Spring Boot app + Kubernetes liveness/readiness checks

Question

I\'m building a few Spring Boot microservices that are getting deployed in a Kubernetes (AKS specifically) cluster. I was planning on setting the probePaths for the

Answer 1

We are using the standard /actuator/health endpoint for both liveness and readiness, and have been for close to a year now. The positive sides of this is that the application is not marked as ready for use unless all its connections are up and running. The downside is due to some cases of buggy connections, which leads to downtime/restarts.

In my mind, an application that holds no connection to its database (or other important infrastructure) is as good as useless. As it probably won't function properly, you might as well report that it is unavailable. So unless you have problems with poor connection to the database or other things, I can't really see the harm of using /actuator/health for both liveness and readiness. Also, it is a cheap way of checking whether your application is up and running, which requires very little manual work to set up.