Do sporadic disk cleanup operations happen automatically in Kubernetes or should this be a scheduled "docker RM/RMI" to remove discarded images? A single node in my dev K8s cluster (other nodes are fine) keeps running out of disk space in / and the following message is show in the K8s UI events:
reason: freeDiskSpaceFailed
Message: failed to garbage collect required amount of images. Wanted to free 2069743207, but freed 0
Yes,Kubernetes supports container and image garbage collection. More details in https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/kubelet-garbage-collection/
You may want to check whether that particular node has enough disk space allocated to host the images for the pods assigned to it.