for container orchestrators to manage storage plugins. A community-driven effort, CSI promises to let storage vendors write a single plugin to make their products work with multiple container orchestrators.

Kubernetes 1.10 contains beta-level support for CSI-based plugins. It uses CSI version 0.2, which has very limited capabilities, including creating/deleting/mounting/unmounting persistent volumes.

CSI Trident

As an independent external volume provisioner, Trident for Kubernetes offers many capabilities beyond those allowed by CSI, so it is unlikely that Trident will limit itself to CSI in the foreseeable future.

However, NetApp is participating in the community’s efforts to see CSI achieve its full potential. As part of that work, we have developed a public preview version of Trident that deploys itself as a CSI plugin. The goals of shipping CSI Trident are to better inform our contributions to CSI as well as to give our customers a way to kick the tires on CSI and see where the container storage community is going.

Note

This experimental CSI driver does not support Kubernetes v1.13

Warning

CSI Trident for Kubernetes is an unsupported, alpha-level preview release for evaluation purposes only, and it should not be deployed in support of production workloads. We recommend you install CSI Trident in a sandbox cluster used primarily for testing and evaluation.

Installing CSI Trident

To install CSI Trident, follow the the extensive deployment guide, with just one difference.

Invoke the install command with the --csi switch:

#./tridentctl install -n trident --csi
WARN CSI Trident for Kubernetes is a technology preview and should not be installed in production environments!
INFO Starting Trident installation.                namespace=trident
INFO Created service account.
INFO Created cluster role.
INFO Created cluster role binding.
INFO Created Trident service.
INFO Created Trident statefulset.
INFO Created Trident daemonset.
INFO Waiting for Trident pod to start.
INFO Trident pod started.                          namespace=trident pod=trident-csi-0
INFO Waiting for Trident REST interface.
INFO Trident REST interface is up.                 version=19.01.0
INFO Trident installation succeeded.

It will look like this when the installer is complete:

# kubectl get pod -n trident
NAME                       READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
trident-csi-0              4/4       Running   1          2m
trident-csi-vwhl2          2/2       Running   0          2m

# ./tridentctl -n trident version
+----------------+----------------+
| SERVER VERSION | CLIENT VERSION |
+----------------+----------------+
| 19.01.0        | 19.01.0        |
+----------------+----------------+

Using CSI Trident

To provision storage with CSI Trident, define one or more storage classes with the provisioner value io.netapp.trident.csi. The simplest storage class to start with is one based on the sample-input/storage-class-csi.yaml.templ file that comes with the installer, replacing __BACKEND_TYPE__ with the storage driver name.:

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: basic-csi
provisioner: io.netapp.trident.csi
parameters:
  backendType: "__BACKEND_TYPE__"

Note

tridentctl will detect and manage either Trident or CSI Trident automatically. We don’t recommend installing both on the same cluster, but if both are present, use the --csi switch to force tridentctl to manage CSI Trident.

Uninstalling CSI Trident

Use the --csi switch to uninstall CSI Trident:

#./tridentctl uninstall --csi
INFO Deleted Trident daemonset.
INFO Deleted Trident statefulset.
INFO Deleted Trident service.
INFO Deleted cluster role binding.
INFO Deleted cluster role.
INFO Deleted service account.
INFO The uninstaller did not delete the Trident's namespace, PVC, and PV in case they are going to be reused. Please use the --all option if you need the PVC and PV deleted.
INFO Trident uninstallation succeeded.