How to restrict access to a volume for only one Pod in Kubernetes?

It is not possible to directly restrict access to a single PersistentVolume (PV) to only one Pod in Kubernetes, as PV is a cluster-level resource, and access is controlled through PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC).

To restrict access to a volume to only one Pod, you need to:

1. Create a PersistentVolumeClaim that requests the desired volume.
2. Use this PVC only in one Pod.

Thus, if the PVC is used only in one Pod, access to the volume will be limited to that Pod.

For more strict segregation, you can use:

• SecurityContext and filesystem permissions within the volume.
• Pod Security Policies or Admission Controllers to restrict PVC usage.
• For cloud providers — use IAM mechanisms and StorageClass with restrictions.

Example of using PVC in a Pod:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: exclusive-pvc
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 1Gi
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pod-with-volume
spec:
  containers:
  - name: app
    image: nginx
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: "/data"
      name: data-volume
  volumes:
  - name: data-volume
    persistentVolumeClaim:
      claimName: exclusive-pvc

Here, the PVC exclusive-pvc is used only in the Pod pod-with-volume, which restricts access to the volume.