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.