Google Cloud has released Filestore Enterprise Multishares for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in general availability. With Filestore Enterprise Multishares, multiple persistent volumes can be packaged into a Filestore Enterprise instance to improve storage utilization and reduce costs, Infoq said on the topic.

Filestore Enterprise provides a fully managed, regional network attached storage (NAS) system for GKE. The storage is completely decoupled from the host and requires no additional infrastructure operations to join or decouple volumes. They can be read and written simultaneously from hundreds to thousands of containers.

When combined with the GKE Filestore Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver, Filestore Multishares can allocate up to ten partitions in a single Filestore Enterprise instance. PVs can be allocated from 100 GiB to 1 TiB. When storage is requested using Kubernetes Persistent Volume Claim (PVC), the GKE Filestore CSI driver will pack the volume requests into the Filestore Enterprise instance.

During this time, PVC creation or expansion operations for the same storage class can be blocked. Snapshots are not currently supported with Filestore Multishares. A shared Filestore StorageClass can be used to manually create snapshots through the Filestore API.

To access the Filestore Multishare feature, the GKE Filestore CSI driver must be enabled on version 1.23 or later. Note that this feature is limited to the Filestore Enterprise service level. More details about the Filestore Multishare feature can be found on the Google Cloud website.

Saikat Roychowdhury, senior software engineer at Google, and Akshay Ram, product manager at Google, caution about a few considerations when using this tool. Since the underlying Filestore storage is shared, there is a risk that some “noisy neighbor” will consume an excessive amount of IOPS and bandwidth.