Volume Drivers

Volume drivers implement the Volume Plugin Interface. This provides an interface to register a volume driver and advertise the driver to Docker. Registering a driver with this volume interface will cause Docker to be able to communicate with the driver to create and assign volumes to a container.

A volume spec is needed to create a volume. A volume spec looks like:

// VolumeSpec has the properties needed to create a volume.
type VolumeSpec struct {
	// Ephemeral storage
	Ephemeral bool
	// Thin provisioned volume size in bytes
	Size uint64
	// Format disk with this FileSystem
	Format Filesystem
	// BlockSize for file system
	BlockSize int
	// HA Level specifies the number of nodes that are
	// allowed to fail, and yet data is availabel.
	// A value of 0 implies that data is not erasure coded,
	// a failure of a node will lead to data loss.
	HALevel int
	// This disk's CoS
	Cos VolumeCos
	// Perform dedupe on this disk
	Dedupe bool
	// SnapshotInterval in minutes, set to 0 to disable Snapshots
	SnapshotInterval int
	// Volume configuration labels
	ConfigLabels Labels
}

Various volume driver implementations can be found in the drivers directory.

Block Drivers

Block drivers operate at the block layer. They provide raw volumes formatted with a user specified filesystem. This volume is then mounted into the container at a path specified using the docker run -v option.

File Drivers

File drivers operate at the filesystem layer.