Kubernetes Probes: Liveness, Readiness, and Startup Checks

Ensuring container health and proper traffic management in a dynamic environment is important for building resilient microservices architectures. Kubernetes provides liveness, readiness, and startup probes that empower the control plane to monitor and react to application states. Liveness probes detect when a container has crashed or become unresponsive, triggering automatic restarts to maintain availability. Readiness probes signal when a service is fully prepared to handle incoming requests, preventing traffic from reaching uninitialized or overloaded instances. Startup probes guard against premature health checks during slow initialization phases, granting complex applications the time they need to fully launch. Together, these probes form a comprehensive health‑check system that enhances fault tolerance, enables graceful rolling updates, and improves overall cluster stability. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure and tune each probe type to align with your application’s lifecycle and operational requirements.