Node lifecycle conditions

Node lifecycle conditions report whether a Node is undergoing a lifecycle event such as drain, maintenance, or Graceful Node Shutdown. They provide a shared signal that cluster administrators, controllers, and third-party tools can use for lifecycle management.

The following well-known lifecycle conditions are available:

The status of each lifecycle condition has the following meaning:

• True: the lifecycle state described by the condition is currently observed.
• False: the lifecycle state described by the condition is not currently observed.
• Unknown: the writer cannot determine whether the lifecycle state is active.

Lifecycle conditions are observations that provide useful context around a Node's lifecycle state. For example, use MaintenancePlanned to signal that a Node may go into maintenance in the future, or Drained to signal that the administrator's selected drain criteria have been met.

The reason field identifies why the condition has its current status. Writers should use stable CamelCase values for reason. The message field can provide additional human-readable detail.

The following example reports that maintenance is planned for a Node:

status:
  conditions:
  - type: MaintenancePlanned
    status: "True"
    reason: MaintenanceWindow
    message: "Hardware maintenance is scheduled for this Node"
    lastTransitionTime: "2026-07-20T14:00:00Z"

Writing lifecycle conditions

An administrator or an administrator-authorized controller is responsible for setting and clearing lifecycle conditions on the Node.

The writer determines when a lifecycle state is active. When the state is no longer active, the writer sets the condition to False or removes it.

Kubernetes does not define exclusive writer ownership, locking, or handoff between actors. Writers should coordinate ownership outside this API.

The existing lifecycle management mechanisms should still be used:

• Use kubectl cordon or set .spec.unschedulable to prevent normal scheduling onto a Node.
• Use kubectl drain to safely evict Pods before taking a Node out of service.
• Use taints and tolerations to control Pod scheduling and eviction policy.

Viewing lifecycle conditions

Use kubectl describe node to view all conditions for a Node:

kubectl describe node <node-name>

To print the type and status of every condition, use:

kubectl get node <node-name> \
  -o jsonpath='{range .status.conditions[*]}{.type}={.status}{"\n"}{end}'