The invention provides methods of placing programmatic packages in a clustered environment. An exemplary method of placing programmatic packages in response to a state change in a clustered computing system is presented including: receiving the state change; in response to receiving the state change, ordering programmatic packages, where each of the programmatic packages is configured with a package priority, the package priority representing a user designated assignment of programmatic importance from high to low; placing the programmatic package having a highest package priority on a configured node, the configured node included as part of the clustered computing system; and for each of a remaining programmatic packages, placing each of the remaining programmatic packages on a node set in accordance with a user-specified package dependency, the node set included as part of the clustered computing system.