Persistent Volume Claims
Container filesystems are ephemeral — when a pod is deleted or rescheduled, everything written inside the container is lost. A PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) is how a pod requests durable storage that outlives any individual pod.
The PVC describes what you need (how much space, which access modes), and Kubernetes finds or provisions a PersistentVolume (PV) that satisfies those requirements. If a StorageClass with a dynamic provisioner is configured, the PV is created automatically when the PVC is created.
Access modes
A PVC declares how it will be mounted:
ReadWriteOnce— mounted as read/write by a single node at a time. This is the most common mode and works with most storage backends.ReadOnlyMany— mounted as read-only by many nodes simultaneously. Useful for shared config data.ReadWriteMany— mounted as read/write by many nodes simultaneously. Requires a storage backend that supports shared writes, such as NFS or a distributed filesystem.
Creating a PVC
Open Storage → Persistent Volumes and click Add PVC. Specify the namespace, a name, the StorageClass, the requested capacity (e.g. 10Gi), and the access mode. The PVC will be in Pending state until a matching PV is available. With dynamic provisioning this usually takes a few seconds.
Attaching a PVC to a workload
Go to Workloads → Deployments, click Storage on the deployment you want to attach it to, and select the PVC along with the mount path inside the container. For StatefulSets, each pod can have its own PVC through volumeClaimTemplates — see StatefulSets.
Deleting a PVC
Before deleting a PVC, make sure no running pod is using it. Deleting a mounted PVC causes the pod to lose access to the volume, which typically crashes the container. What happens to the underlying PV depends on the StorageClass's reclaimPolicy: Retain keeps the PV and its data for manual recovery; Delete removes both the PV and the underlying storage.
Deleting a PVC is not reversible. If reclaimPolicy is Delete, the data on the volume is permanently destroyed.