I have app stacks that deploy a dozen containers in seconds because they are stateless and close to "functional" – just transformations over inputs.

I have app stacks that deploy a dozen containers over an hour because the orchestration takes time: signal the old containers to drain, pause for an app with a very long initialization time to settle, gradually roll traffic to the new one to let caches warm, and then repeat.

In both of these cases, deployment is a function of the application. There's nothing infrastructural that puts a time floor on things.

Sure, not contending that. It's just that in my memories blue/green deployments still took less time, although I can't say how much.

Not a serious reply, but it may interesting: One million containers over 3500 nodes in 2 minutes: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/Microsoft-Ignite-Orl...

Well 10 minutes is way less than 3 hours.

Certainly. But it does add up and it does kill motivation for rapid iteration. :(

10 minutes to deploy to production should be fine, but rapid iteration shouldn't be happening in production. It sounds more like the complaint is related to running a similar setup in dev, and taking 10 minutes to see changes during development (which is understandably too long).

Yep, that's what I meant. I have no choice but to run a local k8s cluster or else I can't test.

and then we're back to the original statement, if you're rapidly iterating hot fixes you have serious problems and likely doing it wrong.