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Kubernetes Tutorial — Part 9: Health Checks, Probes, and Reliability

By Suraj Ahir April 02, 2026 7 min read

A running container is not necessarily a healthy container. Your app might be deadlocked but the process is alive. Probes tell Kubernetes how to check actual application health.

Liveness probes check if the app is alive — if it fails, Kubernetes restarts the container. Readiness probes check if the app is ready for traffic — if it fails, traffic stops but the pod stays alive. Startup probes give slow-starting apps time to initialize.

containers:
- name: web
  image: myapp:v2
  livenessProbe:
    httpGet:
      path: /health
      port: 8080
    initialDelaySeconds: 15
    periodSeconds: 10
  readinessProbe:
    httpGet:
      path: /ready
      port: 8080
    initialDelaySeconds: 5
    periodSeconds: 5

Keep probes lightweight — they run frequently. In Part 10, we learn Helm for managing complex deployments.