Be familiar with several concepts essential to the vSphere Cloud Native Storage environment.

Kubernetes Cluster
A cluster of VMs where Kubernetes control plane and worker services are running. On top of the Kubernetes cluster, you deploy your containerized applications. Applications can be stateful and stateless.
Pod
A pod is a group of one or more containers that share such resources as storage and network. Containers inside a pod are started, stopped, and replicated as a group.
Container Orchestrator
Open-source platforms, such as Kubernetes, for deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of hosts. The platforms provide a container-centric infrastructure.
Stateful Application
As containerized applications evolve from stateless to stateful, they require persistent storage. Unlike stateless applications that do not save data between sessions, stateful applications save data to persistent storage. The retained data is called the application's state. You can later retrieve the data and use it in the next session. Most applications are stateful. A database is as an example of a stateful application.
PersistentVolume
Stateful applications use PersistentVolumes to store their data. A PersistentVolume is a Kubernetes volume capable of retaining its state and data. It is independent of a pod and can continue to exist even when the pod is deleted or reconfigured. In the vSphere environment, the PersistentVolume objects use virtual disks (VMDKs) as their backing storage.
StorageClass
Kubernetes uses a StorageClass to define different tiers of storage and to describe different types of requirements for storage backing the PersistentVolume. In the vSphere environment, a storage class can be linked to a storage policy. As a vSphere administrator, you create storage policies that describe different storage requirements. The VM storage policies can be used as a part of StorageClass definition for dynamic volume provisioning.

The following sample YAML file references the Gold storage policy that you created earlier using the vSphere Client. The resulting persistent volume VMDK is placed on a compatible datastore that satisfies the Gold storage policy requirements. 

kind: StorageClass
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: gold-sc
  annotations:
    storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class: "true"
provisioner: csi.vsphere.vmware.com
parameters:
  storagepolicyname: "Gold"
PersistentVolumeClaim
Typically, applications or pods can request persistent storage through a PersistentVolumeClaim. The PersistentVolumeClaim specifies the type and class of storage, the access mode, either ReadWriteOnce or ReadWriteMany, and other parameters for the PersistentVolume. The request can then dynamically provision the corresponding PersistentVolume object and the underlying virtual disk in the vSphere environment.
Once the claim is created, the PersistentVolume is automatically bound to the claim. Pods use the claim to mount the PersistentVolume and access storage.
When you delete this claim, the corresponding PersistentVolume object and the underlying storage are deleted. 
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
 name: persistent-VMDK
spec:
 accessModes:
 - ReadWriteOnce
 resources:
 requests:
 storage: 5Gi
 storageClassName: gold-sc
StatefulSet
A StatefulSet manages the deployment and scaling of your stateful applications. The StatefulSet is valuable for applications that require stable identifiers or stable persistent storage. You can configure the StatefulSet to include a volumeClaimTemplates entry that automatically generates the PersistentVolumeClaim objects.