Enhancing Kubernetes Storage on OCI with SoftNAS 

by | Jul 28, 2025 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

kubernetes persistent storage

Oracle Engineering + Buurst

How SoftNAS can Enhance Kubernetes Storage on OCI

Persistent storage is a foundational requirement for running stateful applications in Kubernetes. While ephemeral storage suffices for stateless microservices, production-grade environments rely on durable, high-performance file systems for databases, media pipelines, analytics workloads, and enterprise systems. 

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers native options such as Block Volumes and File Storage Service (FSS), but many organizations encounter limitations with these services. Whether due to performance ceilings, limited data management features, or rigid scaling patterns, these native offerings don’t always meet the needs of high-performance or complex applications. 

SoftNAS by Buurst addresses these challenges by delivering a software-defined NAS solution that runs natively in OCI Compute. SoftNAS provides advanced file services using familiar protocols like NFS, CIFS/SMB, and iSCSI. It adds key enterprise features such as compression, deduplication, volume tuning, and high availability—enabling OKE (Oracle Kubernetes Engine) users to dynamically provision persistent volumes with more control, better performance, and stronger resilience than is possible with OCI FSS alone. 

This guide demonstrates how to configure dynamic NFS provisioning in OKE using SoftNAS and highlights why this pairing is ideal for enterprises seeking more from their OCI Kubernetes deployments. 

Kubernetes persistent storage

Why SoftNAS for Kubernetes on Oracle Cloud?

SoftNAS delivers a compelling value proposition for running stateful containerized workloads in OCI. Here are the key benefits that make it an ideal companion to OKE:

1. Performance Optimization

SoftNAS lets you fine-tune volume performance based on the workload profile—something not possible with OCI File Storage. Administrators can adjust block size, enable caching strategies, and configure thread concurrency to optimize read/write performance. For example, one customer running a content management system (CMS) in containers reduced page load latency by over 40% by configuring SoftNAS volumes for small block I/O and enabling write caching.

2. Enterprise Features

Unlike OCI FSS, SoftNAS includes robust data services like:

  • Inline Compression to reduce footprint and improve throughput
  • Deduplication for eliminating redundant data blocks
  • SnapReplicate™ for automated volume-level replication
  • Snapshot Scheduling to enable point-in-time restores

These features enable IT teams to build more efficient, reliable, and secure storage infrastructure—crucial for sectors like healthcare, financial services, and media.

3. High Availability (HA)

For mission-critical workloads, SoftNAS supports High Availability with automatic failover using SnapReplicate and shared virtual IPs. Customers can deploy HA pairs across Availability Domains or Fault Domains to maintain data access during planned maintenance or unexpected outages. A financial services firm, for example, uses SoftNAS HA to ensure uninterrupted access to compliance records and archived trading data—even during node upgrades or failures.

4. Multi-Protocol Access

SoftNAS supports NFS, CIFS/SMB, and iSCSI—from the same virtual appliance. This means both modern Kubernetes apps and legacy VMs or bare-metal apps can mount the same storage. For hybrid application stacks, this unified access layer simplifies data sharing, policy enforcement, and cost control.

5. ReadWriteMany (RWX) Support

Many stateful Kubernetes workloads—like collaborative editing platforms, analytics tools, or AI training pipelines—require multiple pods or services to read/write from the same volume. While OCI FSS supports RWX via NFS, it lacks control over performance and redundancy. SoftNAS, by contrast, enables RWX access with volume-level optimizations, giving DevOps teams better flexibility and responsiveness.

6. Complete Data Sovereignty

SoftNAS keeps all storage inside your Virtual Cloud Network (VCN), offering administrators full control over encryption, access, backups, replication, and policy enforcement. There are no dependencies on external control planes or shared infrastructure, making it ideal for compliance-heavy environments.

 

kubernetes persistent storage

Key Use Case: Media Transcoding in Containers

Consider a media production company using OCI and OKE to run a video transcoding pipeline. Video files—large, compressed, and high-throughput—need to be accessed concurrently by multiple worker pods for encoding, watermarking, and segment generation. The team initially deployed OCI FSS for shared storage but encountered latency bottlenecks, especially when hundreds of pods accessed the same volume.

