Changes to Pod Eviction Timeout Are Not Taking Into Effect

Problem

• Unable to change default value of Pod Eviction Timeout
• Pods are getting evicted after the default pod eviction timeout value of 5 mins even after modifying it.

Environment

• Platform9 Managed Kubernetes - v5.1 onwards
• Kubernetes - v1.18 and onwards

Answer

• From Kubernetes v1.18 onwards taint based eviction method has been given preference over the node conditions based eviction.
• Due to this even if the changes are made to the default value of pod-eviction-timeout, it is not taken in to the consideration. Instead it's taint based Eviction method that takes precedence over the pod-eviction-timeout.
• In case of taint based evictions the default value of pod eviction timeout can be changed by adding couple of flags to the kube-apiserver and the flags responsible for this are, default-not-ready-toleration-seconds and default-unreachable-toleration-seconds.

Additional Information

For additional information regarding the Taint and Toleration based eviction please refer to the article Taint based Evictions