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Kubernetes

What is Taint & Toleration?

Kubernetes mechanism to repel pods from nodes unless they explicitly tolerate the taint.

Taints are applied to nodes to repel pods from being scheduled on them. Tolerations are applied to pods to allow them to be scheduled on tainted nodes. Together they implement node dedication: 'only GPU workloads on GPU nodes', 'no general workloads on spot nodes'. Effects: NoSchedule (don't schedule), PreferNoSchedule (prefer not), NoExecute (evict existing + don't schedule). This lets you reserve specialized hardware or separate workloads by type.

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