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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

Immutable Infrastructure
An approach where servers are never modified after deployment — changes require building and deploying entirely new server instances.
Blue-Green Deployment
A deployment strategy using two identical environments where traffic is switched from the old version to the new one instantly.
Vault
A tool by HashiCorp for securely managing secrets, encryption keys, and certificates with dynamic secret generation.
Microservices
An architectural style where an application is composed of small, independent services that communicate over APIs.
Kubernetes Secret
A Kubernetes object for storing sensitive data like passwords, tokens, and certificates, with base64 encoding and optional encryption at rest.
Istio
An open-source service mesh that provides traffic management, security, and observability for microservices on Kubernetes.
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