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+---
+assignees:
+- mml
+
+---
+This guide is for anyone wishing to specify safety constraints on pods or anyone
+wishing to write software (typically automation software) that respects those
+constraints.
+
+* TOC
+{:toc}
+
+## Rationale
+
+Various cluster management operations may voluntarily evict pods.  "Voluntary"
+means an eviction can be safely delayed for a reasonable period of time. The
+principal examples today are draining a node for maintenance or upgrade
+(`kubectl drain`), and cluster autoscaling down. In the future the
+[rescheduler](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/docs/proposals/rescheduling.md)
+may also perform voluntary evictions.  By contrast, something like evicting pods
+because a node has become unreachable or reports NotReady, is not "voluntary."
+
+For voluntary evictions, it can be useful for applications to be able to limit
+the number of pods that are down.  For example, a quorum-based application would
+like to ensure that the number of replicas running is never brought below the
+number needed for a quorum, even temporarily. Or a web front end might want to
+ensure that the number of replicas serving load never falls below a certain
+percentage of the total, even briefly.  `PodDisruptionBudget` is an API object
+that specifies the minimum number or percentage of replicas of a collection that
+must be up at a time.  Components that wish to evict a pod subject to disruption
+budget use the `/eviction` subresource; unlike a regular pod deletion, this
+operation may be rejected by the API server if the eviction would cause a
+disruption budget to be violated.
+
+## Specifying a PodDisruptionBudget
+
+A `PodDisruptionBudget` has two components: a selector to specify the set of
+pods, and a description of the minimum number of available pods for a disruption
+to be allowed.  The latter can be either an absolute number or a percentage.  In
+typical usage, a single budget would be used for a collection of pods managed by
+a controller—for example, the pods in a single ReplicaSet.
+
+Note that a disruption budget does not truly guarantee that the specified
+number/percentage of pods will always be up.  For example, a node that hosts a
+pod from the collection may fail when the collection is at the minimum size
+specified in the budget, thus bringing the number of available pods from the
+collection below the specified size. The budget can only protect against
+voluntary evictions, not all causes of unavailability.
+
+## Requesting an eviction
+
+If you are writing infrastructure software that wants to produce these voluntary
+evictions, you will need to use the eviction API.  The eviction subresource of a
+pod can be thought of as a kind of policy-controlled DELETE operation on the pod
+itself.  To attempt an eviction (perhaps more REST-precisely, to attempt to
+*create* an eviction), you POST an attempted operation.  Here's an example:
+
+```json
+{
+  "apiVersion": "policy/v1alpha1",
+  "kind": "Eviction",
+  "name": "quux",
+  "namespace": "default"
+}
+```
+
+and here is how you would attempt this with `curl`
+
+```bash
+curl -v -X POST -H 'Content-type: application/json'
+http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/v1/namespaces/default/pods/quux/eviction -d
+eviction.json
+```
+
+The API can respond in one of three ways.
+
+ 1. If the eviction is granted, then the pod is deleted just as if you had sent
+    a `DELETE` request to the pod's URL and you get back `200 OK`.
+ 2. If the current state of affairs wouldn't allow an eviction by the rules set
+    forth in the budget, you get back `429 Too Many Requests`.  This is
+    typically used for generic rate limiting of *any* requests, but here we mean
+    that this request isn't allowed *right now*, but it may be allowed later.
+    Currently, callers do not get any `Retry-After` advice, but they may in
+    future versions.
+ 3. If there is some kind of misconfiguration, like multiple budgets pointing at
+    the same pod, you will get `500 Internal Server Error`.
+
+For a given eviction request, there are two cases.
+
+ 1. There is no budget that matches this pod.  In this case, the server always
+    returns `200 OK`.
+ 2. There is at least one budget.  In this case, any of the three responses may
+    apply.