Tinker Programmer

May 29, 2026 · Cloud Native

K8s Scheduler Black Box: How TopologySpreadConstraints’ Math Can Trip Engineers

The article explains why Pod anti‑affinity often falls short, how TopologySpreadConstraints enforce a maxSkew balance across topology domains, why an “empty topology domain” can cause Pods to stay Pending, and provides a step‑by‑step guide to tightening domain scope and building custom Go scheduler plugins with the Kubernetes Scheduling Framework, while warning about dependency and version pitfalls.