CSI

In the Ultra Transcenders books

AI-200

Each book explains CSI in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• Standard deployment type

  A Foundry deployment type billed per token that keeps processing of prompts and responses inside the Azure geography of the resource, meeting data residency needs at lower volumes.

• General-purpose v1

  The older storage account kind (Storage), which lacks access tiers, Archive and premium file shares and retires on 13 October 2026. Converting to ZRS requires first upgrading to GPv2, a one-way change.

• Azure Key Vault

  Azure service holding secrets, keys and certificates. If the region has a paired region in the same geography, contents replicate to it, and during a best-effort failover initiated by Microsoft the vault can only be read.

• Provider

  The organisation that shares data in OpenSharing. Recipients also see a provider as a Unity Catalog securable, from which shares can be mounted as catalogs.

• Secrets Store CSI Driver

  With this AKS add-on, pods read Key Vault certificates, keys and secrets as files from a mounted CSI volume. It can also rotate them and copy them into Kubernetes Secrets.

• AKS

  Short for Azure Kubernetes Service, a managed Kubernetes offering that gives full control of clusters and node pools. Scaling uses the cluster autoscaler and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler; user sign-in is not built in.

• Volume

  Holds non-tabular files sitting in cloud storage under Unity Catalog governance, addressed as /Volumes/<catalog>/<schema>/<volume>. A volume can be external or managed, and WRITE VOLUME or READ VOLUME decide who may use it.

• Access policies

  Older permission model for Key Vault, now superseded by the Azure RBAC model.

Related terms

• Azure Key Vault provider for Secrets Store CSI Driver

  AKS add-on that gives pods access to Key Vault certificates, keys and secrets by mounting them as CSI volumes; it can optionally copy them into Kubernetes secrets too.