Restarting Deployments in Kubernetes Before v1.15

Christian Emmer
Christian Emmer
Jul 10, 2020 · 2 min read
Restarting Deployments in Kubernetes Before v1.15

Restarting resources such as deployments in Kubernetes is a fairly common task, but before v1.15 it wasn't very straight-forward.

See "Restarting Resources in Kubernetes v1.15+" for a much simpler way to restart resources in Kubernetes v1.15+. v1.15 was released on Jun 19, 2019.

Restarting Resources in Kubernetes v1.15+

Jul 9, 2020 · 1 min read

Restarting resources such as deployments in Kubernetes is a fairly common task, and starting with Kubernetes v1.15 there's an easy command for it.

Restarting Resources in Kubernetes v1.15+

One way

One of the most common ways to restart resources you'll see online is to reduce a deployment's replica count to zero and then back up to its previous number. This isn't great for a number of reasons:

  • At some point in time you will have zero replicas running, which might have drastic consequences in production.
  • It may not respect your deployment strategy . This way of restarting is the same as the "recreate" deployment strategy, and that may not be desired.
  • If you're using horizontal pod autoscaler it will likely fight you.

A better way

Editing a deployment's pod template will cause a rollout, so we can edit the template with a change that has no effect but will cause the rollout anyway. You only need to make a change to one container in the pod template in order to cause this.

One way of doing this is by adding/setting an environment variable such as LAST_MANUAL_RESTART with an ever-changing value such as the output from date +%s.

First, let's get the first container name in the pod template (replacing <DEPLOYMENT> with your deployment name):

kubectl get deployment --output=jsonpath="{.spec.template.spec.containers[*].name}" "<DEPLOYMENT>" | tr -s '[[:space:]]' '\n' | head -1

Then we can patch the deployment to cause a rollout like this (still replacing <DEPLOYMENT> with your deployment name, and now also <CONTAINER> with the container name you just found):

kubectl patch deployment "<DEPLOYMENT>" --patch="{\"spec\":{\"template\":{\"spec\":{\"containers\":[{\"name\":\"<CONTAINER>\",\"env\":[{\"name\":\"LAST_MANUAL_RESTART\",\"value\":\"$(date +%s)\"}]}]}}}}"

You can string those together and make yourself an alias such as:

# Reboot a Kubernetes deployment
# @param {string} $1 Deployment name
kreboot() {
    CONTAINER=$(kubectl get deployment --output=jsonpath="{.spec.template.spec.containers[*].name}" "$1" | tr -s '[[:space:]]' '\n' | head -1)
    kubectl patch deployment "$1" --patch="{\"spec\":{\"template\":{\"spec\":{\"containers\":[{\"name\":\"${CONTAINER}\",\"env\":[{\"name\":\"LAST_MANUAL_RESTART\",\"value\":\"$(date +%s)\"}]}]}}}}"
}

Conclusion

I think this offers a much cleaner way to restart a deployment than strategies such as editing the replica count twice, but really you should just update past Kubernetes v1.15 as it's more than a year old and it'll give you access to kubectl rollout restart <resource>.