How to Delete Volumes from Kubernetes Clusters

DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) is a managed Kubernetes service. Deploy Kubernetes clusters with a fully managed control plane, high availability, autoscaling, and native integration with DigitalOcean Load Balancers and volumes. You can add node pools using shared and dedicated CPUs, and NVIDIA H100 GPUs in a single GPU or 8 GPU configuration. DOKS clusters are compatible with standard Kubernetes toolchains and the DigitalOcean API and CLI.


You’ll typically use a volume when you want data to persist after a container process exits. If you delete volumes with kubectl using the pvc option, the volume will be permanently deleted.

When you delete a cluster from the control panel, you can select the associated volumes to delete them automatically. You can select a subset or all the volumes associated with the cluster.

Delete volumes

You can also manually delete the associated volumes from the control panel. In this case, visit the control panel and manually delete the volume.

While you can currently delete volumes and load balancers from the control panel, we recommend using kubectl to manage all cluster-related resources.

You can also use doctl or the API to delete the associated resources automatically when you destroy a cluster.

For more about managing persistent volumes, see: