Kubernetes Fundamentals: How to Use Kubernetes Health Checks

Kubernetes is a leading platform for orchestrating containerized applications, using health checks called probes to manage container health and traffic effectively. These probes, comprising liveness, readiness, and startup probes, play vital roles in determining whether containers are running properly, ready to handle traffic, or have successfully initialized. Liveness probes ensure that non-responsive containers are restarted, readiness probes prevent traffic routing to containers that are not ready, and startup probes delay other checks until containers are fully initialized. These health checks are implemented through HTTP requests, command executions, or TCP connections, with Kubernetes using kubelet to verify container status and maintain overall system reliability. The article emphasizes the importance of probes in distributed systems, where individual components may fail independently, and highlights New Relic's observability tools for monitoring Kubernetes clusters.