Choosing Kubernetes Storage: Local vs Network vs Cloud CSI Drivers

Calendar February 21, 2026
Kubernetes
Intermediate
Storage-Architecture, Performance-Analysis, Capacity-Planning, Statefulset-Design
Storage, Persistent-Volumes, Csi, Ebs, Efs, Azure-Disk, Gce-Pd, Ceph, Rook, Nfs, Local-Storage, Statefulsets
Kubectl, Fio, Lsblk

Choosing Kubernetes Storage#

Storage decisions in Kubernetes are harder to change than almost any other architectural choice. Migrating data between storage backends in production involves downtime, risk, and careful planning. Understand the tradeoffs before provisioning your first PersistentVolumeClaim.

The decision comes down to five criteria: performance (IOPS and latency), durability (can you survive node failure), portability (can you move the workload), cost, and access mode (single pod or shared).

Storage Categories#

Block Storage (ReadWriteOnce)#

Block storage provides a raw disk attached to a single node. Only one pod on that node can mount it at a time (ReadWriteOnce). This is the most common storage type for databases, caches, and any workload that needs fast, consistent disk I/O.