Volume mounting in Jenkins on Kubernetes - jenkins

Question

I'm trying to setup Jenkins to run in a container on Kubernetes, but I'm having trouble persisting the volume for the Jenkins home directory.
Here's my deployment.yml file. The image is based off jenkins/jenkins
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: jenkins-deployment
labels:
app: jenkins
spec:
replicas: 1
selector:
matchLabels:
app: jenkins
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: jenkins
spec:
containers:
- name: jenkins
image: 1234567.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mycompany/jenkins
imagePullPolicy: "Always"
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
volumeMounts:
- name: jenkins-home
mountPath: /var/jenkins_home
volumes:
- name: jenkins-home
emptyDir: {}
However, if i then push a new container to my image repository and update the pods using the below commands, Jenkins comes back online but asks me to start from scratch (enter admin password, none of my Jenkins jobs are there, no plugins etc)
kubectl apply -f kubernetes (where my manifests are stored)
kubectl set image deployment/jenkins-deployment jenkins=1234567.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mycompany/jenkins:$VERSION
Am I misunderstanding how this volume mount is meant to work?
As an aside, I also have backup and restore scripts which backup the Jenkins home directory to s3, and download it again, but that's somewhat outside the scope of this issue.

Answer 1

You should use PersistentVolumes along with StatefulSet instead of Deployment resource if you wish your data to survive re-deployments|restarts of your pod.

Answer 2

You have specified the volume type EmptyDir. This will essentially mount an empty directory on the kube node that runs your pod. Every time you restart your deployment, the pod could move between kube hosts and the empty dir isn't present, so your data isn't persisting across restarts.
I see you're pulling you image from an ECR repository, so I'm assuming you're running k8s in AWS.
You'll need to configure a StorageClass for AWS. If you've provisioned k8s using something like kops, this will already be configured. You can confirm this by doing kubectl get storageclass - the provisioner should be configured as EBS:
NAME PROVISIONER
gp2 (default) kubernetes.io/aws-ebs
Then, you need to specify a persistentvolumeclaim:
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
name: jenkins-data
spec:
accessModes:
- ReadWriteOnce
storageClassName: gp2 # must match your storageclass from above
resources:
requests:
storage: 30Gi
You can now the pv claim on your deployment:
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: jenkins-deployment
labels:
app: jenkins
spec:
replicas: 1
selector:
matchLabels:
app: jenkins
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: jenkins
spec:
containers:
- name: jenkins
image: 1234567.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mycompany/jenkins
imagePullPolicy: "Always"
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
volumeMounts:
- name: jenkins-home
mountPath: /var/jenkins_home
volumes:
persistentVolumeClaim:
claimName: jenkins-data # must match the claim name from above