What Actually Happens When kube-scheduler Picks a Node (13 Stages Inside Kubernetes)

Your pod has just been written to etcd. The API server returned 201 Created . The pod exists. But spec.nodeName is still empty, and that is the entire reason this post exists. A pod with no node is not a real workload. It is a row in a database. Something has to look at it, decide which machine should run it, and atomically claim that machine. That something is kube-scheduler , and the way it makes the decision is more interesting than "pick the node with the most free CPU." There are thirteen s