Expanding K8s PVs in EKS on AWS

Feb 21, 2019

If that post title isn't a mouthful...

I'm excited to be moving a few EKS clusters into real-world production use after a few months of preparation. Besides my Raspberry Pi Dramble project (which is pretty low-key), these are the only production-grade Kubernetes clusters I've dealt with—and I've learned a lot. Enough that I'm working on a new book.

Anyways, back to the main topic: As of Kubernetes 1.11, you can auto-expand PVs from most cloud providers, AWS included. And since EKS now runs Kubernetes 1.11.x, you can have your EBS PVs automatically expand by just increasing the PVC claim size in spec.resources.requests.storage to a larger size (e.g. 10Gi to 20Gi).

To make sure this works, though, you need to make sure of a few things:

Make sure you have the proper setting on your StorageClass

You need to make sure the StorageClass you're using has the allowVolumeExpansion setting enabled, e.g.:

---
kind: StorageClass
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: standard
  annotations:
    storageclass.beta.kubernetes.io/is-default-class: "true"
provisioner: kubernetes.io/aws-ebs
parameters:
  type: gp2
reclaimPolicy: Delete
allowVolumeExpansion: true
mountOptions:
  - debug

Edit your PVC

Increase the storage request of your PVC (note that you cannot decrease the request... that's a lot weirder a use case and is not something trivial to do on most storage systems!) by editing the pvc:

$ kubectl edit pvc -n [namespace] [claim-name]
...
spec:
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 20Gi # increased from 10Gi
  storageClassName: standard

Save the edit, then wait, and monitor the PV associated with the PVC:

$ kubectl get pv pvc-d2adc816-d0c7-11e8-80aa-0ef7083fecf8 --watch

Once it's done, you're ready for the final step!

Delete/restart the Pod(s) which mount the PVC

This may seem unintuitive, but in order for Kubernetes to expand the actual volume on the disk to fill the newly-available free space, it has to detach the volume (so the running Pod has to be terminated), then it expands the PVC, then it attaches it to a new Pod:

$ kubectl delete pod -n [namespace] [pod identifier]

After a minute or two (or longer if the volume is huge), the new pod should be up with the now-larger PVC attached.

No need to use fdisk or anything arcane like that... just make the claim request larger, wait for it to expand, then delete pods using it, and things come back with the new larger size. Nice!

Further reading: