Agreed. Forgive a minor digression, but what OP wrote is my problem now. I'm looking for something like heroku's or fly's release command. I have an idea how to implement it in docker using swarm, but I can't figure out how to do that on k8s. I googled it some time ago, but all the answers were hacks.

Would someone be able to recommend an approach that's not a hack, for implementing a custom release command on k8s? Downtime is fine, but this one off job needs to run before the user facing pods are available.