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Enabling the AWS EFS CSI Driver Operator on ROSA

Authors: Paul Czarkowski, Andy Repton, Shaozhen Ding
Last Editor: Dustin Scott
Published Date: 4 April 2023
Modified Date: 25 May 2023

The Amazon Web Services Elastic File System (AWS EFS) is a Network File System (NFS) that can be provisioned on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS clusters. With the release of OpenShift 4.10 the EFS CSI Driver is now GA and available.

This is a guide to quickly enable the EFS Operator on ROSA to a Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA) cluster with STS enabled.

Note: The official supported installation instructions for the EFS CSI Driver on ROSA are available here .

Dynamic vs Static provisioning

The CSI driver supports both Static and Dynamic provisioning. Dynamic provisioning should not be confused with the ability of the Operator to create EFS volumes.

Dynamic provisioning

Dynamic provisioning provisions new PVs as subdirectories of a pre-existing EFS volume. The PVs are independent of each other. However, they all share the same EFS volume. When the volume is deleted, all PVs provisioned out of it are deleted too. The EFS CSI driver creates an AWS Access Point for each such subdirectory. Due to AWS AccessPoint limits, you can only dynamically provision 120 PVs from a single StorageClass/EFS volume.

Static provisioning

Static provisioning mounts the entire volume to a pod.

Prerequisites

  • A Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA) 4.10 cluster
  • The OC CLI
  • The AWS CLI
  • jq command
  • watch command

Set up environment

  1. export some environment variables

    export CLUSTER_NAME="sts-cluster"
export AWS_REGION="your_aws_region"
export OIDC_PROVIDER=$(oc get authentication.config.openshift.io cluster -o json \
| jq -r .spec.serviceAccountIssuer| sed -e "s/^https:\/\///")
export AWS_ACCOUNT_ID=$(aws sts get-caller-identity --query Account --output text)
export SCRATCH_DIR=/tmp/scratch
export AWS_PAGER=""
mkdir -p $SCRATCH_DIR

Prepare AWS Account

In order to use the AWS EFS CSI Driver we need to create IAM roles and policies that can be attached to the Operator.

  1. Create an IAM Policy

    cat << EOF > $SCRATCH_DIR/efs-policy.json
{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "elasticfilesystem:DescribeAccessPoints",
        "elasticfilesystem:DescribeFileSystems",
        "elasticfilesystem:DescribeMountTargets",
        "ec2:DescribeAvailabilityZones"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    },
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "elasticfilesystem:CreateAccessPoint"
      ],
      "Resource": "*",
      "Condition": {
        "StringLike": {
          "aws:RequestTag/efs.csi.aws.com/cluster": "true"
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": "elasticfilesystem:DeleteAccessPoint",
      "Resource": "*",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "aws:ResourceTag/efs.csi.aws.com/cluster": "true"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}
EOF

  2. Create the Policy

    This creates a named policy for the cluster, you could use a generic policy for multiple clusters to keep things simpler.

    POLICY=$(aws iam create-policy --policy-name "${CLUSTER_NAME}-rosa-efs-csi" \
   --policy-document file://$SCRATCH_DIR/efs-policy.json \
   --query 'Policy.Arn' --output text) || \
   POLICY=$(aws iam list-policies \
   --query 'Policies[?PolicyName==`rosa-efs-csi`].Arn' \
   --output text)
echo $POLICY

  3. Create a Trust Policy

    cat <<EOF > $SCRATCH_DIR/TrustPolicy.json
{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "Federated": "arn:aws:iam::${AWS_ACCOUNT_ID}:oidc-provider/${OIDC_PROVIDER}"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "${OIDC_PROVIDER}:sub": [
            "system:serviceaccount:openshift-cluster-csi-drivers:aws-efs-csi-driver-operator",
            "system:serviceaccount:openshift-cluster-csi-drivers:aws-efs-csi-driver-controller-sa"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}
EOF

  4. Create Role for the EFS CSI Driver Operator

    ROLE=$(aws iam create-role \
  --role-name "${CLUSTER_NAME}-aws-efs-csi-operator" \
  --assume-role-policy-document file://$SCRATCH_DIR/TrustPolicy.json \
  --query "Role.Arn" --output text)
echo $ROLE

  5. Attach the Policies to the Role

    aws iam attach-role-policy \
   --role-name "${CLUSTER_NAME}-aws-efs-csi-operator" \
   --policy-arn $POLICY

