Kubernetes Persistent Volume Claim Indefinitely in Pending State

Had the same issue but it was another reason that's why I am sharing it here to help community.

If you have deleted PersistentVolumeClaim and then re-create it again with the same definition, it will be Pending forever, why?

persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy is Retain by default in PersistentVolume. In case we have deleted PersistentVolumeClaim, the PersistentVolume still exists and the volume is considered released. But it is not yet available for another claim because the previous claimant's data remains on the volume. so you need to manually reclaim the volume with the following steps:

1. Delete the PersistentVolume (associated underlying storage asset/resource like EBS, GCE PD, Azure Disk, ...etc will NOT be deleted, still exists)

2. (Optional) Manually clean up the data on the associated storage asset accordingly

3. (Optional) Manually delete the associated storage asset (EBS, GCE PD, Azure Disk, ...etc)

If you still need the same data, you may skip cleaning and deleting associated storage asset (step 2 and 3 above), so just simply re-create a new PersistentVolume with same storage asset definition then you should be good to create PersistentVolumeClaim again.

One last thing to mention, Retain is not the only option for persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy, below are some other options that you may need to use or try based on use-case scenarios:

Recycle: performs a basic scrub on the volume (e.g., rm -rf //*) - makes it available again for a new claim. Only NFS and HostPath support recycling.

Delete: Associated storage asset such as AWS EBS, GCE PD, Azure Disk, or OpenStack Cinder...etc volume is deleted

For more information, please check kubernetes documentation.

Still need more clarification or have any questions, please don't hesitate to leave a comment and I will be more than happy to clarify and assist.

With dynamic provisioning, you shouldn't have to create PVs and PVCs separately. In Kubernetes 1.6+, there are default provisioners for GKE and some other cloud environments, which should let you just create a PVC and have it automatically provision a PV and an underlying Persistent Disk for you.

For more on dynamic provisioning, see:

https://kubernetes.io/blog/2017/03/dynamic-provisioning-and-storage-classes-kubernetes/

I quickly realized that PersistentVolumeClaim defaults the storageClassName field to standard when not specified. However, when creating a PersistentVolume, storageClassName does not have a default, so the selector doesn't find a match.

The following worked for me:

kind: PersistentVolume
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: models-1-0-0
  labels:
    name: models-1-0-0
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 200Gi
  storageClassName: standard
  accessModes:
    - ReadOnlyMany
  gcePersistentDisk:
    pdName: models-1-0-0
    fsType: ext4
    readOnly: true
---
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: models-1-0-0-claim
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadOnlyMany
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 200Gi
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      name: models-1-0-0