New PVC for an active pod

Question

Is it possible to plug and play storage to an active pod without restarting the pod? I want to bind a new storage to a running pod without restarting the pod. Does Kubernetes support this?

Answer 1

Most things in a Pod are immutable. In particular if you look at the API definition of a PodSpec it says in part (emphasis mine)

container: List of containers belonging to the pod. Containers cannot currently be added or removed. There must be at least one container in a Pod. Cannot be updated.

Typically you don't directly work with Pods; you work with a higher-level controller like a Deployment. There you can edit these things, and it reacts by creating new Pods with the new pod spec and then deleting the old Pods.

Also remember that sometimes the cluster itself will delete or restart a Pod (if its Node is over capacity or fails, for example) and you don't have any control over this. It's better to plan for your Pods to be periodically restarted than to try to prevent it.