Do deployed Docker Hub images in GKE auto-update?

[danielrosehill]

Hi guys,

One more question while I'm pretty fresh to using GKE!

I'm more familiar with deploying Docker Hub images using tools like Portainer where visualising the image library and the running containers is pretty straightforward (as well as inspecting any persistent volumes created). Typically I make sure that whatever containers I'm running automatically update whenever the authoring entity pushes an update.

For a test project, I deployed 2 Docker Hub images into a workload that I deployed into my GKE cluster. Those got running without difficulty. My question is: "oh wait ... what about image updates?".

If you use a 'latest' tag do the containers automatically update? Or is there something you need to configure before setting up the workload to ensure that this is the case? And what about persistent volumes that might be created? 

TIA!

[MaxImbrox]

Hi @danielrosehill,

In Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), using a 'latest' tag for container images doesn't automatically update the containers. The 'latest' tag refers to the latest version of the image at the time when the tag was applied. If a new version of the image is pushed to the repository with the same 'latest' tag, existing containers won't automatically update to the new version.

To enable automatic updates in GKE, you can use features like RollingUpdate strategy in Kubernetes Deployments. This strategy replaces the old Pods with new ones gradually, ensuring that the application remains available during the update process.