Uncontrolled usage of disks by containers and volumes can lead to storage issues that have an impact on the performance of systems. Implement these best practices for disk space management:
Container Storage Quotas: Use the --storage-opt parameter to limit how much storage a container should use when using storage backends like devicemapper or btrfs. An example is docker run --storage-opt size=1G, which will limit a container's writable layer to 1GB.
Log Rotation: Configure log rotation settings to limit log file sizes, preventing logs from consuming excessive disk space. Use parameters like "max-size" and "max-file" in the daemon.json file to define log file limits.
Image and Volume Pruning: Regularly run the docker system prune and docker volume prune commands to remove unused images, stopped containers, and orphaned volumes. This helps free up disk space and maintain a clean working environment.
Monitoring and Alerts: Install monitoring tools such as Grafana or Prometheus, which may be used to create disk usage alerts so that proactive management can be applied. Track metrics such as volume size and image usage over time.
Docker Garbage Collection: Some tools, like Docker GC, automatically clean up the junk images and volumes on scheduled times so that disk usage is managed on a continuous basis.
Data Volume Management: For applications with significant storage requirements, consider alternatives like local Docker volumes, NFS (Network File System), or cloud-based solutions such as Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. External storage solutions enable scalable, independent storage management, decoupling it from the Docker host's resources. This ensures greater flexibility and capacity to handle growing data demands.
