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Off-peak, the autoscaler removes nodes and our Spark driver got evicted mid-run. How does scale-down choose its victims?

Scale-downers mark a node removable only when every pod on it can leave safely. Your batch workload died because nothing marked it special. The mechanism is a filter cascade, and the fix is priorities, PDBs and annotations.

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UP NEXT ON YOUR JOURNEY

Next in this trackWorker nodes slowly fill their disks until DiskPressure appears. How does the kubelet decide what to clean up?Next in this trackWith tens of thousands of services, DNS lookups start timing out for five seconds at a stretch. Diagnose and fix Kubernetes DNS at scale.Next in this trackThe HPA shows a CPU number. Trace it from the container to the scaling decision, and tell me where that number lies.

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