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Readiness changes routing eligibility; liveness restarts a container

Readiness and liveness answer different operational questions. Readiness asks whether this container should contribute to a Pod that accepts ordinary Service traffic now. Liveness asks whether restarting this container is the configured recovery action. Both can use HTTP, but sharing a protocol does not make their meanings interchangeable. Define the action you want before choosing the condition that triggers it. ...

January 13, 2027 · 6 min · XB Field Notes
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Regular init containers establish startup prerequisites

A regular init container performs setup before a Pod’s application containers start. It has its own command, image and filesystem view, and can mount a volume that the application later reads. This separates a prerequisite from the main process, but does not make arbitrary setup safe or automatically bounded. Design the step around its actual retry behavior and the lifetime of its output. ...

January 3, 2027 · 6 min · XB Field Notes