I want to create some docker images that generates text files. However, since images are pushed to Container Registry in GCP. I am not sure where the files will be generated to when I use kubectl run myImage. If I specify a path in the program, like '/usr/bin/myfiles', would they be downloaded to the VM instance where I am typing "kubectl run myImage"? I think this is probably not the case.. What is the solution?
Ideally, I would like all the files to be in one place. Thank you
Container Registry and Kubernetes are mostly irrelevant to the issue of where a container will persist files it creates.
Some process running within a container that generates files will persist the files to the container instance's file system. Exceptions to this are stdout and stderr which are both available without further ado.
When you run container images, you can mount volumes into the container instance and this provides possible solutions to your needs. Commonly, when running Docker Engine, it's common to mount the host's file system into the container to share files between the container and the host: docker run ... --volume=[host]:[container] yourimage ....
On Kubernetes, there are many types of volumes. An seemingly obvious solution is to use gcePersistentDisk but this has a limitation in that it these disks may only be mounted for write on one pod at a time. A more powerful solution may be to use an NFS-based solution such as nfs or gluster. These should provide a means for you to consolidate files outside of the container instances.
A good solution but I'm unsure whether it is available, would be to write your files as Google Cloud Storage objects.
A tenet of containers is that they should operate without making assumptions about their environment. Your containers should not make assumptions about running on Kubernetes and should not make assumptions about non-default volumes. By this I mean, that your containers will write files to container's file system. When you run the container, you apply the configuration that e.g. provides an NFS volume mount or GCS bucket mount etc. that actually persists the files beyond the container.
HTH!