Deploying Percona Kubernetes Operators with OpenEBS Local Storage

Network volumes in Kubernetes provide great flexibility, but still, nothing beats local volumes from direct-attached storage in the sense of database performance.

I want to explore ways to deploy both Percona Kubernetes Operators (Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster and Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona Server for MongoDB) using local volumes, both on the bare-metal deployments or in cloud deployments.

Simple Ways

There are two ways available out of the box to deploy using local storage, which you can use immediately.

You can specify in cluster deployment yaml volume specification, using either hostPath:

Or emptyDir  (which will be equal somewhat to ephemeral storage in EC2):

While this will work, it is a very rigid way to force local storage, and it is not really the “Kubernetes way”, as we will lose the capability to manage data volumes.  We want to see a more uniform way with Persistent Volumes and Persistent Volumes Claims.

Persistent Volumes

Recognizing limitations with hostPath and emptyDir, Kubernetes introduced Local Persistent Volumes.

Unfortunately, while this will work for the simple deployment of single pods, it does not work with dynamically created volumes which we need for Operators. We need the support of Dynamic Volume Provisioning.

There are several projects to combine Dynamic Volume Provisioning with Local Persistent Volumes, but I did not have much success with them, and the only project which worked for me is OpenEBS.

OpenEBS provides much more than just Local Persistent Volumes, but in this blog, I want to touch only OpenEBS Local PV Hostpath.

OpenEBS Local PV Hostpath

This is actually quite simple, and this is what I like about OpenEBS. First, we will define storage classes:

For the local nvme storage:

And for the local ssd:

And after that we can deploy Operators using StorageClass, for example  in cluster deployment yaml:

The cluster will be deployed using localnvme StorageClass, and using space on /data/openebs.

Now we can observe used volumes with kubectl get pv:

There we can see data volumes from two deployed clusters. OpenEBS Local PV Hostpath is now my go-to method to deploy clusters with the local storage.