Dynamic storage provisioning with democratic-csi

My Talos cluster needed persistent storage backed by the TrueNAS VM that already manages my disks with ZFS. Rather than provisioning volumes on TrueNAS by hand for every workload, I installed democratic-csi, a CSI driver that lets Kubernetes provision storage on TrueNAS directly.

How it works

democratic-csi talks to the TrueNAS API. When a PersistentVolumeClaim is created in the cluster, it creates a matching resource on TrueNAS and hands it back to Kubernetes as a PersistentVolume, so provisioning stays entirely declarative — no manual dataset or zvol creation.

I ended up with two StorageClasses on the cluster, covering the two access modes I need:

• NFS, backed by ZFS datasets, for volumes that need ReadWriteMany.
• iSCSI, backed by ZFS zvols, for block storage with ReadWriteOnce.

Why this setup

Letting Kubernetes drive storage provisioning through the TrueNAS API keeps volume lifecycle entirely declarative and tied to the cluster’s manifests, while ZFS underneath still gives me snapshots, compression and scrubbing for free. It’s also what makes replicating the pool to my secondary server in Switzerland straightforward — it builds directly on top of it.