I have a lot of ideas about this. I'm one of the creators of Pachyderm, which does data pipelining on Kubernetes. The first concrete thing that I think K8s could have would be some sort of a notion of a DataSet. Right now the closest thing I think is a gitRepo volume. GitRepo volumes are different from most other k8s volumes in that they're not meant for persisting state, they're meant as a way to inject data (which might actually be code) into a k8s environment. I'd like to see that idea expanded, I could easily imagine a similar thing that allowed you to mount data from Object stores like s3 and GCS, that would do a lot to make K8s immediately useful for data workflows. Being able to output to volumes like this and pass them between various pods would be the next logical step.

This is an amazing idea! Have you thought about exploring to see if we can overload CSI to accomplish something like this? https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/contribu...