Health check
Also called: Readiness probe, Liveness probe
An endpoint a load balancer or orchestrator calls regularly to decide whether a server should receive traffic or be restarted.
Definition
A readiness check answers "should I get traffic?" and fails while a server is starting, overloaded or shutting down; a liveness check answers "am I stuck and need a restart?". A load balancer stops routing to a server after a few failed checks, so detection takes interval times threshold seconds.
In practice
GET /health/ready returns 503 during shutdown, so the load balancer stops sending new requests before the process exits.
Learn it in context
Lessons that use this term.