Startvolumes

Startvolumes are a concept in virtualization and cloud orchestration referring to storage resources that are attached to a compute instance during the initial boot sequence. They provide essential data and configuration required for the operating system to boot and become operational, separate from data volumes attached after boot. Startvolumes may host components such as the boot loader, initial RAM filesystem, kernel modules, and early-boot configuration, or a minimal read-only root filesystem used to seed the instance.

They are provisioned as persistent storage resources that can be referenced by instance definitions or templates. The orchestration layer ensures that all startvolumes are attached and mounted before the instance completes its boot, enforcing a predefined boot order. They may be created from immutable images or templates and can be configured with encryption, checksums, and integrity verification. Since they are loaded early, startvolumes are often designed to be stable and left unmodified, with changes propagated through controlled image updates or versioned snapshots.

Administrators create and manage startvolumes, attach them to instances at boot time, and rotate or replace them as needed. They can be snapshotted or backed up, and access controls govern their use. Startvolumes help support rapid recovery and reproducible boot environments, as boot-time data is decoupled from mutable data volumes.

Use cases include operating system boot, bootstrap configuration, seed data for initialization, disaster recovery, and immutable boot environments.

See also boot volume, data volume, volume management, bootstrapping.