Spheron Con: volumes for containers

A Spheron Con volume is persistent storage for containers. Pick it when you deploy a container and it is mounted at /workspace, with nothing to format or mount. Several containers can share one volume, and its files outlive any container.

Overview

Mount point: /workspace, mounted for you Size: 10 to 4,096 GB Volumes per container: One Containers per volume: Several, in the same region Regions: Selected per volume, and must match the container's region Works with: Spheron Con GPU and CPU containers only, not virtual machines

Volume rules

A volume is chosen when you deploy, and only then. It cannot be attached to a running container. Terminating the container releases the volume.
One volume per container. On a GPU container it takes /workspace in place of the built-in 500 GB volume, and the built-in volume's cost, about $0.08 per hour, is taken off the container's hourly price.
Same region as the container. The wizard offers only volumes in the container's region.
Grow, never shrink. Make a volume larger, attached or not. It cannot be made smaller.
Rename at any time. Names use lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores, 3 to 60 characters.
Delete only when no container uses it. Terminate the containers first.

Create a volume

Open Create Volume

In the Spheron dashboard, click Create Volume in the sidebar and choose Spheron Con.

Pick the region

Pick the region you will deploy your containers in. A volume attaches only to containers in its own region.

Name and size it

Enter a name and a size from 10 to 4,096 GB. The order summary shows the hourly and monthly price.

Create

Click Create Volume. The volume is ready to pick when you deploy a container.

Use it from a container

On Deploy GPUs or Deploy CPU, choose Dedicated Containers and configure the container in the same region as the volume.
In the last step, pick the volume under Attach Volumes.
Deploy. The volume is mounted at /workspace when the container starts.

Check it from inside the container:

# Confirm /workspace is the volume
grep /workspace /proc/mounts
 
# See how much you have used
du -sh /workspace

df -h /workspace reports the whole storage system the volume lives on, not your volume's size. Use du to see what you have stored.

Keep your files in /workspace. Everything else on the container disk is reset on restart and Stop, and deleted on terminate.

Share a volume across containers

Pick the same volume for several containers in the same region. Each sees the same files at /workspace, read and write. Coordinate writes yourself: two containers writing the same file at once can overwrite each other.

A common pattern: download model weights or a dataset once into the volume from a CPU container, then deploy GPU containers that read them from /workspace.

Resize and rename

Open the volume from the Volumes page:

Resize Volume: enter a larger size. The volume grows in place, attached or not.
Rename: click the pencil next to the name.

Pricing

A Spheron Con volume costs about $0.084 per GB per month ($0.00011507 per GB per hour), billed hourly while it exists, whether or not a container uses it. A 100 GB volume costs about $8.40 per month.

When a volume replaces a GPU container's built-in /workspace, the built-in volume's cost, about $0.08 per hour, is taken off the container's hourly price. While the container is stopped, it bills nothing for itself, and the volume keeps billing as a volume.

The built-in /workspace volume that comes with a GPU container is priced differently: about $0.24 per GB per month while the container is stopped (about $0.16 per hour for its 500 GB), and included in the running price. A Spheron Con volume is the cheaper place to keep files for a container you stop often.

Troubleshooting

Issue: The volume does not appear when deploying

Symptoms: The volume is missing from Attach Volumes when you deploy a container.

Diagnosis: The container is in a different region from the volume.

Resolution: Deploy the container in the volume's region.

Issue: There is no attach button on a running container

Symptoms: A running container cannot take a volume.

Diagnosis: Spheron Con volumes attach only when a container is deployed.

Resolution: Deploy a new container with the volume picked, then move your work across.

Issue: The volume cannot be deleted

Symptoms: Delete Volume is locked, or the API returns 400.

Diagnosis: A live container still uses the volume.

Resolution: Terminate the containers that use it, then delete the volume.

What's next

Containers: Deploy and connect to Spheron Con containers
Volume mounting overview: Storage rules for every provider
API reference: Create and manage volumes programmatically