How to do Zero Downtime Deployments of Docker Containers. I’m determined to get reliable zero-downtime deploys working for a new project, because I know from experience that even a few seconds of downtime during a deploy changes the project mentality from “deploy any time you want” to “don’t deploy too often”. I’m using Docker containers behind Traefik, which means new containers should have traffic automatically balanced to them by Traefik based on their labels. After much fiddling around the pattern described by this article worked best for me: it lets me start a new container, then stop the old one and have Traefik’s “retry” mechanism send any requests to the stopped container over to the new one instead.
Recent articles
- The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles - 6th June 2025
- Tips on prompting ChatGPT for UK technology secretary Peter Kyle - 3rd June 2025
- How often do LLMs snitch? Recreating Theo's SnitchBench with LLM - 31st May 2025