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Saving Data to a Trident-Provisioned PersistentVolume

Contributors banum-netapp

NetApp Trident is a fully supported open source project designed to help you meet the sophisticated persistence demands of your containerized applications. You can read and write data to a Trident-provisioned Kubernetes PersistentVolume (PV) with the added benefit of data tiering, encryption, NetApp Snapshot technology, compliance, and high performance offered by NetApp ONTAP data management software.

Reusing PVCs in an Existing Namespace

For larger AI projects, it might be more efficient for different containers to read and write data to the same Kubernetes PV. To reuse a Kubernetes Persistent Volume Claim (PVC), the user must have already created a PVC. See the NetApp Trident documentation for details on creating a PVC. Here is an example of reusing an existing PVC:

$ runai submit pvc-test -p team-a --pvc test:/tmp/pvc1mount -i gcr.io/run-ai-demo/quickstart -g 1

Run the following command to see the status of job pvc-test for project team-a:

$ runai get pvc-test -p team-a

You should see the PV /tmp/pvc1mount mounted to team-a job pvc-test. In this way, multiple containers can read from the same volume, which is useful when there are multiple competing models in development or in production. Data scientists can build an ensemble of models and then combine prediction results by majority voting or other techniques.

Use the following to access the container shell:

$ runai bash pvc-test -p team-a

You can then check the mounted volume and access your data within the container.

This capability of reusing PVCs works with NetApp FlexVol volumes and NetApp ONTAP FlexGroup volumes, enabling data engineers more flexible and robust data management options to leverage your data fabric powered by NetApp.