Why `livez` and `readyz` Matter for Kubernetes Health Probes

Short summary

Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes serve different operational purposes: liveness triggers pod restart when stuck, while readiness removes pods from traffic without killing them. Probe design must reflect each dependency's criticality—critical failures warrant readiness failure, transient issues need retry logic and circuit breakers. This distinction prevents aggressive pod churn and dropped requests in distributed systems.

• •Liveness probes restart containers when deadlocked; readiness probes gracefully drain traffic without killing pods
• •Dependency criticality determines probe behavior: critical failures trigger readiness failure, transient issues trigger retry logic
• •Proper probe frequency, timeout, and threshold tuning prevents aggressive pod churn and data loss

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