Filestore is widely used by clients running stateful apps on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). See this blog for background information on the advantages of combining the two.
Fully managed file storage from Google Cloud, Filestore is a multi-reader, multi-writer solution that is independent of computing virtual machines (VMs), making it resistant to VM failures or changes.
Filestore’s contemporary platform, which makes use of scale-out architecture and was created from the bottom up for performance, availability, and durability, is the foundation for Filestore’s Enterprise and Zonal (previously known as High Scale) tiers. In order to guarantee high durability inside a zone, customer data is saved twice, and Zonal provides a 99.9% availability SLA. Offering 99.99% availability, Enterprise is a regional service that duplicates the data synchronously across three zones within a region. Even better, google lowered Filestore costs in October by up to 25% for Zonal, Enterprise, and Basic HDD tiers (Basic SSD pricing stays the same). There is no need for action as the new, reduced pricing are implemented automatically.
With new features, functionality, and GKE integrations added on a regular basis, Filestore is a fully managed service that is incorporated into the CSI driver of GKE. Discover three newly released features that are now widely accessible by reading on.
1. Filestore Zonal support for CSI Driver elevated capacity (100TiB)
Google high-capacity Zonal solution with GKE’s new CSI driver increases capacity and performance linearly to match your high-capacity and high-performance needs up to 100TiB per instance. The integration starts at 10TiB. Large-scale AI/ML training frameworks like PyTorch/Tensorflow that require a file interface can benefit from Filestore Zonal’s high throughput (up to 26GiB/s). It also has 1,000 NFS connections per 10TiB and non-disruptive updates. With up to 10,000 NFS connections running concurrently, large-scale GKE deployments and taxing multi-writer AI/ML workloads are supported.
Google previously offered Filestore Enterprise and Filestore Basic are now enhanced with the addition of the CSI driver for Filestore Zonal. You may now select the ideal Filestore tier according to your demands for capacity, performance, and data security (such as backups and snapshots). Keep in mind that while Filestore Basic tier does not offer non-disruptive upgrades, Filestore Enterprise does.
2. Replicas
Google are pleased to announce the release of Filestore Enterprise’s CSI-integrated backup.
Clients can now safeguard Filestore Enterprise volumes in the same manner that they were able to safeguard their data on Filestore Basic volumes using the Volume Snapshots API. It’s crucial to note that the VolumeSnapshot API’s name is a little deceptive because, unlike what the name suggests, it’s a means for backing up data rather than a local file system snapshot. For both Filestore Basic and Enterprise, the procedure for initiating a backup via the API is the same.
Now that you have backups of your current Enterprise volumes, you may use the snapshot as a data source to create new volumes. You may now backup and restore your instances straight from the CSI driver thanks to this new capability. This feature is offered in single-share deployments on the Enterprise tier. At this time, Enterprise Multishare configurations do not support the Volume Snapshots API.
3. Reduced capacity Multiple shares in Filestore Enterprise
Google’s efficient multishare instances from last year, which let users split a 1TiB instance into several 100GiB persistent volumes to increase storage utilization, are well-liked by GKE and Filestore Enterprise clients.
Google are pleased to present the next iteration of the company’s multi-share capability, which is only accessible via the GKE CSI driver on the Enterprise tier. With multishares, you can start with a minimum share (persistent volume) capacity as low as 10GiB (down from 100GiB previously), and you can divide your Enterprise instance into as many as 80 shares (up from 10 shares previously).
Persistent storage for your GKE stateful workloads with Enterprise Multishares is not only very performant and highly durable (99.99% SLA), but it’s also very efficient, providing complete instance utilization of up to 80 shares per instance. Find out more about how to use the enhanced multishares functionality to boost the effectiveness of your GKE storage here.
Workloads with states, the Filestore method
Filestore is an integrated GKE NFS storage solution that is fully managed. They are still working to enable large-scale, demanding GKE stateful workloads like AI/ML training, and we have added the Filestore Zonal CSI integration, made Volume Snapshot API available for Filestore Enterprise, and provided more granular Filestore Enterprise Multishare persistent volume support.
