In this chapter, we've discussed topics related to building a continuous delivery pipeline and how to strengthen our deployment tasks. The rolling update of a pod is a powerful tool that allows us to perform updates in a controlled fashion. To trigger a rolling update, what we need to do is change the pod's specification in a controller that supports that rolling update. Additionally, although the update is managed by Kubernetes, we can still control it with kubectl rollout to a certain extent.

Later on, we fabricated an extensible continuous delivery pipeline using GitHub/DockerHub/Travis-CI. We then moved on to learn more about the life cycle of pods to prevent any possible failures, including using the readiness and liveness probes to protect a pod; initializing a pod with init containers; handling SIGTERM properly by picking the right composition of invocation commands of the entry point of our program and the shell to run it; using life cycle hooks to stall a pod's readiness, as well as its termination for the pod to be removed from a service at the right time; and assigning pod disruption budgets to ensure the availability of our pods.