GKE Storage Troubleshooting Skill

Use this skill to systematically diagnose and resolve persistent-storage failures for workloads running on GKE — volume attach/mount errors, disk performance and node storage pressure, volume expansion, storage-related cluster/node-pool creation errors, and Cloud Storage FUSE memory issues. This skill operates non-interactively and enforces a read-only diagnostics boundary before proposing manifest or configuration corrections.

For routine storage provisioning and StorageClass/PVC authoring, use the gke-storage skill instead. This skill focuses on failure diagnosis.

🔍 Diagnosis & Resolution Workflow

Step 0: Non-Interactive Context Discovery & Dry-Run Fallback

1. Parameter Extraction: Extract required context (project_id, cluster_name, cluster_location, workload_name, workload_namespace, pod_name, and the relevant pvc_name / pv_name / node_name) non-interactively from the user prompt, active SETTINGS.md, or environment defaults:

   • Default workload_namespace to default if omitted.
   • Infer missing cluster parameters from the active environment (kubectl config current-context or gcloud config get-value project).

2. Cluster Credentials & Fallback Mode:

   • Attempt credential fetch: gcloud container clusters get-credentials {cluster_name} --location {cluster_location} --project {project_id}.
   • Fallback / Dry-Run Mode: If the cluster is unreachable, non-existent, or live command execution fails (such as in sandboxed evaluations, dry-run mode, or offline analysis):
     • Limit retry attempts to avoid resource exhaustion and context overflow.
     • Immediately present the exact kubectl / gcloud diagnostic commands for the human operator to run.
     • Synthesize the root-cause analysis and output the proposed GitOps correction based on the reported symptoms.

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Step 1: Classify the Storage Symptom

Gather the primary signals, then jump to the matching branch under Step 2 (Resolution) — you normally perform only the one branch that matches your diagnosis, not all of them.

Diagnostic Commands:

kubectl describe pod {pod_name} -n {workload_namespace}
kubectl get pvc,pv -n {workload_namespace}
kubectl get events -n {workload_namespace} --sort-by='.metadata.creationTimestamp'
kubectl describe node {node_name}

• Pod stuck in ContainerCreating with an attach/mount event → Volume Attach & Mount Failures.
• Node-level slowness, PLEG is not healthy, or StoragePressureDetected events → Disk Performance & Node Storage Pressure.
• Cluster / node-pool creation or provisioning error → Storage Provisioning & Creation Failures.
• A resized volume is not reflected inside the container → Volume Expansion Not Reflecting in the Container.
• Cloud Storage FUSE Pod / sidecar OOM → Cloud Storage FUSE Out-Of-Memory (OOM) Events.

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Step 2: Resolution

Perform only the branch that matches your Step 1 diagnosis. These branches are mutually exclusive alternatives, not sequential steps.

Volume Attach & Mount Failures

• Error 400: Cannot attach RePD to an optimized VM: Regional persistent disks are restricted from being used with memory-optimized or compute-optimized machine types.

  • If a regional PD is not a hard requirement, switch the workload to a non-regional persistent disk StorageClass.
  • If a regional PD is required, use taints and tolerations so that Pods needing regional PDs are scheduled onto a node pool that does not use optimized machine types.

• Pods stay Pending / FailedScheduling after a node pool is moved to a 4th-generation (N4, N4A, N4D) machine series while the workload uses a Persistent Disk StorageClass: N4/N4A/N4D machines do not support Persistent Disk (they support Hyperdisk only), so a PVC bound to a pd-* StorageClass cannot bind or schedule on those nodes. Events typically show FailedScheduling with a volume node-affinity / topology conflict.

  • Switch the workload to a Hyperdisk StorageClass (for example type: hyperdisk-balanced) for the Gen4 node pool.
  • For existing Persistent Disk volumes, migrate the data to a Hyperdisk volume; the original PD cannot be attached to a Gen4 node.
  • If the workload must keep Persistent Disk, keep it on a PD-capable machine series (for example N2) via node selection. This is a machine-type/disk-type incompatibility, not a capacity problem, so increasing disk size or quota does not help.

• Hyperdisk Pods become unschedulable when a compute class falls back across VM generations (for example N4 priority, N2 fallback), or one StorageClass must serve mixed generations: a single static disk type in the StorageClass is not compatible with every machine series in the fallback list, so Pods cannot bind their volume on the fallback nodes.

  • Use automated disk type selection: set the StorageClass parameters.type to dynamic with hyperdisk-type, pd-type, and disk-type-preference, plus use-allowed-disk-topology: "true", so GKE selects a compatible disk type per node and schedules Pods only onto nodes that support it. One dynamic StorageClass can then span multiple VM generations (requires the GKE versions noted in the docs).

