How Kubernetes probes work

Kubernetes probes are periodic kubelet checks that help manage container startup, traffic eligibility, and recovery: startup probes delay normal health checks until initialization succeeds, readiness probes determine whether Pods receive Service traffic, and liveness probes restart containers judged unable to recover independently. Using simulated browser-based cluster demonstrations, the post shows that containers without appropriate probes can be marked ready before they can serve requests, while startup probes combined with Services, replicas, and graceful Pod termination can prevent traffic from reaching starting or stopping containers. It explains probe configuration through HTTP, TCP, exec, and gRPC checks, warns that overly strict startup settings can cause CrashLoopBackOff states, and advises conservative readiness and liveness endpoints that avoid reacting to shared dependency outages, resource pressure, or other failures that could affect every replica simultaneously. The discussion also shows how failed liveness checks and client retries can trigger cascading failures, how probe intervals influence Deployment rollout speed and availability, and reports a Kubernetes v1.35+ bug in which liveness probes may run before a restarted container’s startup probe succeeds.

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