When a rollout stops progressing

Signal

A deployment exceeds its progress deadline, or new pods remain unready while the previous replica set continues serving traffic. This is the kind of failure that can be noisy without immediately being user-visible, so the first job is to separate rollout state from user impact. This is a general-purpose runbook; adapt names, namespaces, and escalation paths to your environment.

Establish scope

Confirm the cluster context and namespace before inspecting the rollout. These commands read state; they do not change the deployment.

kubectl config current-context
kubectl -n <namespace> rollout status deployment/<app> --timeout=30s
kubectl -n <namespace> describe deployment <app>
kubectl -n <namespace> get pods -l app=<app> -o wide

Diagnose

1. Check pod events for image-pull errors, unschedulable resources, or failed mounts.
2. Inspect readiness failures and application logs. Do not expose secrets when sharing logs.
3. Compare the deployed image digest and configuration with the last healthy release.
4. Check error rate and latency for existing users. A stalled rollout is not automatically an outage.

Recover

For a GitOps-managed deployment, revert the desired image digest in Git. An imperative rollback may be immediately undone by reconciliation. Follow the team’s emergency-change process if Git or the controller is unavailable.

Verify and close

Confirm all intended replicas are ready, the controller reports a synced state, and user-facing signals have returned to their normal range. Record the change, the failure mode, and the missing check that would have caught it earlier. A good closeout should make the next rollout easier to diagnose, not only restore this one.

Sources and related notes

• Kubernetes Deployment documentation for rollout status and progress deadlines.
• Flux troubleshooting for source and reconciliation checks.
• Follow the revision through FluxCD when the desired version has not reached the workload.

Technical references reviewed on 13 September 2026. This is a general operational guide, not a report of an incident at an employer.