Heroku is joining the CNCF at the platinum level, upgrading the long-held CNCF Salesforce membership. This marks my third time serving on the CNCF board for different companies, and I’m excited to participate again. Joining the CNCF at the Platinum level signifies a major commitment, reflecting Heroku’s dedication to the evolving landscape.

My three board stints aligns with significant shifts in the cloud-native landscape. Two are behind us, one is happening now, and it’s the current one that motivated us to join now. Quick preview: It’s not the AI shift going on right now - the substrate underlying AI/ML shifted to Kubernetes a while ago.

As to why we are joining and why now, let’s take...

Kubernetes is a container orchestration system that originated at Google, and is now being maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. In this post, I am going to dissect some Kubernetes internals—especially, Deployments and how gradual rollouts of new containers are handled.

What Is a Deployment?

This is how the Kubernetes documentation describes Deployments:

A Deployment controller provides declarative updates for Pods and ReplicaSets.

A Pod is a group of one or more containers which can be started inside a cluster. A pod started manually is not going to be very useful though, as it won't automatically be restarted if it crashes. A ReplicaSet ensures that a Pod...