I tried to setup Continuous Deployment using jenkins for own microservice project which is organized as multi-module maven project (each submodule representing a micro service). I use "Incremental build - only build changed modules" in jenkins to avoid unnessesary building, and then use docker-maven-plugin to build docker image. However, how could I do to only redeploy changed images to kubernetes cluster?
You can use local docker image registry. docker run -d -p 5000:5000 --restart=always --name registry registry:2
You can then push the development images to this registry as a build step and make your kubernetes containers use this registry.
After you are ready, push the image to your production image registry and adjust container manifests to use proper registry.
More info on private registry server: https://docs.docker.com/registry/deploying/
Currently Kubernetes does not provide proper solution for this. But there are few workarounds mentioned [here]: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/33664
I like this one 'Fake a change to the Deployment by changing something other than the image'. We can do it in this way :
Define environment variable say "TIMESTAMP" and any value to it in deployment manifest. In CI\CD pipeline we set the value to current timestamp and then pass this updated manifest to 'kubectl apply'. This way, we are faking a change and kubernetes will pull the latest image and deploy to the cluster. Please make sure that 'imagePullPolicy : always' is set.