What is Readiness Probe?
A Kubernetes health check that controls when a pod starts receiving traffic.
A Readiness Probe is a health check that determines when a pod is ready to receive traffic from a Service. Until the readiness probe passes, the pod is removed from the Service's endpoint list — no traffic is sent to it. This prevents traffic from reaching pods that are still starting up (warming caches, loading models, connecting to DB). Unlike liveness probes (which restart containers), failed readiness probes just remove the pod from load balancing.
Related Terms
More Kubernetes Terms
Admission Controller
A Kubernetes plugin that intercepts API requests before objects are persisted.
Auto Scaling
Automatically adjusting the number of compute resources based on demand.
ClusterIP
The default Kubernetes Service type that exposes a service on an internal cluster IP.
ConfigMap
A Kubernetes object for storing non-sensitive configuration data as key-value pairs.
Controller Manager
Kubernetes control plane component running control loops to maintain desired state.
CoreDNS
The default DNS server in Kubernetes clusters for service discovery.
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