Kubernetes Persistent Volume Claim Indefinitely in Pending State

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: PersistentVolumeapiVersion: v1metadata:  name: models-1-0-0  labels:    name: models-1-0-0spec:  capacity:    storage: 200Gi  storageClassName: standard  accessModes:    - ReadOnlyMany  gcePersistentDisk:    pdName: models-1-0-0    fsType: ext4    readOnly: true---kind: PersistentVolumeClaimapiVersion: v1metadata:  name: models-1-0-0-claimspec:  accessModes:    - ReadOnlyMany  resources:    requests:      storage: 200Gi  selector:    matchLabels:      name: models-1-0-0

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/

If you're using Microk8s, you have to enable storage before you can start a PersistentVolumeClaim successfully.

Just do:

microk8s.enable storage

You'll need to delete your deployment and start again.

You may also need to manually delete the "pending" PersistentVolumeClaims because I found that uninstalling the Helm chart which created them didn't clear the PVCs out.

You can do this by first finding a list of names:

kubectl get pvc --all-namespaces

then deleting each name with:

kubectl delete pvc name1 name2 etc...

Once storage is enabled, reapplying your deployment should get things going.