As containerized applications continue to gain popularity, managing persistent storage in these ephemeral environments has emerged as a significant challenge. Kubernetes addresses this challenge with two key abstractions: Persistent Volumes (PVs) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs). These abstractions separate storage concerns, such as provisioning, lifecycle management, and capacity, from the application logic, allowing developers to focus on building scalable and resilient applications.
Understanding Persistent Volumes (PVs)
A PV in Kubernetes is a representation of a piece of storage that has been provisioned by an administrator or dynamically through storage plugins. It is a cluster-level resource, meaning it is not tied to a particular namespace and can be claimed by PVCs across different namespaces. PVs support various storage backends, including block storage, file systems, and object storage, provided by on-premises solutions or cloud storage services.