My Understanding of Taints, Toleration, and Node Affinity from Kubernetes

As of 16th October 2022, We have Kubernetes Version 1.25.2 and It follows X.Y.Z versioning where X is the major, Y is the Minor and Z is the Patch version. From 2014 to now, It has grown so much that we all might agree that this Software is one of a kind.

I am not here to talk about its maturity and usefulness or similar. I have first been introduced to this tool back in 2015 as it was an Alpha version back then which made me hate my life a lot of time configuring and managing self-configured clusters. I should not feel low by accepting that I still have very little knowledge about this tool and practices related to Kubernetes. But over the years I tried to make it work for me and simplified my understanding. From version 1.6, Taints, Toleration, and Node Affinity got extra focus as they got a promotion to Beta. Let me share my thoughts about them.

To understand them, I took an example of a typical home’s furniture use case.

Assume, I have these three pieces of furniture in my home.

And my wife has some rules to follow when using them.

  1. The cupboard should be used only for kitchen items.
  2. The Wardrobe is primarily for special clothes where we do have a hanging solution.
  3. The closet is about other clothes, shoes, etc items to keep.

In her opinion, If We do not abide by those rules, It will destroy tranquility. 🙂

Let us assume that these rules are categorized into 3.

  1. Taint
  2. Toleration
  3. Affinity

To match these rules with the furniture, assume that some rules are applied to the furniture and some are to the things we keep on the furniture.

  • Taint:
    • These rules are applicable to the furniture. i.e. Some kind of identity matching like a portion of the furniture is marked in some way.
    • Tainting works with Toleration.
    • Taint is the counterpart of Toleration.
  • Toleration:
    • These rules are applicable to the items or things. i.e. Some kind of identity matching with the furniture where it is expected.
    • Toleration is the counterpart of Taint.
  • Affinity:
    • This is not directly connected with the first two categories.
    • These rules are workable with the object’s properties.
    • It works with some conditions or matching of certain tags. i.e I have some shoes but one of them is a bit special and I want to keep it always in my wardrobe’s special section, not the closet with other shoes or not with clothes.

Enough with this symbolic representation. I guess you have got a basic idea of what are they.

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