Similarly to EKS on AWS, GKE also sets up StorageClass by default; this uses Persistent Disk:

$ kubectl get storageclass
NAME                 TYPE
standard (default)   kubernetes.io/gce-pd

$ kubectl describe storageclass standard

Name:                  standard
IsDefaultClass:        Yes
Annotations:           storageclass.beta.kubernetes.io/is-default-class=true
Provisioner:           kubernetes.io/gce-pd
Parameters:            type=pd-standard
AllowVolumeExpansion:  <unset>
MountOptions:          <none>
ReclaimPolicy:         Delete
VolumeBindingMode:     Immediate
Events:                <none>

Consequently, when creating a persistent volume claim, this will automatically allocate the GCP Persistent Disk as the Kubernetes Persistent Volume. For more information on persistent volume claim and Dynamic Provisioning, please refer to Chapter 4, Managing Stateful Workloads:

$ cat pvc-gke.yml
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
    name: pvc-gke-1
spec:
  storageClassName: "standard"
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi

   
//create Persistent Volume Claim
$ kubectl create -f pvc-gke.yml 
persistentvolumeclaim "pvc-gke-1" created
 
   
//check Persistent Volume
$ kubectl get pv
NAME                                       CAPACITY   ACCESSMODES   RECLAIMPOLICY   STATUS    CLAIM               STORAGECLASS   REASON    AGE
pvc-bc04e717-8c82-11e7-968d-42010a920fc3   10Gi       RWO           Delete          Bound     default/pvc-gke-1   standard                 2s

    
//check via gcloud command
$ gcloud compute disks list 
NAME                                                             ZONE               SIZE_GB  TYPE         STATUS
gke-my-k8s-cluster-d2e-pvc-bc04e717-8c82-11e7-968d-42010a920fc3  asia-northeast1-a  10       pd-standard  READY