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Container Service for Kubernetes:CSI overview

Last Updated:Mar 26, 2026

The Container Storage Interface (CSI) plug-in lets you mount statically and dynamically provisioned volumes in ACK Serverless clusters. Use it to provide persistent storage for application data, manage sensitive and configuration data, and provision storage resources on demand.

Supported storage services

The CSI plug-in supports three Alibaba Cloud storage services. Each service supports different provisioning modes — choose based on how your workloads read and write data.

Storage serviceStatic provisioningDynamic provisioning
Alibaba Cloud disksSupported — mount a disk volume using a persistent volume (PV) and persistent volume claim (PVC) pairSupported
File Storage NASSupported — mount a NAS volume using a PV and PVC pairSupported
Alibaba Cloud OSSSupported — mount an OSS volume using a PV and PVC pairNot supported
Note
  • We recommend that you use the CSI plug-in in newly created ACK Serverless clusters. ACK Serverless clusters continuously update the CSI plug-in to support more features provided by the open source version of CSI.

  • The regions supported by the CSI plug-in are the same as the regions available for Kubernetes 1.16. For more information, see Supported regions.

CSI components

The CSI plug-in, which is based on the open source alibaba-cloud-csi-driver, consists of two components that handle different stages of the storage lifecycle.

ComponentWhat it doesInstallation
CSI-PluginMounts and unmounts volumes. Supports Alibaba Cloud disks, NAS file systems, and OSS by default.Installed automatically by default.
CSI-ProvisionerCreates disk volumes dynamically when a PVC is submitted.Install separately. See Install and update csi-provisioner.

CSI-Plugin handles volume attachment on each node. CSI-Provisioner handles automated volume creation — install it when your workloads need dynamic disk provisioning.

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