About storage
How storage works in Akasha — storage pools, instance root disks, custom volumes, buckets, and custom ISOs.
Akasha stores all instance and volume data in storage pools. Storage pools are created and sized by your administrator; as a tenant you consume storage from the pools that are available in your deployment, but you do not create or configure pools yourself.
Storage pools
A storage pool is a slice of the platform's underlying storage with a specific driver. You can browse the pools available to you under Storage → Pools, which lists each pool's name, driver, size and current usage. The set of pools and drivers is specific to your deployment — if you are unsure which pool to use, ask your administrator.
Pool creation and pool configuration are administrator actions. If you open Create pool, the button is disabled with a permission notice for regular users.
What you manage as a tenant
Within the pools your administrator provides, you manage four kinds of storage:
| Resource | What it is | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Instance root disks | The boot disk of each instance, sized when you create the instance | Create an instance |
| Custom volumes | Extra disks you create and attach to instances | Custom volumes |
| Buckets | S3-compatible object storage | S3 buckets |
| Custom ISOs | Installer images you upload to boot VMs from | Custom ISOs |
Instance root disks are managed through the instance itself: you choose the pool and size in the create form, and the disk is deleted with the instance. Custom volumes have their own lifecycle — they exist independently of any instance and survive instance deletion.
Volume content types
Every volume has a content type, chosen at creation and immutable afterwards:
filesystem— a mountable filesystem. Filesystem volumes can be attached to both containers and virtual machines at a mount path you choose.block— a raw block device. Block volumes can only be attached to virtual machines, which see them as an additional disk.
Project isolation
Storage volumes are isolated per project. Volumes you create in one project are not visible from other projects, and other tenants cannot see your volumes. Storage consumed by instances and volumes counts against your project's disk limits and appears in your project's usage report.
Snapshots
Custom volumes support point-in-time snapshots, created manually or on a schedule, with optional expiry. See Volume snapshots. Instance disks are snapshotted through instance snapshots instead — see Instance snapshots.