A PersistentVolume (PV) is a cluster-wide storage resource provisioned by an admin or dynamically by a StorageClass. A PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) is a Pod's request for storage that binds to a PV.

PVs abstract the underlying storage backend (EBS, NFS, GCE Persistent Disk, Ceph). PVCs decouple Pod definitions from storage implementation - change the StorageClass without touching the Pod YAML. Access modes: ReadWriteOnce (single node read-write), ReadOnlyMany (multiple nodes read-only), ReadWriteMany (multiple nodes read-write - not all backends support this). StatefulSets use volumeClaimTemplates to create a unique PVC per Pod replica.