Support for Excluding Ephemeral Volumes from Velero Backups

[ayushrockzzz]

Describe the problem/challenge you have
I am trying to exclude volumes of type ephemeral from being backed up in my Velero backups. However, there is currently no direct way to specify that volumes of type ephemeral should be skipped during the backup process. These ephemeral volumes are not needed in our backup and recovery processes, and excluding them would improve backup speed and reduce storage costs.

Here is a sample pod spec that includes such an ephemeral volume:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pod_name
  namespace: default
spec:
  volumes:
    - name: ephemeral-volume
      ephemeral:
        volumeClaimTemplate:
          spec:
            accessModes:
              - ReadWriteOnce
            resources:
              requests:
                storage: 16Gi

Describe the solution you'd like
I would like Velero to provide an option or resource policy to exclude volumes of kind ephemeral from backups, as they do not need to be backed up.

Anything else you would like to add:
This feature would be helpful in use cases where ephemeral volumes are created for temporary storage, logs, or cache that do not need to persist between pod restarts or cluster restarts.

Environment:

• Velero version (use velero version): 1.15.2
• Kubernetes version (use kubectl version): 1.30
• Kubernetes installer & version:
• Cloud provider or hardware configuration: AWS EKS
• OS (e.g. from /etc/os-release):

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[msfrucht]

I believe this is already supported via VolumePolicies.

https://velero.io/docs/v1.15/resource-filtering/#supported-volumepolicy-actions

# currently only supports v1 version
version: v1
volumePolicies:
- conditions:
    volumeTypes:
      - ephemeral
  action:
    type: skip

[ayushrockzzz]

I believe this is already supported via VolumePolicies.

https://velero.io/docs/v1.15/resource-filtering/#supported-volumepolicy-actions

# currently only supports v1 version
version: v1
volumePolicies:
- conditions:
    volumeTypes:
      - ephemeral
  action:
    type: skip

@msfrucht, I’ve tried using this method and also attempted to annotate my PVs and PVCs with velero.io/exclude-from-backup=true, as suggested by @sseago in this discussion: #8619 (reply in thread). I upgraded to version 1.15.2, but the PVs are still being backed up. When I check the logs, there’s no indication of excluding the backup of PVs or PVCs. I’m creating backups using the velero backup create <backup-name> --include-namespaces <namespace> command.