Understanding Persistent Storage Volumes

Persistent storage volumes in Quant Cloud provide durable, high-performance storage for your applications that survives container restarts, deployments, and environment updates. These volumes offer scalable, shared storage that can be accessed by multiple containers simultaneously.

How Persistent Storage Works

Environment-Level Definition Persistent storage volumes are defined at the environment level through the Volumes tab in your environment details. Each environment maintains its own independent set of volume definitions, allowing you to tailor storage configuration for different stages of your deployment pipeline.

Container Integration Once defined, volumes can be mounted into any container within the environment by configuring mount points in the container’s settings. This creates a seamless integration between your persistent data and application containers.

Production Inheritance When creating new environments, volume definitions are automatically inherited from the production environment as defaults. This ensures consistency across your deployment pipeline while allowing customization for specific environment needs.

Tip

Volume inheritance means your staging and development environments start with the same storage structure as production, reducing configuration drift and simplifying testing of storage-dependent features.

Storage Architecture

Elastic Storage System Quant Cloud provides enterprise-grade elastic storage with the following benefits:

• Pay-as-you-use: Storage costs scale with actual usage - no need to pre-provision capacity
• Automatic scaling: Storage automatically grows and shrinks based on your data requirements
• High availability: Built-in redundancy ensures your data is always accessible
• Concurrent access: Multiple containers can safely read from and write to the same volume
• Performance optimization: Optimized for container workloads with consistent, low-latency access

Logical Volume Mapping Each volume you define (e.g., app-uploads, database-storage) maps to a dedicated directory path on the shared storage system. This logical abstraction simplifies volume management while providing the flexibility to organize your data as needed.

Volume Management

Volumes Tab Interface Access volume management through the Volumes tab on your environment details page. This interface provides a comprehensive view of all defined volumes for the current environment, including their names, descriptions, creation dates, and management actions.

Volume Operations The management interface supports:

• Viewing defined volumes: See all volumes currently available in the environment
• Creating new volumes: Define additional storage volumes as needed
• Volume configuration: Set names, descriptions, and storage parameters
• Removing volumes: Delete volume definitions that are no longer needed

Caution

Deleting a volume definition removes it from the environment configuration, but the underlying data may persist on the storage system. Ensure you understand the data retention implications before removing volume definitions.

Common Use Cases

Application Data Storage

• User-uploaded files (images, documents, media)
• Application logs and audit trails
• Temporary file processing and caching
• Configuration files that persist across deployments

Database and Stateful Services

• Database data files and transaction logs
• Search index storage (Elasticsearch, Solr)
• Cache storage (Redis persistence)
• Session storage for multi-container applications

Development and Testing

• Shared test data across development environments
• Build artifacts and deployment packages
• Development tools and utilities storage

Container Mount Points

Mounting Volumes To use a defined volume in your containers, configure mount points in the container’s settings:

1. Navigate to your environment’s “Edit Config” page
2. Expand the container you want to configure
3. In the “Mount Points” section, select your volume from the dropdown
4. Specify the container path where the volume should be mounted
5. Optionally set the mount as read-only for security

Mount Path Examples

• /var/www/html/uploads for web application file uploads
• /app/data for application data storage
• /var/log/app for persistent application logging
• /shared for data shared between multiple containers

Read-Only Mounts Use read-only mounts when containers only need to read data, such as:

• Configuration files shared across containers
• Static assets or templates
• Reference data that shouldn’t be modified

Tip

Design your mount points to align with your application’s expected file structure. This makes it easier to develop locally and ensures consistency between development and production environments.

Persistent storage volumes provide the foundation for stateful applications in Quant Cloud, offering reliable, scalable storage that integrates seamlessly with your container-based applications.