Baseten promotions may not re-run load, and rolling deploys suspend autoscaling

TL;DR

Keep development deployments warm if you want to avoid scale-to-zero cold starts in the dev loop. Before promoting, decide whether load() must re-run: if yes, enable Re-deploy when promoting on the environment, otherwise you can promote and still be running the old loaded weights.

Steps

1. Before promoting, decide whether load() must re-run: if yes, enable Re-deploy when promoting on the environment, otherwise you can promote and still be running the old loaded weights. During a rolling deployment, do not panic about replica counts, autoscaling is suspended until the rollout finishes. Never start a second promotion while one is in flight, the environment allows only one active promotion. Keep development deployments warm if you want to avoid scale-to-zero cold starts in the dev loop.

When to use

You are seeing this: During a rolling deployment, do not panic about replica counts, autoscaling is suspended until the rollout finishes. Use this skill when you run into "Baseten promotions may not re-run load, and rolling deploys suspend autoscaling".

When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

Versions

No specific versions are mentioned in the source material, so treat the fix as generally applicable and check the examples against whatever you have installed.

Why this happens

The original report does not dig into a root cause. It documents the symptom and the fix that resolved it.

Source: Baseten org reference notes on the deployment lifecycle document the promotion traps agents hit. Promotion may or may not create a new deployment, so if your new code needs load() to re-run, you must enable Re-deploy when promoting on the environment or the new build never actually loads the model fresh. Rolling deployments suspend autoscaling for the whole environment for their entire duration, which is why replica counts look wrong mid-rollout. Only one active promotion per environment is allowed at a time.

Verified resolution: Before promoting, decide whether load() must re-run: if yes, enable Re-deploy when promoting on the environment, otherwise you can promote and still be running the old loaded weights. During a rolling deployment, do not panic about replica counts, autoscaling is suspended until the rollout finishes. Never start a second promotion while one is in flight, the environment allows only one active promotion. Keep development deployments warm if you want to avoid scale-to-zero cold starts in the dev loop.

Source URL: https://github.com/basetenlabs/baseten-skills/blob/HEAD/skills/baseten/references/deployment-lifecycle.md