To do a rolling update of a ConfigMap, the user needs to create a new ConfigMap, update a Deployment to refer to it, and delete the old ConfigMap once no pods are using it. This is similar to the orchestration Deployment does for ReplicaSets.

One solution could be to add a ConfigMap template to Deployment and do the management there.

Another could be to support garbage collection of unused ConfigMaps, which is the hard part. That would be useful for Secrets and maybe other objects, also.

cc @kubernetes/sig-apps-feature-requests