can a container have a higher resource demain than an individual node

Solution 1:

This is not possible. Containers cant use more resources then nodes, where they are scheduled. If your container need more resources than any of cluster's node have - it simply wont be scheduled.

Below part taken from partially-related article Specify a memory request that is too big for your Nodes , but it contains important info:

Pod scheduling is based on requests. A Pod is scheduled to run on a Node only if the Node has enough available memory to satisfy the Pod's memory request.

also

The scheduler ensures that there are enough resources for all pods on a node based on the pod requests. It verifies that the sum of requests of containers on the node is no greater than the node capacity. It includes all containers started by the node, but not containers or processes started outside the knowledge of the cluster.

If you would try to schedule pod that requires more resources(i mean resources.request) that any of your nodes have - pod will remain in Pending state with FailedScheduling error.