A volume is a durable block disk. Its data lives in durable storage, not on the machine that runs your instance, so it survives instance stops and host failures. You can create a volume on its own, attach it to an instance, grow it, snapshot it, and delete it when you no longer need it. Every volume you create yourself is a durable volume of this kind.
A volume in context, where its content comes from and what it connects to:
- Its content comes from one of three sources: you create it as an empty disk, create it from a protected snapshot, or import a disk image at a URL.
- Its storage class sets its performance tier.
- You attach it to an instance, and you create snapshots from it.
Key concepts
| Concept | Description |
|---|---|
| Storage class | The performance tier of a volume. gp1 is the default and the tier you can select. See Storage classes. |
| Volume states | A volume reports a status (such as AVAILABLE or INUSE) and a separate modificationStatus for resizes. Volume operations are asynchronous, and failures show up in these fields. See Volume states. |
| Attachment | While a volume is attached to an instance, it reports INUSE and names the attachment in claimRef. See Find the instance a volume is attached to. |
What you can do
- Create a volume
- Import a disk image as a volume
- Resize a volume
- Find the instance a volume is attached to
- Delete a volume
- Attach and detach volumes (a compute operation)
Limits and quotas
Provisioned volume storage is capped per organization and per project. Creating, importing, and growing a volume all count against the same cap. See Limits.
Related
- Snapshots – point-in-time copies of a volume.
origin storagecommands- Troubleshoot storage