The maven fabric8:rolling goal takes the JSON file generated via mvn fabric8:json located at target/classes/kubernetes.json and applies it to the current Kubernetes environment and namespace creating all resources which don't exist and performing a rolling update of any replication controllers which already exist.
This goal is short hand for
mvn fabric8:apply -Dfabric8.rolling=true
See the fabric8:apply goal for more details on the available properties