How to delete persistent volumes in Kubernetes - kubernetes

Question

I am trying to delete persistent volumes on a Kubernetes cluster. I ran the following command:
kubectl delete pv pvc-08e65270-b7ce-11e9-ba0b-0a1e280502e2 pvc-08e87826-b7ce-11e9-ba0b-0a1e280502e2 pvc-08ea5f97-b7ce-11e9-ba0b-0a1e280502e2 pvc-08ec1cac-b7ce-11e9-ba0b-0a1e280502e2
However it showed:
persistentvolume "pvc-08e65270-b7ce-11e9-ba0b-0a1e280502e2" deleted
persistentvolume "pvc-08e87826-b7ce-11e9-ba0b-0a1e280502e2" deleted
persistentvolume "pvc-08ea5f97-b7ce-11e9-ba0b-0a1e280502e2" deleted
persistentvolume "pvc-08ec1cac-b7ce-11e9-ba0b-0a1e280502e2" deleted
But the command did not exit. So I CONTROL+C to force exit the command. After a few minutes, I ran:
kubectl get pv
And the status is Terminating, but the volumes don't appear to be deleting.
How can I delete these persistent volumes?

Answer 1

It is not recommended to delete pv it should be handled by cloud provisioner. If you need to remove pv just delete pod bounded to claim and then pvc. After that cloud provisioner should also remove pv as well.
kubectl delete pvc --all
It sometimes could take some time so be patient.

Answer 2

Delete all the pods, which is using the pvc(you want to delete), then delete the PVC(PersistentVolumeClaim) & PV(PersistentVolume) in sequence.
Some thing like below(in sequence):
kubectl delete pod --all / pod-name
kubectl delete pvc --all / pvc-name
kubectl delete pv --all / pv-name

Answer 3

I have created below diagram to help explain this better.
The Kubectl commands are mentioned by other answers in this thread. The same should work.
kubectl delete sts sts-name
kubectl delete pvc pvc-name
kubectl delete pv pv-name
Some more useful info
If you see something stuck in terminating state, its because of guardrails set in place by k8s. These are referred to as 'Finalizers'.
If your PV is stuck in terminating state after deletion, it likely because you have deleted the PV before deleting the PVC.
If your PVC is stuck in terminating state after deletion, it likely because your pods are still running. (simply delete the pods/statefulset in such cases)
If you wish to delete the resource in terminating state, use below commands to bypass the pvc, pv protection finalizers.
kubectl patch pvc pvc_name -p '{"metadata":{"finalizers":null}}'
kubectl patch pv pv_name -p '{"metadata":{"finalizers":null}}'
Here is the documentation on PVC retention policy.
Here is the documentation on PV reclaim policy.

Answer 4

PVs are cluster resources provisioned by an administrator, whereas PVCs are a user's request for storage and resources. I guess you have still deployed the corresponding PVC.
Delete the deployment. E.g.:
kubectl delete deployment mongo-db
List the Persistent Volume Claim. E.g.:
kubectl get pvc
Delete the corresponding pcv. E.g.:
kubectl delete pvc mongo-db