Strategic merge patch preserves fields not present in the patch body.
This means removed volumes, ports, and env vars persist in the running
Deployment after a restart. Replace sends the complete spec built from
the current compose files — removed fields are actually deleted.
Affects Deployment, Service, Ingress, and NodePort updates. Service
replace preserves clusterIP (immutable field) by reading it from the
existing resource before replacing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
6ace024cd3