Nomad CSI Plugins on GCP

Some Nomad workloads need to persist data that must still be available after the job is stopped and restarted. Nomad supports this through the Container Storage Interface (CSI).

In this lab you use the GCE Persistent Disk CSI driver to attach a real Google Cloud persistent disk to a MySQL database running on Nomad. The GCE PD CSI driver can only attach disks to genuine Google Compute Engine instances, so you use Terraform from a workstation to build the entire Nomad cluster (server and client) as GCE instances, then run the CSI driver and MySQL on it.

You will:

• Verify the workstation tooling and confirm your injected GCP service account
• Use Terraform to build a Nomad + Consul cluster of GCE instances in GCP
• Deploy the gcepd CSI driver and register a Google persistent disk as a volume
• Deploy MySQL backed by the CSI volume and write data to it
• Destroy and rerun the MySQL job to prove the data persists on the disk

It is based on the HashiCorp "Stateful Workloads with Container Storage Interface" tutorial, adapted to run on GCP.