Deploy and test the AWS EFS Operator

  1. Create a Secret to tell the AWS EFS Operator which IAM role to request.

    cat << EOF | oc apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
 name: aws-efs-cloud-credentials
 namespace: openshift-cluster-csi-drivers
stringData:
  credentials: |-
    [default]
    role_arn = $ROLE
    web_identity_token_file = /var/run/secrets/openshift/serviceaccount/token
EOF

  2. Install the EFS Operator

    cat <<EOF | oc create -f -
apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1
kind: OperatorGroup
metadata:
  generateName: openshift-cluster-csi-drivers-
  namespace: openshift-cluster-csi-drivers
---
apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1alpha1
kind: Subscription
metadata:
  labels:
    operators.coreos.com/aws-efs-csi-driver-operator.openshift-cluster-csi-drivers: ""
  name: aws-efs-csi-driver-operator
  namespace: openshift-cluster-csi-drivers
spec:
  channel: stable
  installPlanApproval: Automatic
  name: aws-efs-csi-driver-operator
  source: redhat-operators
  sourceNamespace: openshift-marketplace
EOF

  3. Wait until the Operator is running

    watch oc get deployment aws-efs-csi-driver-operator -n openshift-cluster-csi-drivers

  4. Install the AWS EFS CSI Driver

    cat <<EOF | oc apply -f -
apiVersion: operator.openshift.io/v1
kind: ClusterCSIDriver
metadata:
    name: efs.csi.aws.com
spec:
  managementState: Managed
EOF

  5. Wait until the CSI driver is running

    watch oc get daemonset aws-efs-csi-driver-node -n openshift-cluster-csi-drivers

Prepare an AWS EFS Volume for dynamic provisioning

  1. Run this set of commands to update the VPC to allow EFS access

    NODE=$(oc get nodes --selector=node-role.kubernetes.io/worker \
  -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')
VPC=$(aws ec2 describe-instances \
  --filters "Name=private-dns-name,Values=$NODE" \
  --query 'Reservations[*].Instances[*].{VpcId:VpcId}' \
  --region $AWS_REGION \
  | jq -r '.[0][0].VpcId')
CIDR=$(aws ec2 describe-vpcs \
  --filters "Name=vpc-id,Values=$VPC" \
  --query 'Vpcs[*].CidrBlock' \
  --region $AWS_REGION \
  | jq -r '.[0]')
SG=$(aws ec2 describe-instances --filters \
  "Name=private-dns-name,Values=$NODE" \
  --query 'Reservations[*].Instances[*].{SecurityGroups:SecurityGroups}' \
  --region $AWS_REGION \
  | jq -r '.[0][0].SecurityGroups[0].GroupId')
echo "CIDR - $CIDR,  SG - $SG"

  2. Assuming the CIDR and SG are correct, update the security group

    aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress \
 --group-id $SG \
 --protocol tcp \
 --port 2049 \
 --cidr $CIDR | jq .

At this point you can create either a single Zone EFS filesystem, or a Region wide EFS filesystem

Creating a region-wide EFS

  1. Create a region-wide EFS File System

    EFS=$(aws efs create-file-system --creation-token efs-token-1 \
   --region ${AWS_REGION} \
   --encrypted | jq -r '.FileSystemId')
echo $EFS

  2. Configure a region-wide Mount Target for EFS (this will create a mount point in each subnet of your VPC by default)

    for SUBNET in $(aws ec2 describe-subnets \
  --filters Name=vpc-id,Values=$VPC Name=tag:Name,Values='*-private*' \
  --query 'Subnets[*].{SubnetId:SubnetId}' \
  --region $AWS_REGION \
  | jq -r '.[].SubnetId'); do \
    MOUNT_TARGET=$(aws efs create-mount-target --file-system-id $EFS \
       --subnet-id $SUBNET --security-groups $SG \
       --region $AWS_REGION \
       | jq -r '.MountTargetId'); \
    echo $MOUNT_TARGET; \
 done

Creating a single-zone EFS

Note: If you followed the instructions above to create a region wide EFS mount, skip the following steps and proceed to “Create a Storage Class for the EFS volume”

  1. Select the first subnet that you will make your EFS mount in (this will by default select the same Subnet your first node is in)

