helm upgrade --recreate-pods is deleting all the pods, because of this we are having application downtime. is there any alternative command to upgrade our latest image without downtime.

[manojchandrabss]

helm upgrade --recreate-pods is deleting all the pods, because of this we are having application downtime. is there any alternative command to upgrade our latest image without downtime.

we are using same tag for all the image builds, so everytime it should pull the image:latest. also changed the imagepullpolicy as always in deployment yaml.

Please suggest, it is blocking us

helm version
Client: &version.Version{SemVer:"v2.11.0", GitCommit:"2e55dbe1fdb5fdb96b75ff144a339489417b146b", GitTreeState:"clean"}
Server: &version.Version{SemVer:"v2.11.0", GitCommit:"2e55dbe1fdb5fdb96b75ff144a339489417b146b", GitTreeState:"clean"}

kubectl version
Client Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"10", GitVersion:"v1.10.3", GitCommit:"2bba0127d85d5a46ab4b778548be28623b32d0b0", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2018-07-26T20:40:11Z", GoVersion:"go1.9.3", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}
Server Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"10+", GitVersion:"v1.10.11-eks", GitCommit:"6bf27214b7e3e1e47dce27dcbd73ee1b27adadd0", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2018-12-04T13:33:10Z", GoVersion:"go1.9.3", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}

Cloud Provider/Platform : AKS

[caongocthai]

You can solve it with a workaround by adding an annotation to pods. Every time you need to restart the pods, change the value of that annotation. A good annotation could be timestamp

Edit: change the annotation by helm upgrade ... --set-string timestamp=$current_timestamp ...

[manojchandrabss]

Hi @kcatstack

Thank you very much for responding to my problem, COuld you please send me the full command. We are using below command, COuld you please make changes as per ur suggestion. That will be great help for us.

helm upgrade --recreate-pods ecf-helm-satellite-qa . --set=image.tag=qa-helm-image --debug.

we need to update image without downtime.

[caongocthai]

First, add an annotation to the pod. If your chart is of kind Deployment, add annotation to spec.template.metadata.annotations. For example:

kind: Deployment
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: ecf-helm-satellite-qa
      annotations:
        timestamp: "{{ .Values.timestamp }}"

Deploy that. Now, every time you set timestamp in helm command. Kubernetes will rollout a new update without downtime.
helm upgrade ecf-helm-satellite-qa . --set-string timestamp=a_random_value

[timm088]

We have used timstamp: "{{ date "20060102150405" .Release.Time }}" within our helm charts to induce this behavior.

It also requires removal of --recreate-pods to achieve the desired rollingUpdate strategy

[bacongobbler]

I'm going to close this as answered but please reopen if this doesn't fully address your use case. Thanks for chiming in @timm088 and @kcatstack!

[manojchandrabss]

@timm088 and @kcatstack thank you very much for ur help, it was nice explanation. cheers

[anlsergio]

We have used timstamp: "{{ date "20060102150405" .Release.Time }}" within our helm charts to induce this behavior.

It also requires removal of --recreate-pods to achieve the desired rollingUpdate strategy

If using helm v3+, use {{ now | date "20060102150405" }} instead, because .Release.Time has been removed from latest helm versions.

[abhishekmotifworks]

@timm088 @anlsergio Thanks for solution it worked for me.