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What is Health Check?

An endpoint or mechanism that reports whether an application is running correctly and ready to handle requests.

Health checks enable load balancers and orchestrators to detect unhealthy instances. Liveness probes check if the application is running (restart if not). Readiness probes check if it can handle traffic (remove from load balancer if not).

A health endpoint (/health or /healthz) typically checks database connectivity, disk space, memory usage, and dependent service availability. Kubernetes supports HTTP, TCP, and command-based health checks with configurable intervals and thresholds.

Related Terms

Artifact Repository
A centralized storage system for build artifacts like compiled binaries, packages, and container images used in CI/CD pipelines.
Canary Deployment
A deployment strategy that gradually rolls out changes to a small subset of users before deploying to the entire infrastructure.
Pipeline as Code
Defining CI/CD pipeline configurations as version-controlled code files rather than through UI-based pipeline builders.
Error Budget
The acceptable amount of unreliability allowed for a service, calculated as 100% minus the Service Level Objective.
Incident Management
The process of detecting, responding to, and resolving service disruptions to minimize impact and restore normal operations.
Message Queue
A communication mechanism that enables asynchronous message passing between services, decoupling producers from consumers.
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