Platform & DevOps·Placement, resources and the pod lifecycle
the workload carries a note saying it can live with the thing that node is marked with, so the scheduler stops excluding it.
Toleration
Also calledtolerations, taint exception
A workload's declaration that a particular taint does not disqualify it. It permits placement, it does not request it: a workload with a toleration for GPU nodes will happily be scheduled onto ordinary ones instead. That is the pairing people get wrong — tolerations plus node affinity is what actually pins something to special hardware, and a toleration alone does nothing of the kind.