As an alternative to creating PVCs and dynamically creating volumes, you can also manually create a volume and attach it to your application directly as a persistent volume by carrying out the following steps:

1. Create an EBS volume in the same zone as your worker nodes by using the following aws CLI:

$ aws ec2 create-volume --availability-zone=us-west-2a --size=10 --volume-type=gp2

2. Deploy a test application using the EBS volumeID you created in Step 1:

$ cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-server
spec:
  containers:
  - image: gcr.io/google_containers/test-webserver
    name: test-container
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /test-ebs
      name: test-volume
  volumes:
  - name: test-volume
    awsElasticBlockStore:
      volumeID: vol-02f4bc9b938604f72
      fsType: ext4
EOF

3. Verify that your pod is in the Running state:

$ kubectl get pods
NAME        READY STATUS  RESTARTS AGE
test-server 1/1   Running 0        4m32s

The main advantage of manually created persistent volumes (PVs) is that PVs are not attached to a single cluster or namespace. They exist as a resource on your AWS cloud account and they can even be shared across clusters where dynamically created PVCs only exist in the namespace created and can only be used by a pod within that same namespace.