health-probes
Installation
SKILL.md
Health Probes and Lifecycle Management
Kubernetes uses health probes to determine when to restart a container, when to route traffic to a pod, and when a slow-starting application is ready. Lifecycle hooks provide initialization and graceful shutdown control. Together they enable self-healing workloads that recover from pod, host, and network failures.
Probe Types
Every container should define all three probe types:
| Probe | Purpose | Failure Action |
|---|---|---|
| Liveness | Detects deadlocks and hangs after the application is running | Restarts the container |
| Readiness | Determines when a container can accept traffic | Removes the pod from Service endpoints |
| Startup | Protects slow-starting containers from premature liveness kills | Disables liveness/readiness checks until the app starts |
Required for: Telco (mandatory), Far-Edge (mandatory), Extended (mandatory), Non-Telco (optional)
Without startup probes, slow-starting applications require large initialDelaySeconds on liveness probes, which delays failure detection after the application is running.