How to get the relationship between the Persistent Volumes and the Pods in Kubernetes

I was asked to provide a way to tell the relationship between a Persistent Volume (PV) and the Pods in a Kubernetes environment.

First, there is another Kubernetes resource in the middle: a Persistent Volume Claim (PVC). So, a PVC is associated with a PV, and a Pod can mount a PVC. It’s that simple!

The relationship between a Pod, a PVC, and a PV

So, now let’s see how we can get the association between a PVC and PV.

The following Matrix-style command returns all PVCs and their respective PVs:

kubectl get pvc --all-namespaces -o json | jq -j '.items[] | "\(.metadata.namespace), \(.metadata.name), \(.spec.volumeName)\n"'

Now the following command returns the association between the Pods and the PVCs, showing the Pod name, namespace, and the PVC:

kubectl get po -o json --all-namespaces | jq -j '.items[] | "\(.metadata.namespace), \(.metadata.name), \(.spec.volumes[].persistentVolumeClaim.claimName)\n"' | grep -v null

Now if you combine these two commands, you can determine which Pod is using which PVC.

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