Relationship between Deployment and ReplicaSet in kubernetes

kubernetes deployment ReplicaSet

3 min read | by Jordi Prats

Although ReplicaSet's main purpose is to maintain a stable set of replica Pods, it's not a kubernetes object that is commonly created, at least not explicitly. But the replicas attribute on the Deployment object is actually related to this object

In fact, every time we create a Deployment we are implicitly creating a ReplicaSet: The real purpose of a Deployment is to provide declarative updates for Pods and ReplicaSets: like an interface. We can check this using this example:

$ kubectl get deploy pet2cattle
NAME         READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
pet2cattle   2/2     2            2           51d

By using kubectl describe we can get which ReplicaSet this deployment has created:

$ kubectl describe deploy pet2cattle | grep -i replicaset
  Progressing    True    NewReplicaSetAvailable
OldReplicaSets:  <none>
NewReplicaSet:   pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb (2/2 replicas created)

Checking the ReplicaSet itself we can see that the number of replicas matched the replicas defined on the deployment:

$ kubectl get deploy pet2cattle -o 'jsonpath={.spec.replicas}{"\n"}'
2
$ kubectl  get rs pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb
NAME                    DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb   2         2         2       5d5h

Using kubectl scale to scale up the replicas to three on the deploy:

$ kubectl scale deploy pet2cattle --replicas=3
deployment.apps/pet2cattle scaled

It gets propagated to the ReplicaSet by the Deployment controller:

$ kubectl get rs pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb
NAME                    DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb   3         3         2       5d5h

Nevertheless, if we try to to the same on the ReplicaSet side we won't get any error:

$ kubectl scale rs pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb --replicas=4
replicaset.apps/pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb scaled

But the number of pods will be quickly scaled down to the previous value by the deployment controller:

  Normal  SuccessfulCreate  6s    replicaset-controller  Created pod: pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb-69vzw
  Normal  SuccessfulDelete  6s    replicaset-controller  Deleted pod: pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb-69vzw

We need to be fast to actually see the number change, by launching the scale up together with the kubectl get rs we might be able to catch it at 4 instead of 3, but we won't be able to catch it every time we try:

$ kubectl get rs pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb -o 'jsonpath={.spec.replicas}{"\n"}'; kubectl scale rs pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb --replicas=4; kubectl get rs pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb -o 'jsonpath={.spec.replicas}{"\n"}'
3
replicaset.apps/pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb scaled
3
$ kubectl get rs pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb -o 'jsonpath={.spec.replicas}{"\n"}'; kubectl scale rs pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb --replicas=4; kubectl get rs pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb -o 'jsonpath={.spec.replicas}{"\n"}'
3
replicaset.apps/pet2cattle-5479f4b6cb scaled
4

Posted on 04/03/2021

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