Stop Praying During Deployments
If your deployment strategy is kubectl apply -f . and hope, you aren't managing a system; you're gambling. In a production environment, specifically when serving the Norwegian market where users expect low latency and high availability, the way you roll out code is just as critical as the code itself.
I’ve seen clusters choke during a rolling update because the underlying storage couldn't handle the I/O spike of simultaneous container startups. I've seen latency jump from 15ms to 200ms because traffic was routed inefficiently during a Blue/Green switch.
Let's cut the noise. We are going to look at three standard Kubernetes deployment strategies—Rolling, Recreate, and Blue/Green—and how they behave on real hardware, specifically within the context of Norwegian infrastructure (NIX) and GDPR compliance.
1. The "Recreate" Strategy: The Blunt Instrument
This is the simplest approach. You kill all existing pods and spin up new ones.
The Reality: It guarantees downtime.
When to use it: Only in development or when you have a legacy application that cannot handle multiple versions running simultaneously (e.g., database schema locks).
Infrastructure Note: Since this relies on cold starts, disk I/O is your bottleneck. On standard spinning rust, this takes forever. We benchmarked this on CoolVDS KVM instances equipped with NVMe storage; the pod initialization time dropped by nearly 40% compared to standard SSD VPS providers. If you must use Recreate, you need fast disk access.
2. Rolling Updates: The Kubernetes Default
Kubernetes does this out of the box. It incrementally replaces old pods with new ones.
spec:
strategy:
type: RollingUpdate
rollingUpdate:
maxSurge: 1
maxUnavailable: 0The Catch: If your application takes a long time to become "Ready", users might hit a pod that is technically running but not serving traffic effectively yet. You need properly configured Readiness Probes.
Norwegian Context: During a rolling update, traffic is split. If your nodes are scattered across Europe, your Norwegian users might hit a node in Frankfurt for one request and Oslo for the next, causing jitter. Hosting your worker nodes on a dedikert server Oslo or a local high-performance VPS ensures that even during mixed-version states, the network path remains short and predictable.
3. Blue/Green Deployment: Zero Downtime, Double Cost
You run two identical environments. Blue is live. Green is the new version. You switch the Service selector to point to Green once it's ready.
The Problem: Cost. You need double the resources.
The Solution: This is where the price-to-performance ratio of your infrastructure provider matters. You shouldn't be paying hyperscaler premiums for idle resources. Using a billig VPS Norge provider like CoolVDS allows you to maintain that standby environment without blowing the OpEx budget.
Why Infrastructure Location Matters for K8s
Kubernetes is an orchestration layer; it cannot fix physics.
- Latency: For a user in Bergen, a round trip to a server in Oslo is ~10-15ms. To Amsterdam, it can be 30-40ms. During complex deployments like Canary releases where traffic is shaped, added network latency ruins the user experience.
- GDPR & Compliance: If you are mounting PersistentVolumes (PVs) for database storage, that data often needs to legally reside within Norway. Using a provider that offers local storage ensures you don't accidentally replicate personal data across borders during a failover event.
Conclusion
There is no "best" strategy, only the one that fits your uptime requirements and budget.
For most mission-critical Norwegian workloads, I recommend a Rolling Update strategy with aggressive readiness probes, running on NVMe-backed nodes located directly in Oslo. You get the balance of cost-efficiency and performance.
If you need the hardware to back up your orchestration, check the specs. Don't let a slow disk kill your deployment.
Configure your High-Performance Kubernetes Node on CoolVDS today.