how to inspect the content of persistent volume by kubernetes on azure cloud service

Question

I have packed the software to a container. I need to put the container to cluster by Azure Container Service. The software have outputs of an directory /src/data/, I want to access the content of the whole directory.

After searching, I have to solution.

1. use Blob Storage on azure, but then after searching, I can't find the executable method.
2. use Persistent Volume, but all the official documentation of azure and pages I found is about Persistent Volume itself, not about how to inspect it.

I need to access and manage my output directory on Azure cluster. In other words, I need a savior.

Answer 1

As I've explained here and here, in general, if you can interact with the cluster using kubectl, you can create a pod/container, mount the PVC inside, and use the container's tools to, e.g., ls the contents. If you need more advanced editing tools, replace the container image busybox with a custom one.

Create the inspector pod

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pvc-inspector
spec:
  containers:
  - image: busybox
    name: pvc-inspector
    command: ["tail"]
    args: ["-f", "/dev/null"]
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /pvc
      name: pvc-mount
  volumes:
  - name: pvc-mount
    persistentVolumeClaim:
      claimName: YOUR_CLAIM_NAME_HERE
EOF

Inspect the contents

kubectl exec -it pvc-inspector -- sh
$ ls /pvc

Clean Up

kubectl delete pod pvc-inspector