Kubernetes v1.35: Extended Toleration Operators to Support Numeric Comparisons (Alpha)

Many production Kubernetes clusters blend on-demand (higher-SLA) and spot/preemptible (lower-SLA) nodes to optimize costs while maintaining reliability for critical workloads. Platform teams need a safe default that keeps most workloads away from risky capacity, while allowing specific workloads to opt-in with explicit thresholds like “I can tolerate nodes with failure probability up to 5%”. Today, Kubernetes taints and tolerations can match exact values or check for existence, but they can’t compare numeric thresholds.