This chapter will expand upon the core concepts, and show you how to roll out updates and test new features of your application with minimal disruption to uptime. It will cover the basics of doing application updates, gradual rollouts, and A/B testing. In addition, we will look at scaling the Kubernetes cluster itself.
In version 1.2, Kubernetes released a Deployments API. Deployments are the recommended way to deal with scaling and application updates going forward. As mentioned in previous chapters, ReplicationControllers are no longer the recommended manner for managing application updates. However, as they're still core functionality for many operators, we will explore rolling updates in this chapter as an introduction to the scaling concept and then dive into the preferred method of using Deployments in the next...