Ephemeral Storage in AKS — A Practical Hands-On Lab

If you're running: CI/CD pipelines Batch jobs Video transcoding ETL pipelines AI preprocessing You do not need persistent storage . In fact, persistent volumes can: Increase cost Add lifecycle complexity Leak unused PVCs Slow down I/O Instead, Kubernetes offers ephemeral storage primitives that are: ✅ Fast ✅ Auto-cleaned ✅ Zero long-term storage cost ✅ Perfect for temporary workloads This tutorial walks through a full working lab. 🧠 What Is Ephemeral Storage? Ephemeral storage is storage that: Exists only for the lifetime of a Pod Is automatically deleted when the Pod is removed Lives on node-local disk or memory No manual cleanup. No orphaned volumes. No storage bills after the job completes. 🧰 What You’ll Learn We’ll demonstrate: 1️⃣ emptyDir (disk-backed) 2️⃣ emptyDir (memory-backed) 3️⃣ Generic Ephemeral Volumes (dynamic PVC lifecycle) 4️⃣ Automatic cleanup behavior 1️⃣ Disk-Backed emptyDir emptyDir is the simplest ephemeral storage mechanism. It: Is created when the Pod starts Liv