In a Kubernetes cluster, a node can be shut down in a planned graceful way or unexpectedly because of reasons such as a power outage or something else external. A node shutdown could lead to workload failure if the node is not drained before the shutdown. A node shutdown can be either graceful or non-graceful. Graceful node shutdown The kubelet attempts to detect node system shutdown and terminates pods running on the node.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [stable] Controlling the behavior of the Kubernetes API server in an overload situation is a key task for cluster administrators. The kube-apiserver has some controls available (i.e. the --max-requests-inflight and --max-mutating-requests-inflight command-line flags) to limit the amount of outstanding work that will be accepted, preventing a flood of inbound requests from overloading and potentially crashing the API server, but these flags are not enough to ensure that the most important requests get through in a period of high traffic.

Automatically provision and consolidate the Nodes in your cluster to adapt to demand and optimize cost.

Device plugins let you configure your cluster with support for devices or resources that require vendor-specific setup, such as GPUs, NICs, FPGAs, or non-volatile main memory.

Node affinity is a property of Pods that attracts them to a set of nodes (either as a preference or a hard requirement). Taints are the opposite -- they allow a node to repel a set of pods. Tolerations are applied to pods. Tolerations allow the scheduler to schedule pods with matching taints. Tolerations allow scheduling but don't guarantee scheduling: the scheduler also evaluates other parameters as part of its function.

This page explains how to configure the kubelet's cgroup driver to match the container runtime cgroup driver for kubeadm clusters. Before you begin You should be familiar with the Kubernetes container runtime requirements. Configuring the container runtime cgroup driver The Container runtimes page explains that the systemd driver is recommended for kubeadm based setups instead of the kubelet's default cgroupfs driver, because kubeadm manages the kubelet as a systemd service.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.33 [stable](enabled by default) Sidecar containers are the secondary containers that run along with the main application container within the same Pod. These containers are used to enhance or to extend the functionality of the primary app container by providing additional services, or functionality such as logging, monitoring, security, or data synchronization, without directly altering the primary application code. Typically, you only have one app container in a Pod.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable] This page provides an overview of ephemeral containers: a special type of container that runs temporarily in an existing Pod to accomplish user-initiated actions such as troubleshooting. You use ephemeral containers to inspect services rather than to build applications. Understanding ephemeral containers Pods are the fundamental building block of Kubernetes applications. Since Pods are intended to be disposable and replaceable, you cannot add a container to a Pod once it has been created.

Production-Grade Container Orchestration

Define a range of valid memory resource limits for a namespace, so that every new Pod in that namespace falls within the range you configure.