SRE Perspective on Rolling Updates and Rollbacks in Kubernetes

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is built on the principles of automation, reliability, and resilience. In modern cloud-native environments, Kubernetes serves as the orchestration backbone for deploying and managing applications. For SREs, two Kubernetes features— rolling updates and rollbacks —play a critical role in ensuring service stability during change. These mechanisms aren't just deployment tools. They are reliability strategies. Understanding and implementing them through the lens of SRE principles helps organizations meet their Service Level Objectives (SLOs) while releasing software at velocity. Site Reliability Engineering Training Rolling Updates: Change Without Disruption One of the foundational goals of SRE is to reduce the risk of change. Rolling updates in Kubernetes align perfectly with this goal by enabling progressive delivery . Instead of replacing all pods at once (a practice prone to service interruption), Kubernetes graduall...