Mounting Google Cloud Storage bucket to Kubernetes Pod

You may ask why doing this if we can use PersistentVolume? Though there may be multiple scenarios when mounting GCS bucket to you Kubernetes Pod is a good option:

• You already have data in GCS bucket used by other services / people and you want to access it from your application deployed to k8s by using standard file system semantics.
• You want write files by using standard file system semantics directly to GCS bucket to have access later.
• Any other use case when latency doesn’t matter that much.

Google Cloud Storage has an open source FUSE adapter gcsfuse which can be used to mount GCS bucket to Kubernetes Pod as a volume.

In this tutorial we’ll deploy nginx server which will serve static files from GCS bucket (not a real-world example probably, but same logic can be applied later to any use case).

Prerequisites

• Create Google Cloud Storage Bucket (bucket-name in my example)
• Create Service Account with read-only access to this bucket and download key as JSON

Dockerfile

Our Docker image should have gcsfuse binary in it, so here is our Dockerfile with nginx and gcsfuse:

Kubernetes Resources

We’ll create the following resources:

• Secret with Service Account Key
• Deployment
• Service

We’ll use Container Lifecycle Hooks to mount and unmount GCS bucket.

Note, that we use allow_other FUSE option which overrides the security measure restricting file access to the user mounting the filesystem. This is needed specifically for nginx case, when nginx process is runnning with nginx user. You may remove this option for better security.

All Kubernetes resources: