1. A computer program product comprising: a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having computer-readable program code embodied therewith, the computer-readable program code executable by a processor to perform an operation comprising: receiving, by a name node, a request to process a client workload on a subset of a plurality of data nodes in a distributed computing environment, wherein the name node stores a file system index reflecting files stored on the plurality of data nodes as part of a distributed file system of the distributed computing environment; retrieving, by the name node, a set of requirements for processing the client workload; analyzing, by the name node, the retrieved set of requirements and nodal data describing each of the data nodes, to select, a first data node of the plurality of data nodes as a delegation target to process at least a portion of the client workload, the first data node being selected upon determining: (i) the first data node has a level of resource utilization not exceeding a maximum delegation threshold, and (ii) the nodal data of the first data node satisfies a greater count of the set of requirements than the nodal data of a second data node of the plurality of data nodes, wherein the set of requirements and the nodal data are encrypted and stored on the name node; delegating the requested processing of the client workload to the delegation target; and updating the nodal data to reflect the delegation of the client workload to the delegation target, wherein each of the data nodes does not include nodal data identifying other data nodes.