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An Express health-check route reports whether an instance is alive or ready to serve; the deployment platform decides whether to restart it, stop sending it traffic, or roll back a deployment. Keep those signals separate, avoid tying liveness to a database, and configure rollout policy independently—an endpoint by itself does not trigger rollback.
What an Express health check does—and does not do
A health endpoint is an application signal. A platform probe requests that endpoint, interprets its status, and applies a configured action. Express describes the purpose this way: “A load balancer uses health checks to determine if an application instance is healthy and can accept requests.” Express.js: Health Checks and Graceful Shutdown.
Keep the behavior in three distinct layers:
- Route response: Express returns a success status when the app meets the state represented by that route, and a failure status otherwise.
- Probe action: The platform decides what a failed check means. A readiness failure can stop traffic reaching an instance; a liveness failure can lead to a restart.
- Rollout policy: The deployment controller decides whether rollout progress should pause, fail, or trigger rollback. That policy is separate from the route and probe.
There is no universal Express route name or response body. Choose paths that make their purpose clear, then configure the platform to request those paths. Keep responses inexpensive and avoid revealing internal dependency or infrastructure details to unauthenticated callers.
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| Signal | Question it answers | Typical consequence of failure |
|---|---|---|
| Readiness | Can this instance accept requests now? | The platform can remove it from service traffic while it remains unready. |
| Liveness | Is this process in a state where it should keep running? | The platform can restart it, depending on probe configuration. |
| Startup | Has initialization finished enough for the other checks to begin? | Other probes are held back until startup succeeds. |
These are different operational decisions, not interchangeable labels for one generic “healthy” status. Express’s Kubernetes guidance says a pod that is not ready is removed from service load balancers. Express.js: Health Checks and Graceful Shutdown. The application chooses what each endpoint reports; the platform’s probe configuration gives that result its effect.
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Practice 1: Keep liveness independent of transient dependencies
Use liveness to detect a process that should be restarted, not to report every external service outage. If a liveness check fails whenever a database is briefly unavailable, an external incident can cause otherwise functioning app instances to restart. AWS recommends avoiding liveness dependencies on factors outside the pod, such as a database. AWS Prescriptive Guidance: Probes and health checks.
Readiness can account for whether an instance can serve requests, including a dependency it needs for a particular service. But consider the blast radius: if every replica uses the same readiness criterion tied to one shared database, that database’s outage may make every replica unready at once. AWS discusses this risk in its EKS best practices. Amazon EKS Best Practices Guide: Application.
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- Liveness: Keep the check local and focused on whether the process can continue running.
- Readiness: Include only conditions that genuinely prevent the instance from serving its intended traffic.
- Dependency failures: Decide whether a dependency problem should stop all traffic or whether the application can still serve some requests. Avoid making a shared outage cascade into unnecessary restarts or a fleet-wide loss of readiness.
Practice 2: Configure probes for startup and real failure behavior
A route has no operational effect until the deployment platform is configured to probe it. Kubernetes supports HTTP GET, TCP socket, and command-based probes; timing, timeout, and failure thresholds affect both response speed and tolerance for brief delays. Verify the available options and semantics against the platform and version you actually deploy. Kubernetes: Configure Liveness, Readiness and Startup Probes.
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Choose probe thresholds around observed startup time, request latency, and recovery needs. A short timeout or low failure threshold may react quickly but can treat brief slowness as failure; more tolerance can delay detection. These settings are platform-specific rather than universal Express defaults.
ECS command-check settings are ECS-specific
For an Amazon ECS task-definition command health check, the API reference specifies intervals of 5–300 seconds, retries of 1–10, start periods of 0–300 seconds, and timeouts of 2–60 seconds. Its documented defaults are a 30-second interval, three retries, and a 5-second timeout. These are ECS configuration limits and defaults, not recommended values for Kubernetes or other platforms. Amazon ECS API Reference: HealthCheck.
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ECS task-definition health checks override health checks declared in the container image. If your command invokes a utility such as curl, verify that the utility is installed in the image; it is not guaranteed to be present. Amazon ECS API Reference: HealthCheck.
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Health design must cover termination as well as startup. When Express receives SIGTERM, its guidance is to stop accepting new requests, finish ongoing work, release resources such as database connections and file locks, and then exit. The example uses server.close() to stop accepting new connections while existing requests complete. Express.js: Health Checks and Graceful Shutdown.
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- On termination, stop accepting new work.
- Allow in-flight requests to finish within the platform’s termination grace period.
- Close database connections and other resources before exiting.
- Set probe behavior and the termination grace period to fit the app’s actual shutdown time.
If the platform removes an instance from traffic only after a readiness failure, ensure the shutdown sequence and traffic-removal behavior work together for your deployment system. Do not assume that a route response alone drains connections or completes cleanup.
Will a failed health check roll back an Express deployment?
Not by itself. A failed readiness check generally indicates that an instance should not receive traffic; a failed liveness check can result in a restart. Neither behavior establishes a platform-neutral rollback rule. Rollback depends on the deployment controller, rollout strategy, and configuration. Kubernetes probe documentation; Amazon EKS Best Practices Guide: Application.
To determine whether a deployment will roll back, inspect the specific rollout system’s health criteria and failure policy in addition to the probe configuration. Treat these as separate questions:
- What HTTP status does the Express route return in each state?
- Does the configured probe remove traffic, restart a container, or take another action?
- What does the rollout controller do when its health or progress criteria fail?
Do Kubernetes applications need routes named /livez and /readyz?
No. Kubernetes documents /livez and /readyz as health endpoints for the Kubernetes API server; they are not required path names for an Express application. Configure the probe path to match the route your app implements. Kubernetes also notes that the API server’s healthz endpoint has been deprecated since Kubernetes v1.16 in favor of livez and readyz. Kubernetes API health checks.
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