Insights

Kubernetes Deployment Strategies for Zero Downtime

Rolling, blue-green, and canary deployments each serve different risk and cost profiles.

Category: DevOps Published: 2026-02-17 Author: Prashant Sinha

Choose deployment strategy by risk profile

  • Rolling update: simple and resource-efficient.
  • Blue-green: clean rollback with environment switching.
  • Canary: progressive exposure with real user traffic.

Traffic and health controls

Zero downtime depends on readiness checks, pod disruption budgets, and autoscaling tuned for rollout behavior.

  • Use startup, liveness, and readiness probes correctly.
  • Configure surge and unavailable thresholds intentionally.
  • Gate rollout steps with automated SLO checks.

Rollback readiness

If rollback is manual and slow, deployment strategy is incomplete. Rehearse rollback paths and dependency reversibility in staging.