Persistent Volumes and Persistent Volume Claims

The CKA exam drops a PVC in Pending and asks you to fix it. An on-call page at 2 AM is the same task, with higher stakes. The root cause is always the same: a mismatch between what a PV offers and what a PVC demands — on storageClassName, accessModes, or capacity. Three fields. Once you internalize how they interact, any Pending PVC is a two-minute debug.

The previous articles in this series covered StorageClasses and dynamic provisioning, then volume types, access modes, and reclaim policies. This article is the operational layer: creating PVs and PVCs from scratch, reading the binding algorithm precisely, mounting PVCs in Pods and StatefulSets, resizing volumes, and the six failure modes that reliably bite people in production and on the exam.