Kubernetes v1.35: Mutable PersistentVolume Node Affinity (alpha)

The PersistentVolume node affinity API dates back to Kubernetes v1.10. It is widely used to express that volumes may not be equally accessible by all nodes in the cluster. This field was previously immutable, and it is now mutable in Kubernetes v1.35 (alpha). This change opens a door to more flexible online volume management. Why make node affinity mutable? This raises an obvious question: why make node affinity mutable now? While stateless workloads like Deployments can be changed freely and the changes will be rolled out automatically by re-creating every Pod, PersistentVolumes (PVs) are stateful and cannot be re-created easily without losing data. However, Storage providers evolve and storage requirements change. Most notably, multiple providers are offering regional disks now. Some of them even support live migration from zonal to regional disks, without disrupting the workloads. This change can be expressed through the VolumeAttributesClass API, which recently graduated to GA in 1