Containers' storage features

Before going into a real example and use cases, we should first dig into the main differences between container storage and a container storage interface (CSI).

Container storage, previously referred to as underlying container storage, is responsible for handling container images on Copy-on-Write (COW) filesystems. Container images need to be transferred and move around until a container engine is instructed to run them, so we need a way to store that image until it is run. That's the role of container storage.

Once we start using an orchestrator such as Kubernetes, CSI instead is responsible for providing container block or file storage that containers need to write data to.

In the next section of this chapter, we will concentrate on container storage and its configuration. Later, we will talk about external storage for containers and the options we have in Podman to expose the host local storage to the running containers.

A great...