Kubernetes Rolling Restart: What It Is and How To Use It
When managing applications on Kubernetes, sometimes you need to restart your pods — maybe to pick up new config changes (like a refreshed ConfigMap or Secret), or to recover from a transient issue — without causing downtime.
That’s where a Rolling Restart comes in
A Rolling Restart updates pods one at a time so your app stays available throughout the process. The main reason is to avoid downtime.
How to perform a Rolling Restart
You can easily trigger a rolling restart of a Deployment with this command:
kubectl rollout restart deployment <deployment-name>What happens:
✅ Kubernetes restarts pods gradually
✅ Ensures that new pods are ready before terminating old ones
✅ Maintains availability
How to check that is working:
kubectl rollout status deployment <deployment-name>When should be used
Why not just delete the pods?
You could, but deleting pods directly (via kubectl delete pods) doesn’t respect readiness checks or availability — it can cause downtime if you're not careful. Rolling Restart is the safe, Kubernetes-native way.