Mount Static Assets from an OCI Image into a Kubernetes Pod

Container images are long-used for shipping not only applications but also arbitrary artifacts - static assets, model weights, configuration files, etc.

Getting the contents of a(n artifact) container image into a Pod historically required either an init container that copied the files into a shared emptyDir, or baking the image's files into the application container itself. Since Kubernetes v1.36 (GA), there is a much simpler option: the image volume type, which lets the Pod mount an OCI image directly as a volume.

In this challenge, an OCI image with a custom index.html page has already been pushed to registry.iximiuz.com/welcome-page:v1. Your task is to deploy a Pod that runs nginx and mounts this image so that its index.html becomes nginx's default index page.

Success criteria:

A Pod named nginx-1 exists in the default namespace.
The Pod uses an image volume that references registry.iximiuz.com/welcome-page:v1.
That volume is mounted at /usr/share/nginx/html in the nginx container.
Hitting the Pod's nginx on port 80 returns the custom welcome page from the OCI image.

Hint: What is an OCI Image Volume?

A Pod volume of kind image makes Kubernetes pull an OCI image from a registry and expose its filesystem as a regular (read-only) volume that can be mounted into one or more Pod's containers. The contents of the image's root filesystem appear at the volume's mountPath, replacing whatever was there in the original container image (if anything).

Read more in the official Kubernetes documentation.

Hint: How To Add an Image Volume to a Pod?

A Pod with an image volume looks exactly like a regular Pod, but with one of the volumes entries declared as an OCI image reference:

...regular pod spec...
  volumes:
    - name: <volume-name>
      image:
        reference: <registry>/<repo>/<image>:<tag>
        pullPolicy: IfNotPresent

Hint: Where Should the Image Be Mounted?

By default, nginx serves files from /usr/share/nginx/html. If you mount the image volume at that exact path, the image's index.html will replace Nginx's default welcome page automatically.

Hint: Inspecting the Image Volume

If something doesn't work, you can verify the image volume is mounted correctly by running:

kubectl exec nginx-1 -- ls -la /usr/share/nginx/html
kubectl exec nginx-1 -- cat /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html

Does the file exist? Does cat show the expected content?

If both commands succeed, you can verify that Nginx serves the expected welcome page by running:

kubectl exec nginx-1 -- wget -qO- localhost:80

Start challenge