This response I got from the Cloudera support
"I can see you're running on CDH 5.3.3, and this was added as a feature in YARN-2005, which was included in CDH releases starting from CDH 5.5.0: "YARN-2005: Blacklisting support for scheduling AMs" https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/YARN-2005,
Unfortunately this can't be backported to your version of CDH and you will have to resort to an upgrade "
Another ticket related black listing AMs is
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/YARN-4389
This fix releasing with Hadoop 2.8.0.