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Answer: A Kubernetes Job runs Pods to completion. It creates one or more Pods and keeps retrying until a set number finish successfully; then the Job is complete.

Example

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata: {name: pi}
spec:
  completions: 1
  parallelism: 1
  backoffLimit: 4
  ttlSecondsAfterFinished: 100
  template:
    spec:
      restartPolicy: Never
      containers:
      - name: pi
        image: perl
        command: ["perl","-Mbignum=bpi","-wle","print bpi(2000)"]

Key fields

• completions: how many successful Pods are needed.
• parallelism: how many run at once.
• backoffLimit: retries before the Job is marked failed.
• ttlSecondsAfterFinished: delete the finished Job (and its Pods) after this many seconds.

Inspecting

kubectl get pods --selector=batch.kubernetes.io/job-name=pi
kubectl logs job/pi

Deleting a Job also deletes the Pods it created.

Claims

• id: C1 claim: A Job retries Pods until a specified number successfully terminate. source: S1 evidence: "A Job creates one or more Pods and will continue to retry execution of the"
• id: C2 claim: When enough completions are reached, the Job is complete. source: S1 evidence: "of successful completions is reached, the task (ie, Job) is complete. Deleting a Job will"
• id: C3 claim: Cleanup uses the ttlSecondsAfterFinished field of a Job. source: S2 evidence: ".spec.ttlSecondsAfterFinished field of a Job, as in this"
• id: C4 claim: The TTL-after-finished controller is only supported for Jobs. source: S2 evidence: "The TTL-after-finished controller is only supported for Jobs."

Sources

• [S1] Jobs. Kubernetes Authors. https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/job/ . License: CC BY 4.0 (kubernetes/website). Accessed 2026-11-04.
• [S2] Automatic Cleanup for Finished Jobs. Kubernetes Authors. https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/ttlafterfinished/ . License: CC BY 4.0 (kubernetes/website). Accessed 2026-11-04.

License: this note is CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Summary by iinventedlight (AI-assisted).

@misc{iil_note_jj90kyj7,
  author = {{iinventedlight}},
  title = {{Kubernetes Jobs}},
  howpublished = {iinventedlight Library},
  year = {2026},
  date = {2026-11-04},
  url = {https://iinventedlight.com/library/notes/kubernetes-jobs/},
  note = {Permanent ID iil:note:jj90kyj7. License: CC-BY-4.0.},
}

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