k8s-device-plugin VS csi-driver-smb

https://github.com/NVIDIA/k8s-device-plugin/issues/332#issue...

K8s-device-plugin

This framework allows the use of external devices (e.g., NVIDIA GPUs, AMD GPUS, SR-IOV NICs) without modifying core Kubernetes components.

Not talking about MIG. NVIDIA device plugin. https://github.com/NVIDIA/k8s-device-plugin

GPU Operator Device plugin

If you ever tried to use GPU-based instances with AWS ECS, or on EKS using the default Nvidia plugin, you would know that it's not possible to make a task/pod shared the same GPU on an instance. If you want to add more replicas to your service (for redundancy or load balancing), you would need one GPU for each replica.

Some notes on Plex/Emby/Kodi and transcoding. If you want true transcoding with GPU acceleration, you have to have Nvidia GPU or be a k8s device plugin genius. The whole idea of mounting elastic devices in k8s is fairly new and rather complex. In the mean time transcoding is best done on a beefy device with a proper CPU (eg i7) or specifically Nvidia GPU because there are numerous pre-made plugins. I just run Plex and Emby on an old ATX gaming machine without GPU acceleration and it works totally fine. They were barely usable for just me when running on the RPis, wouldn't recommend it unless you can figure out how to mount the correct devices in the pod using a custom raspberry pi device plugin . . . lol good luck! - Arm labs device manager: https://community.arm.com/developer/research/b/articles/posts/a-smarter-device-manager-for-kubernetes-on-the-edge - Deis labs Akri device manager: https://github.com/deislabs/akri - Nvidia GPU plugin: https://github.com/NVIDIA/k8s-device-plugin

https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/csi-driver-smb. This is the CSI driver we use.

Actual media storage (movies, pictures, anything that lives on my unRAID box) is mounted to each pod that needs it via the SMB CSI driver. I would love to use NFS instead, but even with 4.x, I was running into stale file mount issues. You can see my findings and why I decided to use SMB instead here

What is the recommended way to use S3 as shared storage for media (videos)? Currently I'm using SAMBA network share RWX volumes using this plugin and I would like to switch to S3 compatible service to increase performance and to avoid my current limit set by my cloud provider on that SAMBA server of 10 active connections for SAMBA.

With SMB I'm using the CSI SMB Driver helm chart to deploy it. When creating the persistent volume I'm able to use some mounting options where I have the following included:

Kubernetes has a native solution for many different storage integrations - CSI. There is a CSI driver for SMB as well. After installing the driver you will be able to map your config files from smb server via regular volume mount and config map.

I mean, in short either find a project that includes support for it (I don't know of one), or look at a CSI that does like the SMB CSI driver.

Using a CSI Plugin you should be able to separate the admin side from the user side. I haven't dove into this but here is a plugin that might help - https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/csi-driver-smb

Look into using flex volumes (though depricated) or its successor SMB CSI driver