How to mount a file and access it from application in a container kubernetes

Question

I am looking for a best solution for a problem where lets say an application has to access a csv file (say employee.csv) and does some operations such as getEmployee or updateEmployee etc.

Which Volume is best suitable for this and why?

Please note that employee.csv will have some pre-loaded data already.

Also to be precise we are using azure-cli for handling kubernetes.

Please Help!!

Answer 1

My first question would be: is your application meant to be scalable (ie have multiple instances running at the same time)? If that is the case, then you should choose a volume that can be written by multiple instances at the same time (ReadWriteMany, https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/persistent-volumes/ ). As you are using Azure, the AzureFile volume could fit your case. However, I am concerned that there could be a conflict with multiple writers (and some data may be lost). My advice would be to better use a Database System so you avoid this kind of situations.

If you only want to have one writer, then you could use pretty much any of them. However, if you use local volumes you could have problems when a pod get rescheduled on another host (it would not be able to retrieve the data). Given the requirements that you have (a simple csv file), the reason I would give you for using one PersistentVolume provider instead of another would be the less painful to setup. In this sense, just like before, if you are using Azure you could simply use an AzureFile volume type, as it should be more straightforward to configure in that cloud: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/azure-files