PersistentVolume
A piece of storage in the cluster that has been provisioned for use by Pods independently of their lifecycle
A PersistentVolume (PV) is a piece of storage provisioned in the cluster that exists independently of any Pod. It can be backed by a cloud disk, NFS share, local disk, or many other storage systems. Unlike a regular volume defined inside a Pod spec, a PersistentVolume has its own lifecycle and persists even after the Pod using it is deleted.
Pods do not reference PersistentVolumes directly. Instead, a Pod requests storage through a PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC), which describes the size and access mode needed. Kubernetes binds the claim to a suitable PersistentVolume. This separation keeps Pod specs portable across environments with different underlying storage.
Storage can be provisioned statically by an administrator who creates PVs ahead of time, or dynamically through a StorageClass that automatically provisions a volume when a PVC is created. Dynamic provisioning is the most common approach in cloud environments.