How to tell Kubernetes which nodes to put kube-system pods?

Question

When I create a node-pool for a specific purpose, is there a way to tell Kubernetes not to put kube-system pods such as kube-proxy on those nodes (which consumes memory)? When this happens, the actual pod that is supposed to request all the memory on these nodes becomes Pending forever.

$ kubectl get pods -l app=my-app
…
my-app-2    0/2       Pending   0          2d
$ kubectl describe nodes gke-my-cluster-my-node-pool-f05270d7-7c5d
…
Non-terminated Pods:        (3 in total)
  Namespace         Name                                        CPU Requests    CPU Limits  Memory Requests Memory Limits
  ---------         ----                                        ------------    ----------  --------------- -------------
  kube-system           fluentd-cloud-logging-gke-my-cluster-my-node-pool-f05270d7-7c5d     100m (5%)   0 (0%)      200Mi (1%)  200Mi (1%)
  kube-system           kube-dns-3263495268-hw5bl                           260m (13%)  0 (0%)      110Mi (0%)  170Mi (1%)
  kube-system           kube-proxy-gke-my-cluster-my-node-pool-f05270d7-7c5d            100m (5%)   0 (0%)      0 (0%)      0 (0%)
Allocated resources:
  (Total limits may be over 100 percent, i.e., overcommitted.)
  CPU Requests  CPU Limits  Memory Requests Memory Limits
  ------------  ----------  --------------- -------------
  460m (23%)    0 (0%)      310Mi (2%)  370Mi (2%)

Answer 1

You can use taints for this. It's a beta feature where you mark nodes with a taint and pods with a matching tolerance. Pods without a tolerance won't be scheduled onto the tainted nodes.