Creating And Using Volumes

To create a volume, click on New Deployment and select Volume.

To create a volume, you will need to select a workspace. Volumes created within a specific workspace in TrueFoundry can only be used by applications deployed within the same workspace.This ensures that the volume’s data is accessible only to the applications that are part of the same environment, enhancing security and organization.

The volume form will look something like this:

The key fields to fill up in the form are:

Name: The name of the volume.
Volume Config: You can select either of Create New Volume or Use Existing Volume.

In most cases, you will want to create a new volume. The Use Existing Volume option is useful when you want to mount a pre-existing volume or bucket like S3, GCS, etc.

Create New Volume
Use Existing Volume

You will need to fill up two fields here:

Size: The size of the volume in Gi.

In most cases, you can increase the size of the volume after it is created. But you cannot decrease the size of the volume once created. So if you are not sure about the final size, you can start with a smaller size and increase it later.

Storage Class: The Kubernetes storage class to use for the volume. Storage classes provide a way to specify the type of storage that should be provisioned for a Volume. These storage classes differ in their characteristics, such as performance, durability, and cost. The specific storage classes available will depend on the cloud provider you are using and what is preconfigured by the Infra team.

In case you want to whitelist only certain storage classes in the cluster to be used for provisioning volumes, you can add the truefoundry.com/enabled: 'true' label to the StorageClass resources. The dropdown will then show only the storage classes with this label.

The most common storage classes available in different cloud providers are:

AWS Storage Classes

Storage Class	Cloud Provider Storage Name	Storage Class	Description
efs-sc	Elastic File System (EFS)	efs.csi.aws.com	A fully managed, scalable, and highly durable elastic file system that offers high availability, automatic scaling, and cost-effective general file sharing. It’s suitable for workloads with varying capacity needs.

GCP Storage Classes

TrueFoundry Storage Name	Cloud Provider Storage Name	Storage Class	Description
standard-rwx	Google Basic HDD Filestore	filestore.csi.storage.gke.io	A cost-effective and scalable file storage solution ideal for general-purpose file storage and cost-sensitive workloads. It offers lower cost but also lower performance due to its HDD-based nature.
premium-rwx	Google Premium Filestore	filestore.csi.storage.gke.io	Provides higher performance and throughput compared to Basic HDD, making it suitable for I/O-intensive file operations and demanding workloads. It’s SSD-based, offering higher performance at a higher cost.
enterprise-rwx	Google Enterprise Filestore	filestore.csi.storage.gke.io	Delivers the highest performance, throughput, advanced features, multi-zone support, and high availability, making it ideal for mission-critical workloads and applications with strict availability requirements. It comes with the highest cost.

Azure Storage Classes

TrueFoundry Storage Name	Cloud Provider Storage Name	Storage Class	Description
azurefile	Azure File Storage (Standard)	file.csi.azure.com	Uses Azure Standard storage to create file shares for general file sharing across VMs or containers, including Windows apps. It offers cost-effective performance.
azurefile-premium	Azure File Storage (Premium)	file.csi.azure.com	Uses Azure Premium storage for higher performance, making it suitable for I/O-intensive file operations.
azurefile-csi	Azure File Storage (StandardCSI)	file.csi.azure.com	Leverages Azure Standard storage with CSI for dynamic provisioning, potentially offering better performance and CSI features.
azurefile-csi-premium	Azure File Storage (PremiumCSI)	file.csi.azure.com	Combines Azure Premium storage with CSI for dynamic provisioning and high-performance file operations.
azureblob-nfs-premium	Azure Blob Storage (NFS Premium)	blob.csi.azure.com	Uses Azure Premium storage with NFS v3 protocol for accessing large amounts of unstructured data and object storage, catering to demanding workloads with NFS access.
azureblob-fuse-premium	Azure Blob Storage (Fuse Premium)	blob.csi.azure.com	Uses Azure Premium storage with BlobFuse for accessing large amounts of unstructured data and object storage, suitable for workloads that require BlobFuse access.

In this case, you will first create a PersistentVolume object in the Kubernetes cluster and then provide the name of the object in the PersistentVolume field. This option is useful if you want to mount the data that is present in an existing S3, EFS or GCS bucket.

