User Story

As a cluster administrator, I want to define and apply taints to Machine objects so that I can influence workload scheduling and prevent pods from being scheduled onto specific nodes (e.g., during maintenance or for dedicated workloads).

Steps

This story implements the Machine-level API and controller changes required to support taints, as proposed in the proposal ( https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api/blob/main/docs/proposals/20250513-propogate-taints.md ) with the result of being able to propagate taints from a MachineDeployment, MachineSet or directly a Machine to the corresponding Nodes.

This work is part of a larger enhancement to introduce taints support in Cluster API. This story focuses specifically on the Machine-related resources, implementing the necessary API changes and the controller logic to reconcile those taints to the corresponding Node object.

Definition of Done

• Upstream implementation for Machines and MachineSets is merged
• Upstream E2E test coverage is merged