What happens when an AppEngine instance shuts down?

Posted on July 18, 2022
DigitalOcean App Platform Docker
Asked by ljfc

I am wondering if there is any documentation or other discussion outlining what happens inside a Docker container in App Platform as it is shut down?

Does the process get sent a particular signal? Is it given any grace period to shut itself down safely? Does this vary between services and workers?

Outside the container, how does the cut-over work? Are the new containers all brought up and then it switches at the load-balancer level?

Apologies if I am missing this in the documentation, I have read what I think are the relevant pages, and I can’t see anything talking it at this level.

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• September 24, 2022

Hi there,

The App Platform is based on Kubernetes, which allows for zero-downtime deployments.

Let’s say that you’ve made some changes to your code, and you are deploying the new version of your application to the App Platform. Once the build has finished and your deployment is ready, the App Platform will send a health check to your application to make sure it’s healthy. If an error occurs during running the deployment commands or the application doesn’t respond to the health check, App Platform will roll back the application to its previous version.

If the new deployment is healthy, the traffic will be routed to the new deployment and a SIGTERM signal is sent to the old one for a graceful termination.

For more information you can take a look at the documentation here:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/manage-deployments/

Also here is a great video on how to build Production-Ready apps with App Platform: