Pod Scheduling Readiness

Pods were considered ready for scheduling once created. Kubernetes scheduler does its due diligence to find nodes to place all pending Pods. However, in a real-world case, some Pods may stay in a "miss-essential-resources" state for a long period. These Pods actually churn the scheduler (and downstream integrators like Cluster AutoScaler) in an unnecessary manner.

By specifying/removing a Pod's .spec.schedulingGates, you can control when a Pod is ready to be considered for scheduling.

Configuring Pod schedulingGates

The schedulingGates field contains a list of strings, and each string literal is perceived as a criteria that Pod should be satisfied before considered schedulable. This field can be initialized only when a Pod is created (either by the client, or mutated during admission). After creation, each schedulingGate can be removed in arbitrary order, but addition of a new scheduling gate is disallowed.

Usage example

To mark a Pod not-ready for scheduling, you can create it with one or more scheduling gates like this:

pods/pod-with-scheduling-gates.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-pod
spec:
  schedulingGates:
  - name: foo
  - name: bar
  containers:
  - name: pause
    image: registry.k8s.io/pause:3.6

After the Pod's creation, you can check its state using:

kubectl get pod test-pod

The output reveals it's in SchedulingGated state:

NAME       READY   STATUS            RESTARTS   AGE
test-pod   0/1     SchedulingGated   0          7s

You can also check its schedulingGates field by running:

kubectl get pod test-pod -o jsonpath='{.spec.schedulingGates}'

The output is:

[{"name":"foo"},{"name":"bar"}]

To inform scheduler this Pod is ready for scheduling, you can remove its schedulingGates entirely by re-applying a modified manifest:

pods/pod-without-scheduling-gates.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: test-pod
spec:
  containers:
  - name: pause
    image: registry.k8s.io/pause:3.6

You can check if the schedulingGates is cleared by running:

kubectl get pod test-pod -o jsonpath='{.spec.schedulingGates}'

The output is expected to be empty. And you can check its latest status by running:

kubectl get pod test-pod -o wide

Given the test-pod doesn't request any CPU/memory resources, it's expected that this Pod's state get transited from previous SchedulingGated to Running:

NAME       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   IP         NODE  
test-pod   1/1     Running   0          15s   10.0.0.4   node-2

Observability

The metric scheduler_pending_pods comes with a new label "gated" to distinguish whether a Pod has been tried scheduling but claimed as unschedulable, or explicitly marked as not ready for scheduling. You can use scheduler_pending_pods{queue="gated"} to check the metric result.

What's next

• Read the PodSchedulingReadiness KEP for more details