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. You'd need to create discrete taint categories, use external admission controllers, or accept less-than-optimal placement decisions. In Kubernetes v1.35, we're introducing Extended Toleration Operators as an alpha feature. This enhancement adds Gt (Greater Than) and Lt (Less Than) operators to spec.tolerations , enabling threshold-based scheduling decisions that unlock new possibilities for SLA-based placement, cost optimization, and performance-aware workload distribut