Configure PodDisruptionBudget unhealthyPodEvictionPolicy to unblock node drains with already-unhealthy pods
domain: kubernetes.io · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Set spec.unhealthyPodEvictionPolicy: AlwaysAllow in the PodDisruptionBudget manifest (policy/v1), alongside the existing minAvailable or maxUnavailable field.
Confirm the target cluster is 1.27+ (field is beta and enabled by default) or 1.29+ (field is GA/stable) so no feature gate needs to be toggled; the field was added as alpha in 1.26.
Apply with kubectl apply -f pdb.yaml and verify with kubectl get pdb <name> -o yaml that .spec.unhealthyPodEvictionPolicy shows AlwaysAllow.
Re-run kubectl drain <node> --ignore-daemonsets --delete-emptydir-data; the drain's Eviction API calls can now evict Pods that are Running but not Ready, instead of blocking until status.currentHealthy >= status.desiredHealthy.
Leave unhealthyPodEvictionPolicy unset (default IfHealthyBudget) on PDBs guarding quorum-sensitive apps (etcd, ZooKeeper) where evicting an already-unhealthy replica mid-outage could break quorum.
Known gotchas
AlwaysAllow trades availability guarantees for drain progress: it permits evicting unhealthy pods even when that drops the app below its healthy budget, so it's a poor fit for quorum-based stateful systems.
The field only affects the Eviction API path (kubectl drain, descheduler, cluster-autoscaler); a direct kubectl delete pod bypasses the eviction subresource and PDB checks entirely, so unhealthyPodEvictionPolicy won't change that behavior.
Applying this field against a pre-1.26 API server will fail validation/be pruned since the schema didn't exist yet; there's no separate feature-gate flag to flip on 1.27+ clusters since it ships beta-enabled-by-default.
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