Health Checks and Graceful Shutdown
Production services need readiness and liveness concepts. Readiness answers whether the service should receive traffic; liveness answers whether the process is alive enough for the platform to keep it running.
Graceful shutdown stops accepting new work, allows in-flight work to finish within a deadline, closes resources, and exits.
SIGTERM
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v
Stop new traffic
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v
Finish in-flight work
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v
Close pools / clients
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v
Exit
Key Takeaways
- Readiness and liveness serve different purposes.
- Graceful shutdown prevents dropped work during deployments.
- Health checks should reflect meaningful service capability.