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Notes / Docker Sandboxes / Readiness, Liveness and Startup Probes
Docker Sandboxes · Tier 5: Orchestrate: Kubernetes on your laptop · Lab 62

Readiness, Liveness and Startup Probes

Differentiate between traffic routing and process health using Kubernetes Readiness, Liveness, and Startup probes. Isolate sick pods without restarts, trigger automated recovery on fatal deadlocks, and protect slow-starting workloads on 127.0.0.1:18302.

Time40 minutes
StackKubernetes v1.37Ports 18302
Memory1.3GB
Before thisLab 61Services and Load Balancing
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Verified runWindows, Mac, LinuxBash and PowerShell
  1. 1PrepareWhat you will learn
  2. 2PredictGuess before you run
  3. 3RunStep by step
  4. 4ObserveWhat you should see
  5. 5Break itChange one thing
  6. 6Clean upLeave nothing running
On this page
  1. 00 / What You Will Learn
  2. 01 / Why It Matters
  3. 02 / What We Are Building
  4. 03 / Words You Need
  5. 04 / Predict First
  6. 05 / Step by Step
  7. 06 / What You Should See
  8. 07 / Look Inside
  9. 08 / Break It, Fix It
  10. 09 / In Real Projects
  11. 10 / Interview Corner
  12. 11 / Clean Up

00 /What You Will Learn

By the end you will be able to
  • Distinguish between Readiness probes (traffic routing) and Liveness probes (container restart).
  • Demonstrate how Kubernetes removes unready pods from the Endpoints list with zero dropped requests.
  • Observe the kubelet automatically restart a deadlocked container when its liveness probe fails consecutively.
  • Configure a Startup probe to shield slow-initializing applications from premature crash loops.
  • Avoid the dangerous cascading probe outage anti-pattern in production microservices.

Before you start

Finish Lab 61 (Services and Load Balancing) first. You should understand how a Service maps traffic to healthy Endpoints. Give Docker at least 4 GB of memory, and make sure kind and kubectl are installed.