Kubernetes 1.32: Moving Volume Group Snapshots to Beta

Kubernetes 1.32: Moving Volume Group Snapshots to Beta An overview of volume group snapshots Why add volume group snapshots to Kubernetes? Kubernetes APIs for volume group snapshots What components are needed to support volume group snapshots What's new in Beta? How do I use Kubernetes volume group snapshots Creating a new group snapshot with Kubernetes How to use group snapshot for restore in Kubernetes As a storage vendor, how do I add support for group snapshots to my CSI driver? What are the limitations? What’s next? How do I get involved? Volume group snapshots were introduced as an Alpha feature with the Kubernetes 1.27 release. The recent release of Kubernetes v1.32 moved that support to beta. The support for volume group snapshots relies on a set of extension APIs for group snapshots. These APIs allow users to take crash consistent snapshots for a set of volumes. Behind the scenes, Kubernetes uses a label selector to group multiple PersistentVolumeClaims for snapshotting. A key aim is to allow you restore that set of snapshots to new volumes and recover your workload based on a crash consistent recovery point. This new feature is only supported for CSI volume drivers. Some storage systems provide the ability to create a crash consistent snapshot of multiple volumes. A group snapshot represents copies made from multiple volumes, that are taken at the same point-in-time. A group snapshot can be used either to rehydrate new volumes (pre-populated with the snapshot data) or to restore existing volumes to a previous state (represented by the snapshots). The Kubernetes volume plugin system already provides a powerful abstraction that automates the provisioning, attaching, mounting, resizing, and snapshotting 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 applications and underlying clusters so that applications can be agnostic to the specifics of the cluster they run on and application deployment requires no cluster specific knowledge.