The kubelet uses readiness probes to know when a container is ready to start accepting traffic. A Pod is considered ready when all of its containers are ready. One use of this signal is to control which Pods are used as backends for Services. When a Pod is not ready, it is removed from Service load balancers. This is normally the 1st check to happen as a pod/container comes up.
The kubelet uses liveness probes to know when to restart a container. For example, liveness probes could catch a deadlock, where an application is running, but unable to make progress. Restarting a container in such a state can help to make the application more available despite bugs. This is normally done after the readiness probe has completed and pod has started serving traffic.
The kubelet uses startup probes to know when a container application has started. If such a probe is configured, it disables liveness and readiness checks until it succeeds, making sure those probes don't interfere with the application startup. This can be used to adopt liveness checks on slow starting containers, avoiding them getting killed by the kubelet before they are up and running.
Example
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: etcd-with-grpc
spec:
containers:
- name: etcd
image: k8s.gcr.io/etcd:3.5.1-0
command: [ "/usr/local/bin/etcd", "--data-dir", "/var/lib/etcd", "--listen-client-urls", "http://0.0.0.0:2379", "--advertise-client-urls", "http://127.0.0.1:2379", "--log-level", "debug"]
ports:
- name: liveness-port
containerPort: 8080
hostPort: 8080
livenessProbe:
httpGet:
path: /healthz
port: liveness-port
failureThreshold: 1
periodSeconds: 10
startupProbe:
httpGet:
path: /healthz
port: liveness-port
failureThreshold: 30
periodSeconds: 10
initialDelaySeconds: 30
readinessProbe:
exec:
command:
- cat
- /tmp/healthy
initialDelaySeconds: 5
periodSeconds: 5