Of course, liveness isn’t the only kind of health check we want to perform. Kubernetes makes a distinction between liveness and readiness. Liveness determines if an application is running properly. Containers that fail liveness checks are restarted. Readiness describes when a container is ready to serve user requests. Containers that fail readiness checks are removed from service load balancers. Readiness probes are configured similarly to liveness probes. 

Combining the readiness and liveness probes helps ensure only healthy containers are running within the cluster.