Kubernetes Deployment Specification Reference

Comprehensive reference for Kubernetes Deployment resources, covering all key fields, best practices, and common patterns.

Overview

A Deployment provides declarative updates for Pods and ReplicaSets. It manages the desired state of your application, handling rollouts, rollbacks, and scaling operations.

When to use this skill

• Authoring or reviewing a Kubernetes Deployment manifest.
• Pinning down which Deployment fields are mandatory vs recommended.
• Picking an update strategy (RollingUpdate vs Recreate) and its parameters.
• Choosing replica count, surge/unavailable budgets, and revisionHistoryLimit.
• Setting probes (startup / liveness / readiness), security context, and resource requests/limits.
• Picking a deployment pattern: high-availability, sidecar, init container.
• Diagnosing common Deployment failure modes (ImagePullBackOff, CrashLoopBackOff, stuck rollouts).

Reference map