I've been using the NFS client provisioner for my lab k8s cluster for a while. The reason I decided to use it was because I wanted to avoid having to create the

I've been using the NFS client provisioner for my lab k8s cluster for a while. The reason I decided to use it was because I wanted to avoid having to create the shares for that service manually. I thought this would be useful for StatefulSets, which provisions a single volume for every pod, letting the application manage replication. After a while, I've realized that it was a bad idea, because it turns out I don't run many services so creating a share for each service is a big deal, and that storing the StatefulSet volumes on a single server basically defeats the purpose of StatefulSets. The second problem was that when I deployed it to a new cluster, I would get new paths on the NFS server, so the data from a previous cluster was not recognized. Since it is a lab environment, it is better for me to not bother with backing up the k8s cluster. With set paths, I can backup the NFS server, and redeploy a clean k8s cluster from the manifests and have the pods recognize previously written data. As far as I can tell, the provisioner is mostly beneficial if you need to create volumes on the fly (although its possible that this is also possible with directly mounting NFS shares). On another note, have you looked at using one of the many ways of using persistent storage with GKE that isn't NFS? It seems that Google has created connectors and stuff for their own cloud storage that might be more straightforward to use.