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Persistent Volume

A piece of storage in a Kubernetes cluster that has been provisioned by an administrator or dynamically provisioned using Storage Classes.

AbbreviationPV
Categorycloud

Overview

A Persistent Volume (PV) is a resource in the cluster just like a node is a cluster resource. PVs are volume plugins like Volumes, but have a lifecycle independent of any individual Pod that uses the PV.

Key Characteristics

  • Persistence: The data in a PV remains even if the Pod using it is deleted.
  • Abstraction: PVs hide the details of the underlying storage (e.g., NFS, iSCSI, or cloud-provider-specific storage) from the user.
  • Provisioning: Can be static (created by an admin) or dynamic (created automatically based on a Persistent Volume Claim).

Access Modes

  • ReadWriteOnce (RWO): Mounted as read-write by a single node.
  • ReadOnlyMany (ROX): Mounted as read-only by many nodes.
  • ReadWriteMany (RWX): Mounted as read-write by many nodes.

Related Terms

Persistent Volume Claim