Automating Zero-Downtime Deployments in Kubernetes on Amazon EKS

Abstract

Automating zero-downtime deployments in Kubernetes on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) enables businesses to deliver new features and updates seamlessly without interrupting user experiences. With its robust orchestration capabilities, Kubernetes empowers organizations to achieve rolling updates and progressive rollouts, reducing risks associated with software releases. By leveraging Amazon EKS, teams can deploy containerized applications on a managed service that simplifies Kubernetes operations, allowing a greater focus on automation and reliability. This abstract explores strategies and best practices for implementing automated, zero-downtime deployments in Kubernetes environments, emphasizing the importance of CI/CD pipelines and tools like Helm, ArgoCD, and Spinnaker. It discusses the role of Kubernetes features like Deployment resources, health checks, and readiness probes in ensuring application stability during updates. Additionally, the paper examines how service meshes like Istio or Linkerd can enhance observability and traffic routing, enabling advanced deployment patterns like blue-green deployments and canary releases. By automating these processes, teams can reduce manual intervention, enhance deployment consistency, and respond quickly to changing business needs. The discussion includes lessons from industry use cases and highlights how teams can overcome challenges like configuration drift, rollback complexities, and scaling under high traffic. Ultimately, this abstract underscores the potential of combining Kubernetes with Amazon EKS to foster a culture of innovation, speed, and resilience in software delivery pipelines, aligning with DevOps and cloud-native best practices.