    SUBNET=$(aws ec2 describe-subnets \
  --filters Name=vpc-id,Values=$VPC Name=tag:Name,Values='*-private*' \
  --query 'Subnets[*].{SubnetId:SubnetId}' \
  --region $AWS_REGION \
  | jq -r '.[0].SubnetId')
AWS_ZONE=$(aws ec2 describe-subnets --filters Name=subnet-id,Values=$SUBNET \
  --region $AWS_REGION | jq -r '.Subnets[0].AvailabilityZone')

  2. Create your zonal EFS filesystem

    EFS=$(aws efs create-file-system --creation-token efs-token-1 \
   --availability-zone-name $AWS_ZONE \
   --region $AWS_REGION \
   --encrypted | jq -r '.FileSystemId')
echo $EFS

  3. Create your EFS mount point

    MOUNT_TARGET=$(aws efs create-mount-target --file-system-id $EFS \
  --subnet-id $SUBNET --security-groups $SG \
  --region $AWS_REGION \
  | jq -r '.MountTargetId')
echo $MOUNT_TARGET

  4. Create a Storage Class for the EFS volume

    cat <<EOF | oc apply -f -
kind: StorageClass
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: efs-sc
provisioner: efs.csi.aws.com
parameters:
  provisioningMode: efs-ap
  fileSystemId: $EFS
  directoryPerms: "700"
  gidRangeStart: "1000"
  gidRangeEnd: "2000"
  basePath: "/dynamic_provisioning"
EOF

Test

  1. Create a namespace

    oc new-project efs-demo

  2. Create a PVC

    cat <<EOF | oc apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: pvc-efs-volume
spec:
  storageClassName: efs-sc
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteMany
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 5Gi
EOF

  3. Create a Pod to write to the EFS Volume

    cat <<EOF | oc apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
 name: test-efs
spec:
 volumes:
   - name: efs-storage-vol
     persistentVolumeClaim:
       claimName: pvc-efs-volume
 containers:
   - name: test-efs
     image: centos:latest
     command: [ "/bin/bash", "-c", "--" ]
     args: [ "while true; do echo 'hello efs' | tee -a /mnt/efs-data/verify-efs && sleep 5; done;" ]
     volumeMounts:
       - mountPath: "/mnt/efs-data"
         name: efs-storage-vol
EOF

    It may take a few minutes for the pod to be ready. If you see errors such as Output: Failed to resolve "fs-XXXX.efs.us-east-2.amazonaws.com" it likely means its still setting up the EFS volume, just wait longer.

  4. Wait for the Pod to be ready

    watch oc get pod test-efs

  5. Create a Pod to read from the EFS Volume

    cat <<EOF | oc apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
 name: test-efs-read
spec:
 volumes:
   - name: efs-storage-vol
     persistentVolumeClaim:
       claimName: pvc-efs-volume
 containers:
   - name: test-efs-read
     image: centos:latest
     command: [ "/bin/bash", "-c", "--" ]
     args: [ "tail -f /mnt/efs-data/verify-efs" ]
     volumeMounts:
       - mountPath: "/mnt/efs-data"
         name: efs-storage-vol
EOF

  6. Verify the second POD can read the EFS Volume

    oc logs test-efs-read

    You should see a stream of “hello efs”

    hello efs
hello efs
hello efs
hello efs
hello efs
hello efs
hello efs
hello efs
hello efs
hello efs

Cleanup

  1. Delete the Pods

    oc delete pod -n efs-demo test-efs test-efs-read

  2. Delete the Volume

    oc delete -n efs-demo pvc pvc-efs-volume

  3. Delete the Namespace

    oc delete project efs-demo

  4. Delete the storage class

    oc delete storageclass efs-sc

  5. Delete the EFS Shared Volume via AWS

    aws efs delete-mount-target --mount-target-id $MOUNT_TARGET --region $AWS_REGION
aws efs delete-file-system --file-system-id $EFS --region $AWS_REGION

    Note: if you receive the error An error occurred (FileSystemInUse) wait a few minutes and try again.

    Note: if you created additional mount points for a regional EFS filesystem, remember to delete all of them before removing the file system

  6. Detach the Policies to the Role

    aws iam detach-role-policy \
   --role-name "${CLUSTER_NAME}-aws-efs-csi-operator" \
   --policy-arn $POLICY

  7. Delete the Role

    aws iam delete-role --role-name \
   ${CLUSTER_NAME}-aws-efs-csi-operator

  8. Delete the Policy

    aws iam delete-policy --policy-arn \
   $POLICY