eviction

The kubelet is a local reconcile loop with its own event stream, probe workers and eviction brain. The detail worth holding onto is that Ready status can reflect either a reported health failure or missing heartbeats, and those have different causes and different fixes.

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.

Two cleanup mechanisms hide behind one taint: image garbage collection removes unreferenced images by LRU at threshold crossings, while eviction kills pods. Candidates who conflate them fail this question quietly.

Tests whether you know that Kubernetes waits, and for how long. The default timings surprise most candidates, and they explain why a node failure hurts longer than people expect.

A drain that hangs without erroring is almost always eviction being refused, and the two refusals that look identical from the outside have opposite fixes.