Platform & DevOps·Placement, resources and the pod lifecycle
instead of forbidding two replicas per zone you say the counts must stay within one of each other, and the scheduler balances them.
Topology spread
Also calledtopology spread constraints, even spreading
A softer, quantitative alternative to anti-affinity: specify the maximum imbalance allowed across a topology domain rather than an outright prohibition. It expresses what teams usually actually want — spread evenly across zones, but do not refuse to schedule if one zone is full. It is the standard fix for a service that became unschedulable because its strict anti-affinity rule could not be satisfied during a zone outage.