Stop Using TCP Health Checks for Kubernetes Applications

Kubernetes container probes help manage application availability by assessing whether containers have started, are ready to receive traffic, or remain healthy enough to continue running. Startup probes accommodate slow initialization, readiness probe failures remove pods from service without restarting them, and liveness probe failures can trigger termination and restart according to pod policy. Although Kubernetes supports exec, gRPC, HTTP, and TCP probe mechanisms, the discussion argues that TCP probes are often inadequate for readiness and liveness checks because they only verify that a port accepts connections, not that the application can process requests or access required dependencies. HTTP and gRPC probes can evaluate application-level health endpoints, provide more useful diagnostic context and observability, and better identify failures such as unavailable databases or degraded services. Effective probe design should combine readiness and liveness checks, use suitable timeouts and retry settings, test failure scenarios, and monitor probe metrics through tools such as Prometheus and Grafana to improve reliability and incident analysis.

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