Introducing Volume Cloning Alpha for Kubernetes

Kubernetes v1.15 introduces alpha support for volume cloning. This feature allows you to create new volumes using the contents of existing volumes in the user’s namespace using the Kubernetes API. Many storage systems provide the ability to create a “clone” of a volume.

A clone is a duplicate of an existing volume that is its own unique volume on the system, but the data on the source is duplicated to the destination (clone). A clone is similar to a snapshot in that it’s a point in time copy of a volume, however rather than creating a new snapshot object from a volume, we’re instead creating a new independent volume, sometimes thought of as pre-populating the newly created volume. The Kubernetes volume plugin system already provides a powerful abstraction that automates the provisioning, attaching, and mounting of block and file storage.

Underpinning all these features is the Kubernetes goal of workload portability: Kubernetes aims to create an abstraction layer between distributed systems applications and underlying clusters so that applications can be agnostic to the specifics of the cluster they run on and application deployment requires no specific storage device knowledge. The Kubernetes Storage SIG identified clone operations as critical functionality for many stateful workloads. For example, a database administrator may want to duplicate a database volume and create another instance of an existing database.

Source: kubernetes.io