The parallelism field limits how many Pods a Job may run at the same time. It controls concurrency, not the total number of successful completions. section 18.1.2
Run five completions with two Pods at once
Set completions to 5 and parallelism to 2. The Job starts two Pods, creates replacements as they finish, and completes after five Pods succeed. section 18.1.2
Interpret parallelism together with completions:
- Leave both fields unset to create one Pod and require one successful completion. section 18.1.2
- Set parallelism higher than completions to create only the required number of Pods. section 18.1.2
- Set parallelism lower than completions to maintain that concurrency while additional Pods replace completed ones. section 18.1.2
- Use parallelism without completions when one successful Pod completes the Job, while several Pods may run concurrently. section 18.1.2
For work queues, parallelism controls how many Pods retrieve and process work items concurrently. A value of 3 lets three Pods process separate items at once; the container must implement queue retrieval. section 18.1.5 section 18.3
Listing 18.3 A Job for running a task multiple times
apiVersion: batch/v1 #1
kind: Job #1
metadata: #1
name: generate-responses #1
labels:
app: quiz
spec:
completions: 5 #2
parallelism: 2 #3
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: quiz
spec:
restartPolicy: OnFailure
containers:
- name: mongo
image: mongo:5
command:
...
Inspect the complete Job manifest showing parallelism alongside completions, the Pod template, and restart policy. section 18.1.2
