A Persistent Volume (PV) is a piece of storage that has been provisioned by an administrator in the Kubernetes cluster like an EFS or EBS in AWS. A Persistent Volume Claim (PVC) is a request for storage by a user. It specifies the desired size and access modes for storage. When a PVC is created, Kubernetes looks for an available PV that meets the criteria specified in the PVC (size, access modes, storage class). If a matching PV is found, it is bound to the PVC.