For AWS EBS, a volume can only be attached to a node in the same AZ.
The scheduler must therefore detect if a volume is being attached to a
pod, and ensure that the pod is scheduled on a node in the same AZ as
the volume.
So that the scheduler need not query the cloud provider every time, and
to support decoupled operation (e.g. bare metal) we tag the volume with
our placement labels. This is done automatically by means of an
admission controller on AWS when a PersistentVolume is created backed by
an EBS volume.
Support for tagging GCE PVs will follow.
Pods that specify a volume directly (i.e. without using a
PersistentVolumeClaim) will not currently be scheduled correctly (i.e.
they will be scheduled without zone-awareness).
There's not a huge amount of detail in the docs as to how the scheduler
actually works, which is probably a good thing both for readability and
because it makes it easier to tweak the zone-spreading approach in the
future, but we should include some information that we do spread across
zones if zone information is present on the nodes.