Keeping your applications healthy with Kubernetes

Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration system initially developed by Google, allows software developers to deploy software into production without any help from system administrators. Once a software application is deployed, Kubernetes monitors the application and makes sure it stays healthy. This requires the application developer to expose the application’s health - usually through a web endpoint. While exposing an application’s health like this is crucial when running the application in Kubernetes, it is also very useful when running apps standalone (without Kubernetes). In this presentation, we’ll take a look at what an application’s health checks should actually check and how they make managing applications in production much easier. As an example, we’ll show a demo of a Java application running on a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster composed of 4 nodes. We’ll see how Kubernetes uses the application’s health checks to keep it running smoothly without requiring any intervention by the operations team - even when one or more nodes fail.