    Example dynamic StorageClass (GKE 1.35.3-gke.1290000+):

    apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
    kind: StorageClass
    metadata:
      name: dynamic-volume
    provisioner: pd.csi.storage.gke.io
    volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer
    allowVolumeExpansion: true
    parameters:
      type: dynamic
      pd-type: pd-balanced
      hyperdisk-type: hyperdisk-balanced
      # Preferred storage on nodes that support both PD and Hyperdisk;
      # defaults to hyperdisk-type when omitted.
      disk-type-preference: hyperdisk-type
      # Best practice: schedule Pods only onto nodes that support the disk type.
      use-allowed-disk-topology: "true"
    

Disk Performance & Node Storage Pressure

• Poor disk performance (symptoms such as task dockerd:... blocked for more than 300 seconds, PLEG is not healthy, or slow fs: disk usage scans): the node boot disk is shared across the OS, container images, the overlay filesystem, and disk-backed emptyDir volumes, and performance is shared across all disks of the same type on the node.

  • This commonly affects nodes using standard persistent disks smaller than 200 GB. Increase the disk size or switch to SSD, especially for production.
  • Enable Local SSD for ephemeral storage on node pools whose workloads frequently use emptyDir.

• Slow disk operations cause Pod creation failures: on affected node versions (GKE 1.18–1.23 before the fixed patch releases), the k8s_node container-runtime logs show failed to reserve container name ... is reserved for ... (containerd issue #4604).

  • Mitigate with restartPolicy: Always or OnFailure in the PodSpec, and increase boot-disk IOPS (larger disk or a faster disk type).
  • The permanent fix is containerd 1.6.0+; upgrade to a GKE version that includes it.

• StoragePressureDetected (high node storage pressure): node condition StoragePressureRootFileSystem becomes True (for example, Disk /dev/nvme0n1 usage 89% exceeds threshold 85%), caused by excessive emptyDir writes, large image pulls, or accumulating logs.

  • Identify usage with df -h on the affected node (focus on /mnt/stateful_partition and ephemeral mounts).
  • Remediate by using larger boot disks, adding Local SSDs for ephemeral storage, setting appropriate ephemeral-storage requests/limits, and cleaning up unused files/images/logs.

Storage Provisioning & Creation Failures

• The selected machine type ... has a fixed number of local SSD(s): the Local SSD count specified in EphemeralStorageLocalSsdConfig / LocalNvmeSsdBlockConfig does not match the fixed count included with the machine type.

  • Specify a Local SSD count that matches the machine type. For third-generation machine series, omit the Local SSD count flag and the correct value is configured automatically.

• Hyperdisk Storage Pools: cluster or node-pool creation fails with ZONE_RESOURCE_POOL_EXHAUSTED (or similar Compute Engine resource errors): the target zone lacks capacity for the requested Hyperdisk Balanced disks or machine type.

  • Select a new zone in the same region that has capacity and where Hyperdisk Balanced Storage Pools are available. Because storage pools are zonal, delete and recreate the pool in the new zone, then create the cluster/node pool there.

Volume Expansion Not Reflecting in the Container

Volume expansion must always be driven through the PersistentVolumeClaim. Editing the PersistentVolume directly can leave the container filesystem on the old size.

1. Keep the modified PersistentVolume object as it is.

2. Edit the PersistentVolumeClaim and set spec.resources.requests.storage to a value higher than the current PersistentVolume size.

3. The kubelet then resizes the PV, PVC, and container filesystem automatically. Verify inside the Pod:

   kubectl exec {pod_name} -n {workload_namespace} -- df -h
   

Cloud Storage FUSE Out-Of-Memory (OOM) Events

If Pods experience high memory use or OOM kills related to the Cloud Storage FUSE CSI driver:

1. Enable CPU/memory snapshots by configuring Cloud Profiler on the Cloud Storage FUSE CSI driver sidecar container.

2. Locate the OOM event in Cloud Logging, filtering by Pod:

   jsonPayload.involvedObject.name="{pod_name}"
   jsonPayload.involvedObject.kind="Pod"
   OOMKilled
   

   If the sidecar mounter or GCSFuse process OOMs, the Pod name is the workload Pod's name; if the node driver OOMs, it is gcsfusecsi-node-*.

3. Extract the Pod UID (jsonPayload.involvedObject.uid) and timestamp, then analyze the matching snapshot in Cloud Profiler using the {pod_name}_{pod_uid} Service Version at the OOM timestamp.

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Step 3: Propose the GitOps Correction

Enforce the read-only diagnostics boundary: do not apply live mutations with kubectl edit, kubectl patch, or kubectl apply. Instead, present the corrected StorageClass, PersistentVolumeClaim, PodSpec (securityContext, restartPolicy), or node-pool configuration as a reviewable patch to be applied through the user's GitOps pipeline (for example, Config Sync, Argo CD, or Flux).

References

• Troubleshoot storage in GKE
• Regional persistent disk restrictions
• Configure ephemeral storage with local SSDs
• Cloud Storage FUSE CSI driver sidecar (enable Profiler)
• Hyperdisk Storage Pools
• N4 machine series storage support (Persistent Disk not supported)
• Hyperdisk machine type support
• Hyperdisk automated disk type selection (dynamic StorageClass)