Zero-Downtime Deployments with Docker Compose and HAProxy: A Kubernetes-Free Approach
By
StatusDude
Summary
This article argues that Kubernetes is overkill for many production services, presenting Docker Compose with HAProxy as a simpler, effective alternative. The author shares StatusDude's experience: Traefik failed at zero-downtime deployments (dropping requests and returning 404s), while HAProxy solved everything with just 60 lines of configuration. The piece details the technical setup for achieving zero-downtime deploys using Docker Compose's rolling update strategy combined with HAProxy's health checks and retry logic, without needing Kubernetes or its associated complexity.
Source
Key quotes
· 5 pulledThere's a mass delusion in the industry that you need Kubernetes to run a serious production service.
We serve thousands of monitoring checks per minute, run multi-region workers, and deploy multiple times a day — all with Docker Compose and HAProxy.
Traefik is the popular choice for Docker-based setups. It auto-discovers services via Docker labels, has a slick dashboard, and the docs make it... That lasted about four hours.
HAProxy fixed everything in 60 lines of config.
Zero dropped requests. Zero downtime. No etcd to babysit at 3 AM.
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