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Ephemeral storage management limits and requests

Express ephemeral storage limits and requests using byte quantities with suffixes like G, M, K or power-of-two equivalents Gi, Mi, Ki. Pod-level limits aggregate all container limits plus emptyDir volumes, enabling proper scheduling and preventing pods from exhausting node storage.

Limits and requests for ephemeral storage are measured in byte quantities. You can express storage as a plain integer or as a fixed-point number by using one of these suffixes: E, P, T, G, M, K. You can also use the power-of-two equivalents: Ei, Pi, Ti, Gi, Mi, Ki. For example, the following quantities all represent approximately the same value: 128974848, 129e6, 129M, and 123Mi. Pod-level limits aggregate all container limits plus emptyDir volumes, enabling proper scheduling and preventing pods from exhausting node storage.

The suffixes for each byte quantity are case-sensitive. Be sure to use the correct case. Use the case-sensitive "M", such as used in "400M", to set the request at 400 megabytes. Use the case-sensitive "400Mi" to request 400 mebibytes. If you specify "400m" of ephemeral storage, the storage request is only 0.4 bytes.

The following example configuration file shows a pod with two containers:

Each container requests 2GiB of local ephemeral storage.
Each container has a limit of 4GiB of local ephemeral storage.
At the pod level, kubelet works out an overall pod storage limit by adding up the limits of all the containers in that pod.
- In this case, the total storage usage at the pod level is the sum of the disk usage from all containers plus the emptyDir volumes of a pod.
- Therefore, the pod has a request of 4GiB of local ephemeral storage, and a limit of 8GiB of local ephemeral storage.

Example ephemeral storage configuration with quotas and limits

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: frontend
spec:
  containers:
  - name: app
    image: images.my-company.example/app:v4
    resources:
      requests:
        ephemeral-storage: "2Gi"
      limits:
        ephemeral-storage: "4Gi"
    volumeMounts:
    - name: ephemeral
      mountPath: "/tmp"
  - name: log-aggregator
    image: images.my-company.example/log-aggregator:v6
    resources:
      requests:
        ephemeral-storage: "2Gi"
      limits:
        ephemeral-storage: "4Gi"
    volumeMounts:
    - name: ephemeral
      mountPath: "/tmp"
  volumes:
    - name: ephemeral
      emptyDir: {}

spec.containers.name.resources.requests.ephemeral-storage: Specifies the container request for local ephemeral storage.
spec.containers.name.resources.limits.ephemeral-storage: Specifies the container limit for local ephemeral storage.