By switching to SoftNAS:

  • They enabled inline compression and deduplication, cutting storage use by over 35%.
  • Configured read-ahead caching to accelerate large sequential reads.
  • Tuned NFS concurrency and I/O thread pool to match the transcoding workload.

The result was a 3x improvement in transcoding throughput, reduced cloud spend, and higher CI/CD deployment velocity—all within their existing OCI account and Kubernetes deployment.

 

Architecture Overview: SoftNAS + OKE 

In a typical deployment: 

  • SoftNAS runs on Oracle Compute instances in the same VCN as the Kubernetes cluster. 
  • Volumes are configured in SoftNAS and exported via NFS. 
  • A Kubernetes StorageClass and NFS provisioner are defined, allowing dynamic PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) creation for pods. 
  • Optional: Use SnapReplicate to set up an HA pair for redundancy. 

This approach provides a cloud-native file system with the flexibility of on-prem NAS—entirely within your OCI ecosystem.

 

Prerequisites

To follow this guide, you’ll need: 

  • An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy with OKE and Compute quotas 
  • A SoftNAS instance deployed and configured with one or more NFS shares 
  • A working OKE cluster with access to Helm and kubectl 
  • Networking rules to allow NFS traffic (typically port 2049) between SoftNAS and OKE worker nodes 

    Deployment Steps

    Step 1: Deploy SoftNAS 

    You can deploy SoftNAS from the Oracle Cloud Marketplace or manually launch a Compute instance with the Buurst SoftNAS image. After launch: 

    • Log in via web UI 
    • Configure storage pools using Oracle Block Volumes 
    • Create and export NFS volumes 

      Step 2: Install NFS Subdir External Provisioner 

      On your OKE cluster: 

      bash 

      CopyEdit 

      helm repo add nfs-subdir-external-provisioner https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/nfs-subdir-external-provisioner/ 

      helm repo update 

      helm install nfs-client nfs-subdir-external-provisioner/nfs-subdir-external-provisioner \ 

        –set nfs.server=<SoftNAS_IP> \ 

        –set nfs.path=/<exported-path> 

       

      Step 3: Define StorageClass 

      Create a StorageClass object in Kubernetes: 

      yaml 

      CopyEdit 

      apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1 

      kind: StorageClass 

      metadata: 

        name: softnas-nfs 

      provisioner: k8s-sigs.io/nfs-subdir-external-provisioner 

      parameters: 

        archiveOnDelete: “false” 

       

      Step 4: Create PersistentVolumeClaims (PVCs) 

      Now, your workloads can dynamically request storage with: 

      yaml 

      CopyEdit 

      apiVersion: v1 

      kind: PersistentVolumeClaim 

      metadata: 

        name: my-softnas-volume 

      spec: 

       accessModes: 

          – ReadWriteMany 

        storageClassName: softnas-nfs 

        resources: 

          requests: 

            storage: 100Gi 

      Validation & Observability

      After provisioning, validate that your pods mount the volume and write data correctly. Monitor performance using: 

      • nfsstat and iotop on SoftNAS 
      • Pod metrics and volume mounts in Kubernetes 
      • Optional: Use built-in SoftNAS reporting to observe compression ratios, dedupe savings, and throughput 

      Comparison Summary: SoftNAS vs OCI FSS for Kubernetes 

      Feature 

      OCI FSS 

      SoftNAS 

      NFS Support 

      Yes 

      Yes 

      Performance Tuning 

      Limited 

      Volume-level configurable 

      Inline Compression 

      No 

      Yes 

      Deduplication 

      No 

      Yes 

      Snapshots & Replication 

      No 

      Yes (SnapReplicate) 

      RWX Support 

      Yes 

      Yes 

      High Availability 

      No 

      Yes 

      Multi-Protocol Access 

      NFS only 

      NFS, CIFS/SMB, iSCSI 

      Data Control 

      OCI managed 

      Customer-managed in VCN 

        Final Thoughts

        Oracle Kubernetes Engine offers powerful orchestration capabilities, but the value of your stateful applications hinges on persistent storage that performs under pressure, adapts to enterprise requirements, and scales intelligently. SoftNAS extends OCI’s native services with an enterprise-grade storage platform purpose-built for performance, resilience, and flexibility.

        Whether you’re running web apps, AI/ML pipelines, media services, or legacy databases inside containers, SoftNAS gives your Kubernetes workloads the storage foundation they need to thrive

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