Glossary · Reliability & operations
Readiness Probe
A diagnostic that tells the traffic-routing layer whether a service instance is currently able to accept requests.
Why it matters
A process can be alive while its model is unloaded, dependencies are unavailable, or warmup is incomplete, so sending traffic too early creates avoidable failures.
In practice
Check the minimum dependencies required to serve, fail readiness during startup and draining, keep the probe inexpensive, and do not restart the process solely because readiness is false.
Common confusion
Readiness controls traffic eligibility. Liveness decides whether the process should be restarted, and neither proves that every model response will be correct.
Related terms
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