Kubernetes Fundamentals: How to Use Kubernetes Health Checks

This article discusses Kubernetes health checks and probes, which are essential for managing containerized applications effectively. Probes allow Kubernetes to verify the health of containers by checking their liveness, readiness, and startup stages. There are three types of probes: liveness probes, readiness probes, and startup probes. Liveness probes check if a container is alive and serving requests, while readiness probes ensure that a container is ready to receive traffic. Startup probes determine when a container has been initialized successfully. Probes can be implemented using HTTP requests, running commands, or opening TCP sockets. The article also highlights the importance of monitoring Kubernetes health and provides resources for further learning, including New Relic as an observability platform.