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    Container Service for Kubernetes:Manage the storage-operator add-on

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    Container Service for Kubernetes:Manage the storage-operator add-on

    Last Updated:Sep 21, 2026

    The storage-operator add-on provides storage features such as automatic volume expansion, online disk resizing, storage resource monitoring, and data pre-populating (creating high-performance volumes with pre-filled Object Storage Service (OSS) data). These features improve how you manage Alibaba Cloud storage resources in Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) clusters.

    Introduction

    storage-operator automates the lifecycle management of storage components in ACK clusters. It integrates multiple advanced storage features to improve the operational efficiency of your storage resources. By default, storage-operator is deployed in your cluster as a Deployment and includes the following features:

    • Volume expansion: Manages the automatic expansion of cloud disk and NAS volumes.

      To disable this feature, add the feature gate Expander=false.

    • Cloud disk resizing: Modifies disk configurations.

      To disable this feature, add the feature gate DiskVolumeUpgradeControl=false.

    • Stateful application migration: Migrates stateful applications across zones.

      To disable this feature, add the feature gate ApplicationMigrationAcrossAZ=false.

    • Data pre-populating: Allows you to specify an OSS bucket as a data source when creating a persistent volume (PV). The system then automatically pre-populates data from the OSS bucket into a newly created high-performance volume, such as a Cloud Parallel File System (CPFS) volume. This is ideal for use cases such as AI training and big data analytics that require warming up cold data from OSS to a high-performance file system to accelerate computation jobs.

      To enable this feature, add the feature gate VolumePopulator=true. When enabled, the system creates a namespace named ack-volume-populator to run temporary persistent volume claims (PVCs) and pods generated during the data pre-population process.

    Prerequisites

    • Your cluster runs Kubernetes v1.20 or later. To upgrade your cluster, see Manually upgrade a cluster.

    • Your cluster has the Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin installed.

      Check the installation status on the Components and Add-ons page.

    Manage the storage-operator add-on

    Check the running status

    To verify that storage-operator has started successfully, run the following command to check the status of the add-on's pod:

    kubectl get pods -n kube-system -l app=storage-operator

    Expected output:

    NAME                                READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
storage-operator-57bdfd7f56-kl86k   1/1     Running   0          12m

    Upgrade the add-on

    Before upgrading, review the storage-operator release notes.

    1. Log on to the ACK console. In the left navigation pane, click Clusters.

    2. On the Clusters page, click the name of your cluster. In the left navigation pane, click Components and Add-ons .

    3. Locate storage-operator and follow the on-screen instructions to upgrade the add-on.

    FAQ

    Why is the storage monitoring dashboard empty after upgrading storage-operator to v1.33.1 or later?

    After cnfs-controller became a managed add-on, the data collection path for monitoring metrics was changed. When upgrading storage-operator to v1.33.1 or later, make sure to also upgrade the related monitoring add-ons. Otherwise, the storage monitoring dashboard will fail to display metrics.