Storage drivers once lived inside Kubernetes 5,150 , so a vendor's fix waited for a release. The Container Storage Interface (github.com/container-storage-interface/spec (https://github.com/container-storage-interface/spec 1,490 ), v1.13.0) is a gRPC API a storage system implements once for every orchestrator. Most in-tree cloud plugins have moved to CSI drivers and been removed (gcePersistentDisk in 1.28). A driver runs as two parts, each with Kubernetes-maintained sidecars that turn API objects into gRPC calls:
A driver registers a CSIDriver object that StorageClasses name as provisioner, such as ebs.csi.aws.com, and brings snapshots, expansion and topology. kind 14,561 has none (kubectl 5,150 get csidrivers is empty): local-path-provisioner 2,940 runs a helper Pod per directory instead. Open-source drivers for your own disks include Longhorn 185,900 , Rook 264,425 (Ceph 205,849 ) and OpenEBS; commercial platforms such as Portworx 355,694 add cross-cluster replication and backup.