Critical and Non-critical Pods

The pods running various Cloudera AI services and jobs broadly fall into critical and non-critical types.

Critical pods are protected from preemption by autoscaling to avoid interrupting important services. Most of the pods running in the “infra” autoscaling group are critical. Pods that run user sessions, such as engine pods and Spark executor pods, are also considered critical, and are marked as not safe to evict. Cloudera AI system services that are deployed as daemonsets (they run on all nodes in the cluster) are deemed important, but not critical. These pods are marked as “safe-to-evict” by autoscaling.