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Kubernetes Tutorial — Part 6: Persistent Storage and Volumes

By Suraj Ahir March 21, 2026 7 min read

Containers are ephemeral — when a pod dies, everything inside dies too. For databases, you need persistent storage that survives pod restarts. Kubernetes provides this through PersistentVolumes and PersistentVolumeClaims.

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: postgres-data
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi
  storageClassName: standard

For databases, use StatefulSets instead of Deployments. StatefulSets give each pod a stable hostname (postgres-0, postgres-1) and persistent storage that follows the pod.

In Part 7, we organize our cluster with Namespaces and resource quotas.