We want to deploy the colored pods on matching nodes and ensure that other pods don’t get deployed on colored nodes. We also don’t want the colored pods to get deployed on other nodes.

If we taint the colored nodes accordingly and apply tolerations to the pods, we can prevent non-matching and other pods from being deployed on the colored nodes. However, we cannot guarantee that a colored pod will not get deployed on a non-tainted node.

If we label the nodes according to their color and use node affinity to make colored pods schedule on the corresponding colored nodes, the colored pods will always be deployed on matching nodes. However, this does not guarantee that other pods will not be deployed on colored nodes.

We can combine both taints & tolerations and node affinity to achieve the desired result. Taints and tolerations ensure that other pods don’t get scheduled on colored nodes. Node affinity ensures that colored pods get scheduled on the right nodes.