Azure has default support for mounting Azure container buckets as volumes. So, you can just follow the route of creating a volume in truefoundry.

Create PersistentVolume for S3 Bucket

To mount an S3 bucket as a volume on TrueFoundry, you need to follow the following steps:

Setting up IAM Policies and Relevant Roles

Please follow this document of AWS to set up mount point of S3 in an EKS cluster.This will guide you to do the following things:

Create an IAM policy to give permissions for mount point to access the s3 bucket
Create an IAM role.
Install the mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver and attach the role that was created above.

Creating a Persistent Volume on the Kubernetes Cluster

Create a PV with the following spec (by doing a kubectl apply):

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: <Enter persistent volume name here>
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 100Gi
  csi:
    driver: s3.csi.aws.com
    volumeHandle: s3-csi-driver-volume # must be unique
    volumeAttributes:
      bucketName: <Enter s3 bucket name here>
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteMany
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Retain
  storageClassName: s3-test # put any value here
  mountOptions:
    - allow-delete
    - region <enter aws region here>
    - allow-other
    - uid=1000
  volumeMode: Filesystem

Create a Volume on TrueFoundry:

Please follow this section to create volume on TrueFoundry

Create PersistentVolume for existing EFS volume

To mount a EFS as a volume on truefoundry, you need to follow the following steps:

Install EFS CSI driver on your cluster

To install EFS CSI driver on your cluster, go to TrueFoundry UI -> Clusters-> Installed Applications-> Manage
From the Volumessection click on install AWS EFS CSI driver and click on Install.

Create an Access Point for your EFS

Locate your EFS in the AWS console and open it. Ensure that the EFS and the K8S cluster are in the same VPC. Click on “Create access point”
Enter details like name, Root directory path(please make sure you fill the Root directory creation permissionssection, can fill in with UID:1000, GID:1000 if you want to attach it to notebook)
Click on create.

Create a PersistentVolume on the cluster

Create a PV with the following spec (by doing a kubectl apply):

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: <Enter your PV name here>
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 5Gi # this number doesn't matter for EFS, any number will work
  csi:
    driver: efs.csi.aws.com
    volumeHandle: <file_system_id>::<access_point_id> # e.g. fs-036e93cbb1fabcdef::fsap-0923ac354cqwerty
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteMany
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Retain
  storageClassName: efs-sc
  volumeMode: Filesystem

Create a Volume on TrueFoundry:

Please follow this section to create volume on TrueFoundry

Create PersistentVolume for existing GCS Bucket

To mount a GCS bucket as a volume on truefoundry, you need to follow the following steps. You can refer to this document for more details:

Create a GCS bucket

Create a GCS bucket and ensure the following:

Should be single region ( multi-region will work but speed will be slower and costs will be higher )
Region should be the same as that of your Kubernetes Cluster

Create Serviceaccount and Grant relevant permissions

You need to run the following script. This does the following:

Enables GCS Fuse Driver on the cluster
Create IAM Policy to access your bucket
Create K8s service-account and add policy to this service-account
Enables role-binding of service account to the desired K8s namespace.

#!/bin/bash

PROJECT=<Enter your Project Name>
CLUSTER_NAME=<Enter your Cluster Name>
REGION=<Region of your Cluster>
BUCKET_NAME=<Name of GCS Bucket>
TARGET_NAMESPACE=<Namespace where you want to mount your GCS bucket>

# Clip bucket name to 20 characters
CLIPPED_BUCKET_NAME="${BUCKET_NAME:0:20}"

K8S_SA_NAME="$CLIPPED_BUCKET_NAME-bucket-sa"
GCP_SA_NAME="$CLIPPED_BUCKET_NAME-gcp-sa"

GCP_SA_ID="$GCP_SA_NAME@$PROJECT.iam.gserviceaccount.com"


gcloud container clusters update $CLUSTER_NAME \
    --update-addons GcsFuseCsiDriver=ENABLED \
    --region=$REGION \
    --project=$PROJECT
gcloud iam service-accounts create $GCP_SA_NAME  --project=$PROJECT
gcloud storage buckets add-iam-policy-binding gs://$BUCKET_NAME \
    --member "serviceAccount:$GCP_SA_ID" \
    --role "roles/storage.objectAdmin" \
    --project $PROJECT

gcloud iam service-accounts add-iam-policy-binding $GCP_SA_ID \
    --role roles/iam.workloadIdentityUser \
    --member "serviceAccount:$PROJECT.svc.id.goog[$TARGET_NAMESPACE/$K8S_SA_NAME]" \
    --project $PROJECT

