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Zero Downtime Releases using Kubernetes and Istio
This is an excerpt from the upcoming Learn Istio ebook — you can get a free 20+ page PDF and supporting YAML files preview or preorder the book at https://learnistio.com
The idea behind zero downtime release is to release a new version of the service, without affecting any users — i.e., users don’t even know when a new version of the service is released. A practical example would be if you have a website running, how can you can you release a new version without taking the site down? For services, it means that you can make continuous requests to that service while new service is being released and the callers never get that dreaded 504 Service Unavailable response.
In this article, I’ll explain two methods on how to do the zero downtime deployments — one using Kubernetes only and the second one using Istio service mesh.
Using Kubernetes (Rolling Updates)
As the first option for zero downtime deployments, we are just going to use “plain” Kubernetes, without any Istio involved. We are going to use a simple Node.Js web application that shows “Hello World!” message.
