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Kubernetes Liveness Probe – HTTPRequest

Design & Configure

Kubernetes Liveness Probe – HTTPRequest

Liveness Probe HTTPRequest is an element in Kubernetes, thanks to which you can control the state of life of a counter in Pods using the HTTP protocol. The component allows you to send queries to a given endpoint in the container and infer whether the application is working correctly.

In this article, I will list some common settings of Kubernetes Liveness Probe and httpGet options. Then, I’ll show you a working example of how you can set up Liveness Probe correctly in your code.

Liveness Probe settings

Liveness Probe restarts the container when the given endpoint returns a status higher than 399. This feature also has some useful settings such as: 

  1. initialDelaySeconds – time after which Liveness Probe should start polling the endpoint 
  2. periodSeconds – the frequency of polling the endpoint 
  3. timeoutSeconds – time after which the timeout will expire. 
  4. successThreshold – the minimum number of successful attempts after which the probe will determine the correct operation of the container 
  5. failureThreshold – number of failed attempts after which the container will be restarted 

httpGet options: 

  1. host – Host name to connect to
  2. scheme – Protocol type HTTP or HTTPS
  3. path – Path to access on the HTTP/HTTPS server
  4. httpHeaders– Custom headers to set in the request 
  5. port – Port number to access on the container 

 

# YAML example
# liveness-pod-example.yaml
#
apiVersion: v1 
kind: Pod 
metadata: 
  name: liveness-request 
spec: 
  containers: 
  - name: liveness 
    image: nginx 
    ports: 
        - containerPort: 80 
    livenessProbe: 
      httpGet: 
        path: / 
        port: 80 
      initialDelaySeconds: 2 #Default 0 
      periodSeconds2 #Default 10 
      timeoutSeconds: 1 #Default 1 
      successThreshold: 1 #Default 1 
      failureThreshold: 3 #Default 3 

 

Liveness Probe – example

Create pod:

kubectl create -f liveness-pod-example.yaml

 

Describe the pod:

kubectl describe pod liveness-request  
Restart Count:  0
.
.
.
Events:
Type Reason Age From Message
---- ------ ---- ---- -------
Normal Scheduled <unknown> default-scheduler Successfully assigned example-dc/liveness-request to dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor3
Normal Pulling 4m45s kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor3 Pulling image "nginx"
Normal Pulled 4m42s kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor3 Successfully pulled image "nginx"
Normal Created 4m42s kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor3 Created container liveness
Normal Started 4m42s kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor3 Started container liveness

Pod works great, no issue count.

 

To check if liveness probe works, remove index.html file from “liveness-request” pod.

kubectl exec -it liveness-request -- rm /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html 
Index.html file was removed and the liveness probe tried to send a request to port 80, because the response status was not in the range from 200 to 399. Hence, the container will be restarted. You can see the result below.

 

kubectl describe pod liveness-request 
Restart Count: 1
.
.
.
Events:
Type Reason Age From Message
---- ------ ---- ---- -------
Normal Scheduled <unknown> default-scheduler Successfully assigned example-dc/liveness-request to dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor3
Normal Pulling 9s (x2 over 11m) kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor3 Pulling image "nginx"
Warning Unhealthy 9s (x3 over 13s) kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor3 Liveness probe failed: HTTP probe failed with statuscode: 403
Normal Killing 9s kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor3 Container liveness failed liveness probe, will be restarted
Normal Pulled 7s (x2 over 11m) kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor3 Successfully pulled image "nginx"
Normal Created 7s (x2 over 11m) kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor3 Created container liveness
Normal Started 7s (x2 over 11m) kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor3 Started container liveness 
Author: Wojciech Tokarski
 
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