Create Service-Account in the Namespace

We now need to create a serviceaccount on truefoundry in the same namespace with name: TARGET_NAMESPACEand the serviceaccount must have the name K8S_SA_NAME.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: <Enter K8S_SA_NAME same from above step>
  namespace: <NAMESPACE>
  annotations:
    iam.gke.io/gcp-service-account: <Enter GCP IAM Principal Here>

Important

The service account name and workspace should be exactly same as the previous step.

Create a PersistentVolume object as shown below:

Create a persistent volume object with the following step. (by doing a kubectl apply)

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: <Enter a unique PV name here>
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 30Gi
  csi:
    driver: gcsfuse.csi.storage.gke.io
    volumeHandle: <Enter your Bucket Name here>
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteMany
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Retain
  storageClassName: np-fuse-test
  mountOptions:
    - implicit-dirs
  volumeMode: Filesystem

Create a Volume on TrueFoundry:

Please follow this section to create volume on TrueFoundry

Volume Browser: Enabling the volume browser will provide you a user-friendly interface that allows you to effortlessly upload, download, and view files stored within the Volumes. The interface will need to be configured with a password so that only authorized users can view the data in the volume. The password will need to be first created as a Secret and then entered in the form below.

Create the secret for the volume browser password

You can enable the volume browser by following the demo below:

Using the Volume

Once you press the submit button in the deployment form, the volume will be created within a few seconds. The Volume Dashboard will transform to appear as follows:

You can use the volume in the following ways:

Browse / Upload / Download data using Volume Browser

Once set-up, you can use Volume Browser to effortlessly upload, download, and view files stored within the Volumes.

Use the volume to store / read data from your deployments

You can attach Volumes to various types of deployments, including Services and Jobs. You can then read and write data to the volume like you would normally read and write data to a file system.You can read this guide to learn more about how to use volumes in deployments. This guide is for Service, but the same can be applied to Jobs as well.

Getting Started

Train and Deploy Models

Service Deployment

Job Deployment

LLM Deployment

LLM Finetuning

MCP Server Deployment

Workflow Deployment

Async Service Deployment

Volumes

Experiment Tracking

Advanced Features

Setting up IAM Policies and Relevant Roles

Creating a Persistent Volume on the Kubernetes Cluster

Create a Volume on TrueFoundry:

Install EFS CSI driver on your cluster

Create an Access Point for your EFS

Create a PersistentVolume on the cluster

Create a Volume on TrueFoundry:

Create a GCS bucket

Create Serviceaccount and Grant relevant permissions

Create Service-Account in the Namespace

Important

Create a PersistentVolume object as shown below:

Create a Volume on TrueFoundry:

Using the Volume

​Setting up IAM Policies and Relevant Roles

​Creating a Persistent Volume on the Kubernetes Cluster

​Create a Volume on TrueFoundry:

​Install EFS CSI driver on your cluster

​Create an Access Point for your EFS

​Create a PersistentVolume on the cluster

​Create a Volume on TrueFoundry:

​Create a GCS bucket

​Create Serviceaccount and Grant relevant permissions

​Create Service-Account in the Namespace

​Important

​Create a PersistentVolume object as shown below:

​Create a Volume on TrueFoundry:

​Using the Volume

Setting up IAM Policies and Relevant Roles

Creating a Persistent Volume on the Kubernetes Cluster

Create a Volume on TrueFoundry:

Install EFS CSI driver on your cluster

Create an Access Point for your EFS

Create a PersistentVolume on the cluster

Create a Volume on TrueFoundry:

Create a GCS bucket

Create Serviceaccount and Grant relevant permissions

Create Service-Account in the Namespace

Important

Create a PersistentVolume object as shown below:

Create a Volume on TrueFoundry:

Using the Volume