The Kubernetes Volume Snapshots concepts documentation mentions Volume Snapshots can be pre-provisioned;

A cluster administrator creates a number of VolumeSnapshotContents. They carry the details of the real volume snapshot on the storage system which is available for use by cluster users. They exist in the Kubernetes API and are available for consumption.

How is this done?

Some background: I'm trying to create k8s Volume Snapshots (VS) from EBS snapshots. I want to use the VS to restore a mongodb replicaset that is deployed using the Bitnami helm chart.

I've tried creating the VS without creating a VolumeSnapshotContents using this method:

1. Create EBS snapshot.
2. Create EBS volume from snapshot.
3. Create Persistent Volume (PV) from EBS volume.
4. Create Persistent Volume Claim (PVC) to bind to PV.
5. Bind PVC to PV by creating pod with PVC.
6. Create VolumeSnapshot (VS) from PVC.

The last step fails with this error:

Events:
  Type     Reason                         Age   From                 Message
  ----     ------                         ----  ----                 -------
  Warning  SnapshotContentCreationFailed  21s   snapshot-controller  Failed to create snapshot content with error cannot find CSI PersistentVolumeSource for volume mongo-with-data

This is because the PV created in step 3 has this as its Source:

Source:
    Type:       AWSElasticBlockStore (a Persistent Disk resource in AWS)
    VolumeID:   vol-049483f660a6a66cf
    FSType:
    Partition:  0
    ReadOnly:   false

while a PV created (behind the scenes) through the creation of a pod using a PVC has this Source

Source:
    Type:              CSI (a Container Storage Interface (CSI) volume source)
    Driver:            ebs.csi.aws.com
    FSType:            ext4
    VolumeHandle:      vol-05b14044113937bee
    ReadOnly:          false
    VolumeAttributes:      storage.kubernetes.io/csiProvisionerIdentity=1625656807749-8081-ebs.csi.aws.com

Both PVs have the same StorageClass.