others-What's the difference between hostpath volume and the Local Persistent Volume?

Problem

What’s the difference between hostpath volume and the Local Persistent Volume? e.g. hostpath vs Local Pv in kubernetes.

We know that we can use host’s local directory to provision the kubernetes pods like this:

A hostPath volume mounts a file or directory from the host node’s filesystem into your Pod. This is not something that most Pods will need, but it offers a powerful escape hatch for some applications.

For example, some uses for a hostPath are:

• running a container that needs access to Docker internals; use a hostPath of /var/lib/docker
• running cAdvisor in a container; use a hostPath of /sys
• allowing a Pod to specify whether a given hostPath should exist prior to the Pod running, whether it should be created, and what it should exist as

We can configure a pod to use hostpath volume like this:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-pd
spec:
  containers:
  - image: k8s.gcr.io/test-webserver
    name: test-container
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /test-pd
      name: test-volume
  volumes:
  - name: test-volume
    hostPath:
      # directory location on host
      path: /data
      # this field is optional
      type: Directory

Whereas the Local Persistent Volume that is released from Kubernetes 1.14 is defined as follows:

A local persistent volume represents a local disk directly-attached to a single Kubernetes Node.

To use local pv, we must first define the storage class:

kind: StorageClass
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: local-storage
provisioner: kubernetes.io/no-provisioner
volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer

Then we can use the volumeClaimTemplates to claim the pv automatically:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  name: local-test
spec:
  serviceName: "local-service"
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: local-test
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: local-test
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: test-container
        image: k8s.gcr.io/busybox
        command:
        - "/bin/sh"
        args:
        - "-c"
        - "sleep 100000"
        volumeMounts:
        - name: local-vol
          mountPath: /usr/test-pod
  volumeClaimTemplates:
  - metadata:
      name: local-vol
    spec:
      accessModes: [ "ReadWriteOnce" ]
      storageClassName: "local-storage"
      resources:
        requests:
          storage: 368Gi

Pay attention to the storageClassName in the above yaml file, it must be the same as the StorageClass’s name.

Environment

• Kubernetest 1.14+

Difference

Let’s see the comparision of hostpath volume vs the Local Persistent Volume:

	HostPath	Local Persistent Volume
mount type	a file or directory	a local disk or partition
k8s native	k8s scheduler does know the hostpath of the pod when it schedules a pod,a pod referencing a HostPath volume may be moved by the scheduler to a different node resulting in data loss.	the Kubernetes scheduler ensures that a pod using a Local Persistent Volume is always scheduled to the same node.
use type	directly or with PV/PVC, it’s not secure if used directly because it can mount any directory on the host	ONLY PV/PVC, it can be controlled with access control.