Health Check / Readiness Probe

Expose endpoints that tell orchestrators whether the service is alive and ready.

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Detailed Description

Liveness and readiness answer different questions. A service can be alive but not ready.

Readiness should check critical dependencies needed to serve traffic.

Liveness: should restart?
Readiness: should receive traffic?
Startup: finished booting?

Pros

Auto recovery, no traffic to unhealthy pods

Cons

Bad probes can cause false restarts

Examples: Kubernetes livenessProbe, readinessProbe, Consul health