TechOps Examples

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A container's filesystem lives and dies with the container itself. Picture an application writing uploaded files to /data inside its container, or a machine learning job checkpointing progress to local disk mid-training. The container crashes from an out of memory error, and the kubelet restarts it moments later. The pod shows Running again, the application comes back up, but every file written to that local filesystem is gone. Kubernetes replaced the container with a fresh one, and a fresh container starts with a fresh, empty filesystem. This is not a bug. It is the deliberate design of containers, and it becomes a serious operational problem the moment an application needs to remember anything across a restart.

A volume solves this by attaching storage to a pod that exists independently of any single container's lifecycle inside it.

A container running inside a pod on a node writes its state to a volume sitting outside the container's own filesystem. Because the volume is attached at the pod level rather than the container level, the data written to it survives a container restart even though the container's local filesystem does not.

The simplest form of this is an emptyDir volume, which Kubernetes creates fresh when the pod starts and mounts into whichever containers reference it.

This pod spec declares a volume named logs-volume using the emptyDir type under spec.volumes, then mounts it into the container at /var/logs using volumeMounts. Any process inside techops-container writing to /var/logs is now writing to storage that survives a container restart within the same pod, since emptyDir only gets wiped when the pod itself is deleted, not when an individual container inside it restarts.

This is useful for a scratch space multiple containers in the same pod need to share, such as a sidecar reading log files written by the main application container. What it does not solve is data surviving the pod being deleted entirely, which happens constantly during deployments, node drains, and horizontal scaling events. For a database or any stateful workload, the data needs to outlive the pod, not just the container.

Kubernetes lets two objects working together. A PersistentVolume, or PV, represents an actual piece of storage provisioned in the cluster. A PersistentVolumeClaim, or PVC, is a request from a developer (mostly) for storage matching certain criteria, without needing to know which specific PV backs it.

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