Sparse block storage is achievable with s3backer and similar tools which treat bucket/object storage as arbitrarily large volumes. Practically, sizing thin-pro

Sparse block storage is achievable with s3backer and similar tools which treat bucket/object storage as arbitrarily large volumes. Practically, sizing thin-provisioned filesystems too large wastes a lot of space on filesystem metadata. All operating systems and clouds that I've worked with support online volume and filesystem resizing which is as close to the semantics of thin-provisioning as I've ever needed. I wasn't actually aware that StatefulSets don't resize volumes as smoothly as desired but I haven't had a problem manually deleting pods to get the filesystem on a PVC to grow (the way it works for Deployments).