Mount an existing NFS share into K8s Pods

I hadn’t realised Kubernetes could mount an existing NFS share into a pod with just a little text inside a manifest. Of course, the share has to exist first, and Kubernetes can’t create the NFS storage without a persistent volume provisioner like nfs-subdir, but it is very useful.

It isn’t necessary to add anything to Kubernetes itself; it is built in. You just specify the following to mount a volume and associate it with a share like this: –

volumes:
  - name: nfs-vol
    nfs:
      server: 192.168.1.95
      path: /mnt/HDDPool2/Video

Then you mount the volume like this: –

volumeMounts:
  - name: nfs-vol
    mountPath: /opt/folderincontainer

So, a full manifest would look something like this: –

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app: fedoratest
  name: fedoratest
  namespace: fedoratest
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - image: registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora:35
          name: fedora
          command: ["/bin/bash", "-c", "--"]
          args: ["while true; do sleep 30; done;"]
          volumeMounts:
            - name: nfs-vol
              mountPath: /opt/nfs
      volumes:
        - name: nfs-vol
          nfs:
            server: 192.168.1.95
            path: /mnt/HDDPool2/Video

An important thing to note is that the share must be set up with the correct permissions before it can be accessed and written to from the Pod.

One great feature of using this method is the Pod does not need to have nfs-common installed within it. The container doesn’t know that the folder is an NFS share. To the container, it is a local folder.

This is a compelling and easy-to-use feature.

Related posts:

Add an NFS provisioner to Kubernetes NFS and Proxmox containers don’t mix Manage K8s with K9s Slow and Problematic Windows -> Linux SMB Share