Help Center/ Cloud Container Instance (CCI)/ User Guide/ Using CCI Through the Console/ Storage Management/ General Purpose File System (SFS 3.0) Volumes/ General Purpose File System Overview
Updated on 2025-09-26 GMT+08:00
View PDF
Share

General Purpose File System Overview

What Is General Purpose File System?

CCI allows you to mount a volume that is created from a general-purpose file system to a container for persistent data storage. General Purpose File System (formerly SFS 3.0) volumes are commonly used in ReadWriteMany scenarios for large-capacity expansion and cost-sensitive services, such as media processing, content management, big data analysis, and workload analysis.

General Purpose File System is expandable to petabytes, and provides fully hosted shared file storage. It features high availability and durability, and seamlessly handles data-intensive and bandwidth-intensive applications.

  • Standard file protocols: You can mount file systems as volumes to servers, the same as using local directories.
  • Data sharing: The same file system can be mounted to multiple servers, so that data can be shared.
  • Private networks: You can access data only in private networks of data centers.
  • Capacity and performance: The capacity of a single file system is high (PB level) and the performance is excellent (ms-level I/O latency).
  • Use cases: Deployments and StatefulSets in the ReadWriteMany mode, and jobs created for high-performance computing (HPC), media processing, content management, web services, big data analysis, and workload process analysis

File Storage Performance

CCI 2.0 can work with General Purpose File System for persistent data storage. For more details, see File System Types.

General Purpose File System is currently being rolled out across different regions. Their availability may vary depending on regions. If you encounter any issues, contact SFS customer support or wait for further updates. If General Purpose File System is available in the region where your application is located, you are advised to use General Purpose File System for new applications.

Scenarios

To provision a volume statically, you must have an existing general-purpose file system. You need to use this file system to create a PV and then mount the PV to the workload through a PVC. This mode is suitable for the scenario where the underlying storage is available. For details about static provisioning, see Creating a Volume from an Existing General-Purpose File System.

Constraints

  • General-purpose file systems and containers must be in the same VPC.
  • Multiple PVs can use the same general-purpose file system, but there are some constraints:
    • If multiple PVCs or PVs that use the same general-purpose file system are mounted to a single pod, the pod may fail to start, because the PVs have identical volumeHandle values. To avoid this issue, do not mount the same general-purpose file system volume to the same pod.
    • The persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy parameter in target PVs must be set to Retain. If you use any other values, when a PV is deleted, its associated underlying storage may be deleted. In this case, other PVs associated with the underlying storage will malfunction.
    • When a file system is repeatedly used, you should enable isolation and protection for ReadWriteMany at the application layer to prevent data overwriting and loss.
  • If General Purpose File System is used, the group and permissions of the mount point cannot be modified.

Billing

For details about the price of using an existing general-purpose file system, see Billing.