Storage for stateful NFs: PersistentVolumes, StorageClasses, CSI

The Storage Challenge in Cloud-Native Telecom

Containers are ephemeral by design, losing all data when they restart. However, many telecom network functions maintain critical state that must survive pod restarts and even node failures. The Unified Data Repository stores subscriber profiles, the Policy Control Function maintains active policy sessions, and the Session Management Function tracks PDU session contexts. Kubernetes addresses this through the persistent volume subsystem, which decouples storage lifecycle from pod lifecycle. PersistentVolumes represent actual storage resources while PersistentVolumeClaims let pods request…