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Recipe: Prevent pods from being scheduled on specific nodes

Overview

Nodes with specialized processors, such as GPUs, can be more expensive to run than nodes on standard machines. To protect these nodes from workloads that don’t require special hardware, you can use Kubernetes taints. Taints mark nodes to repel pods that don’t have matching tolerations, ensuring only compatible workloads are scheduled. For more information, see Taints and Tolerations in the Kubernetes documentation.

Kubernetes node taints can be applied to new and existing managed node groups using the AWS Management Console or through the Amazon EKS API. This recipe shows how to apply taints to Amazon EKS managed node groups using the AWS CLI. For information on creating a node group with a taint using the AWS Management Console, see Create a managed node group for your cluster.

Prerequisites

Steps

Step 1: Create a node group with taints

Use the aws eks create-nodegroup command to create a new managed node group with taints. This example applies a taint with key dedicated, value gpuGroup, and effect NO_SCHEDULE.

aws eks create-nodegroup \
 --cli-input-json '
{
  "clusterName": "my-cluster",
  "nodegroupName": "node-taints-example",
  "subnets": [
     "subnet-1234567890abcdef0",
     "subnet-abcdef01234567890",
     "subnet-021345abcdef67890"
   ],
  "nodeRole": "arn:aws:iam::111122223333:role/AmazonEKSNodeRole",
  "taints": [
     {
         "key": "dedicated",
         "value": "gpuGroup",
         "effect": "NO_SCHEDULE"
     }
   ]
}'

For more information and examples, see taint in the Kubernetes reference documentation.

Step 2: Update taints on an existing node group

Use the aws eks update-nodegroup-config AWS CLI command to add, remove, or replace taints for managed node groups.

aws eks update-nodegroup-config
  --cluster-name my-cluster
  --nodegroup-name node-taints-example
  --taints 'removeTaints=[{key=dedicated,value=gpuGroup,effect=NO_SCHEDULE}]'

Notes