Kubernetes Patterns, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5. Managed Lifecycle

Containerized applications managed by cloud native platforms have no control over their lifecycle, and to be good cloud native citizens, they have to listen to the events emitted by the managing platform and adapt their lifecycles accordingly. The Managed Lifecycle pattern describes how applications can and should react to these lifecycle events.

Problem

In Chapter 4, “Health Probe”, we explained why containers have to provide APIs for the different health checks. Health-check APIs are read-only endpoints the platform is continually probing to get application insight. It is a mechanism for the platform to extract information from the application.

In addition to monitoring the state of a container, the platform sometimes may issue commands and expect the application to react to them. Driven by policies and external factors, a cloud native platform may decide to start or stop the applications it is managing at any moment. It is up to the containerized application to determine which events are important to react to and how to react. But in effect, this is an API that the platform is using to communicate and send commands to the application. Also, applications are free to either benefit from lifecycle management or ignore it if they don’t need this service.

Solution

We saw that checking only the process status is not a good enough indication of the health of an application. That is why there are different APIs for monitoring the health of a container. ...