In cloud-native architectures, health checks are used to determine whether a computing node is alive and ready to perform work. The concept of readiness describes the state when containers start up or roll over (that is, redeployment). During this time, the cloud platform needs to ensure that no network traffic is routed to that instance before it is ready to perform work.
Liveness, on the other hand, describes the state of a running container; that is, can it still respond to requests? If either the liveness or readiness states are seen as invalid, the computing node will be discarded (terminated or shut down) and eventually replaced by another, healthy, instance.
Health checks are an essential contract with the orchestration framework and scheduler of the cloud platform. The check procedures are provided by the application...