Startup probes have recently been introduced to Kubernetes as an alternative way of managing slow-starting containers. When a Pod is started, the startup probe is run before any other probing of the Pod is started. The startup probe proceeds until it either times out (in which case the Pod is restarted) or it succeeds, at which time the liveness probe takes over. Startup probes enable you to poll slowly for a slow-starting container while also enabling a responsive liveness check once the slow-starting container has initialized.