ServiceActive

Modal Volumes

High-performance distributed file system for Modal applications, optimized for write-once, read-many I/O workloads.

Field note

What it does

Distributed file system with caching and chunking, a full filesystem interface, and multi-cloud-provider backing for high availability.

Capabilities

Available capabilities

Read-Only Mounts Background commits Volume reloads Distributed file storage Background commits CLI Access Sub-path mounting Sub-path mounting Read-only mounts Distributed Storage

Background commits

Volumes run background commits every few seconds while a Function or Sandbox executes.

CLI and Python SDK access

Volumes can be used outside Modal via the Python SDK or the modal volume CLI.

Creating a Volume

Creating Volumes lazily from code

Downloading a file from a Volume

Lazy Volume creation

Volumes can be created lazily from code via from_name(), creating the Volume if it doesn't exist.

Mount options

Mounting a sub-path

Pricing

Read-only mounts

/user data inside of the contianer is now referencing /users/user 123 in the Volume

Using a Volume from outside of Modal

Using a Volume on Modal

Volume commits and reloads

Changes must be committed to become visible outside the container; reload to see changes made since mount.

Volumes

Volumes v2

Beta version with more scalability, concurrent writes from hundreds of containers, and sync commits.