Why Your Kubernetes PersistentVolume Reclaim Policy Costs You Money

Episode notes

In this episode of DevOps Daily with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna dig into a costly Kubernetes misconfiguration that flies under the radar: the PersistentVolume reclaim policy. Most teams set it to 'Delete' and forget it, but that means every time a PersistentVolumeClaim is deleted, the underlying volume (like an EBS or GCE PD) gets wiped out too—along with any data. Lucas walks through a real example: a development environment where accidentally deleting a PVC nuked a week's worth of test data. The fix? Switching the reclaim policy to 'Retain' for critical volumes. They also discuss how to safely reuse volumes with manual reclamation, and why 'Recycle' is effectively deprecated. If your team is burning money on orphaned volumes or losing data from PVC deletions, this episode is for you. #Kubernetes #DevOps #PersistentVolume #StorageManagement #CloudCost #DataLoss #K8sConfig #VolumeReclaim #RetainPolicy #DeletePolicy #RecyclePolicy #EBS #GCEPersistentDisk #PVC #Technology #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #DevOpsDaily Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo