Graceful Shutdown: Zero-Downtime Deployments Done Right
Kill -9 is violence. Your application deserves a dignified death. Graceful shutdown means finishing in-flight work before terminating. Without it, deployments cause dropped requests, broken connections, and data corruption. With it, users never notice you restarted. The Problem When a process receives SIGTERM: Kubernetes/Docker sends the signal Your app has a grace period (default 30s) After the grace period, SIGKILL terminates forcefully If your app doesn’t handle SIGTERM, in-flight requests get dropped. Database transactions abort. WebSocket connections die mid-message. ...