Cloud-Native Microservices With Kubernetes - 2nd Edition

Priority vs. Quality of Service (QoS)

Think of Pod Priority and Quality of Service (QoS) as two separate mechanisms that help Kubernetes decide which Pods are most important and how to treat them in different situations.

Priority tells the scheduler—the part of Kubernetes that decides where to place a Pod—which Pods matter the most. This is especially useful when the cluster is running low on resources (not enough CPU or memory on the nodes).