Deprecation of in-tree RBD driver in 1.28
Humble Devassy Chirammal
Hey Team,
As we all know, there is an effort in the Kubernetes community to remove in-tree storage plugins to reduce external dependencies and security concerns in the core Kubernetes. CSI plugin has been the dominant and proper way to go. Thus, we are in a process to gradually deprecate all the in-tree external storage plugins and eventually remove them from the core Kubernetes codebase.
We would like to bring into your notice that, we are planning to deprecate RBD in-tree driver ( kubernetes.io/rbd) in 1.28 release and planning to take out the code from Kubernetes Code base in subsequent release.
This in-tree driver development have been pretty much stale for many releases. Also, the CSI version of the same is available for long time now. We implemented CSI migration path for this driver in Kubernetes v1.23, however it seems that, its not a worth effort to take this functionality to GA due to few reasons like lack of in-tree driver users, the limited functionality in-tree driver provide, also due to some changes CSI driver deployments has wrt to in-tree model. Additionally, we haven't got any feedback/interest from community to maintain this driver in our attempts to gather feedback in the past.
Here we are proposing deprecation and removal of RBD in-tree driver from our code base. Preferably deprecation in 1.28 and removal in upcoming releases. However we would like to get your feedback on this plan and would like to consider/revisit the removal version accordingly.
If you are using RBD in-tree driver in your cluster setup, please reply with below info before 25-May-2023 which can help us to make a decision on when to completely remove this code base from the repo.
- what version of kubernetes you are running in your setup ?
- how often do you upgrade your cluster?
- what vendor or distro you are using ? Is it any (downstream) product offering or upstream RBD driver directly used in your setup?
Awaiting your feedback.
Thanks
Humble