Primarily, this gives a way to explicitly disable eviction, which is necessary to use omitempty on EvictionHard. See: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/53833#discussion_r166672137 As justification for this approach, neither 0% nor 100% make sense as eviction thresholds; in the "less-than" case, you can't have less than 0% of a resource and 100% perpetually evicts; in the "greater-than" case (assuming we ever add a resource with this semantic), the reasoning is the reverse (not more than 100%, 0% perpetually evicts).