February 21, 2026
A DaemonSet ensures that a copy of a pod runs on every node in the cluster – or on a selected subset of nodes. When a new node joins the cluster, the DaemonSet controller automatically schedules a pod on it. When a node is removed, the pod is garbage collected.
This is the right abstraction for infrastructure that needs to run everywhere: log collectors, monitoring agents, network plugins, storage drivers, and security tooling.
February 21, 2026
Pod scheduling in Kubernetes defaults to “run anywhere there is room.” In production, that is rarely what you want. GPU workloads should land on GPU nodes. System components should not compete with application pods. Nodes being drained should stop accepting new work. Taints, tolerations, and node affinity give you control over where pods run and where they do not.
A taint is applied to a node and tells the scheduler “do not place pods here unless they explicitly tolerate this taint.” Taints have three parts: a key, a value, and an effect.