Priority Class

Planted .

It is a cluster-wide object part of scheduling.k8s.io/v1. It has a mapping of priority class name and an integer value. Higher value has higher priority.

Kubernetes ships with a few default ones, examples below:

kubectl get priorityClass
NAME                      VALUE        GLOBAL-DEFAULT   AGE   PREEMPTIONPOLICY
system-cluster-critical   2000000000   false            28m   PreemptLowerPriority
system-node-critical      2000001000   false            28m   PreemptLowerPriority

Example

apiVersion: scheduling.k8s.io/v1
kind: PriorityClass
metadata:
  name: high-priority
value: 1000000
globalDefault: false
description: "This priority class should be used for XYZ service pods only."

Updated October 24, 2026 at 13:41 . Thoughts? Email me.

Posted to:

Preemption in Kubernetes TIL

By default in PriorityClass, the preemptionPolicy is set to PreemptLowerPriority, but it can be set to Never in which case these higher priority pods will not preempt other pods. Which might be useful in scenarios where you have a higher priority task but you don't want to kill existing tasks.
How to Use Priority and Preemption TIL

Set up a PriorityClass