Storage Classes and Dynamic Volume Provisioning

Pre-provisioning PVs by hand is how you end up getting paged at 2 AM because a StatefulSet PVC is stuck in Pending and the on-call runbook says "ask someone to create the volume." Dynamic provisioning was the fix: a provisioner controller watches for unbound PVCs, creates the underlying storage, and binds a PV automatically. The StorageClass is what tells that controller what to create and how.

On a CKA exam cluster, you'll typically find one default StorageClass pre-configured: local-path on Kind, or standard on kubeadm with GCE. The exam tests whether you can inspect that class, create a new one with specific parameters, and change which class is the default. All of it is kubectl, but you do need to understand the fields before you can apply them under time pressure.