Kubernetes Recovery Strategies

Mastering Rollbacks in Kubernetes Deployments

Ensuring Application Reliability with Effective Version Control and Rapid Recovery Techniques

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Table of Contents
Understanding Rollbacks
Practical Rollback Example

Overview

Rolling back a deployment in Kubernetes is a critical feature, allowing us to revert to a previous state of our application if an update does not go as planned. This process is facilitated by Kubernetes’ use of ReplicaSets to manage the versions of a deployment.

Understanding Rollbacks

When we update a deployment in Kubernetes, a new ReplicaSet is created for the new version, and the old ReplicaSet for the previous version is not deleted. This behavior is what makes rollbacks possible. If the new version introduces problems — be it an error in the code, issues with the environment, or any other type of failure — we can quickly revert to the previous, stable version by performing a rollback.

Practical Rollback Example

Let’s imagine a scenario where we’ve deployed an application called webapp, packaged in a container with…