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Scenario #372
Storage
Kubernetes v1.22, NFS with ReadWriteMany

File Locking Issue Between Multiple Pods on NFS

Two pods wrote to the same file concurrently, causing lock conflicts and data loss.

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What Happened

Lack of advisory file locking on the NFS server led to race conditions between pods.

Diagnosis Steps
  • 1Log files had overlapping, corrupted data.
  • 2File locks were not honored.
Root Cause

POSIX locks not enforced reliably over NFS.

Fix/Workaround
• Introduced flock-based locking in application code.
• Used local persistent volume instead for critical data.
Lessons Learned

NFS doesn’t guarantee strong file locking semantics.

How to Avoid
  • 1Architect apps to handle distributed file access carefully.
  • 2Avoid shared writable files unless absolutely needed.
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