Health Check Endpoints: Reporting App Status
A health check is a dedicated endpoint that tells an orchestrator if your app is alive and ready for traffic. Systems like Kubernetes use it to decide whether to send traffic (readiness) or restart a container (liveness).
A health check is a dedicated endpoint that reports your application's status to external systems like a load balancer or Kubernetes. It answers two key questions: 'Are you running?' (liveness) and 'Can you handle new work?' (readiness). A failed liveness probe restarts the container, while a failed readiness probe temporarily removes it from receiving traffic. The biggest footgun is creating a check that only returns 'OK' without verifying critical dependencies like a database connection, masking real-world failures.
Read the original → expressjs.com
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