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OpenShift Liveness and Readiness Probes

This repository is meant to demonstrate the liveness and readiness probes in OpenShift and how they interact with the service abstraction.

It relies on Minishift to run OpenShift locally. The code in the repository was tested using Minishift version 1.34 (OKD/OpenShift version 3.11).

The demonstration in this repo most likely applies to apps deployed on Kubernetes as OpenShift is a Kubernetes distribution.

Prerequisites

Getting Started

Make sure you have all the prerequisites installed and configured. We are now going to deploy the sample app in this repository on Minishift.

First start Minishift.

minishift start

To access the OpenShift CLI execute

eval $(minishift oc-env)

Create and switch to a new OpenShift project where we will deploy the app.

oc login --username developer --password doesnotmatter
oc new-project probes \
    --description="project for playing around with probes" \
    --display-name="probes"

Create an OpenShift service with pods and an image stream for our apps Docker image.

oc new-app --file app/app.yml

Build and push the Docker image for the app.

cd app
./build-image.sh

Check that a Deployment was created due to the new Docker image (ImageChange trigger).

oc describe dc/probes

You should see something like

Deployment #1 (latest):
	Name:		probes-1
	Created:	3 seconds ago
	Status:		Running
	Replicas:	2 current / 2 desired
	Selector:	deployment=probes-1,deploymentconfig=probes
	Labels:		app=probes,openshift.io/deployment-config.name=probes
	Pods Status:	0 Running / 2 Waiting / 0 Succeeded / 0 Failed

As soon as at least one pod is ready the apps service will process requests. You can check the pods readiness with oc get pods --selector app=probes. Then try

curl --silent --include http://$(minishift ip):30080/pod

Note that the port is specified in the ./app/app.yml service spec.ports[].nodePort.

You'll see that if you repeat the request a few times it will be handled by a different pod. This is due to the service acting as an internal load balancer.

Probes

The following describes the type of probes, their purpose and how you can try them out in our app.

Make sure you completed the Getting Started section before moving on.

App Endpoints

Once you have running pods you can access the following endpoints our app provides via HTTP.

METHOD PATH DESCRIPTION
GET /pod Responds with the pod name processing the request
GET /live Liveness probe
POST /live/toggle Toggles the state of the liveness probe
GET /ready Readiness probe
POST /ready/toggle Toggle the state of the readiness probe

To target any of our deployed pods execute

oc rsh dc/probes curl --silent --include http://localhost:8080/pod

To target a specific one run

oc exec <fill_in_podname> -- curl --silent --include http://localhost:8080/pod

Fill in the name of one of the running pods oc get pods --selector app=probes.

To target the service which routes traffic to the pods execute

curl --silent --include http://$(minishift ip):30080/pod

Readiness

Sometimes, applications are temporarily unable to serve traffic. For example, an application might need to load large data or configuration files during startup, or depend on external services after startup. -- kubernetes.io

This is why we can declare a readiness probe. The readiness probe tells OpenShift when the container is ready to receive traffic. Once a container is unready it will not get any traffic from the service we defined in our ./app/app.yml.

OpenShift will call the probe defined in your containers spec at regular intervals. There are a few things you can configure, which you can find here.

The probe will be called during the entire lifetime of the pod! So a pod can go from unready to ready many times during its existence.

You can try it out for yourself by executing the following scripts in separate terminal windows

Arrange the windows side-by-side so you can follow the changes in a pods state and which pods gets traffic closely.

Pick a pods name

oc get pods --selector app=probes

And toggle it to unready

oc exec <fill_in_podname> -- curl --request POST --silent --include http://localhost:8080/ready/toggle

After toggling the readiness state one of the pods should show up as unready (READY 0/1) in the terminal running watch-probes.sh.

Every 1.0s: oc -n probes get pods

NAME             READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
probes-1-bd2wt   0/1       Running   0          1h
probes-1-w5rvp   1/1       Running   0          1h

From now on send-to-service.sh should show you that only the pod that is ready is processing requests from the service.

You can try toggling the readiness state back to ready and observe the pod getting traffic again.

Try setting both pods to unready and see what happens 🙃️

Liveness

Many applications running for long periods of time eventually transition to broken states, and cannot recover except by being restarted. Kubernetes provides liveness probes to detect and remedy such situations. -- kubernetes.io

This is why we can declare a liveness probe for our containers. The liveness probe tells OpenShift whether it should restart the container.

To see the effects of a failing liveness probe follow the steps at readiness probe. Exchange ready with live in the URLs.

You should see that a container gets restarted when it is not live. The RESTARTS counter in oc get pods should also reflect that. While the container is starting and is not yet ready it will also not get any traffic.

Try setting both pods to not live and see what happens 🙃️ You can also first toggle a pods ready state to unready and then toggle its live state. It should be restarted and receive traffic again once its ready.

Useful Commands

Check the logs to see when probes are invoked.

oc logs --follow svc/probes
Found 2 pods, using pod/probes-4-hpdtw
probes-4-hpdtw 2021/05/30 11:47:32 Listening on port 8080...
probes-4-hpdtw 2021/05/30 11:47:51 Readyness probe invoked. Pod is ready.
probes-4-hpdtw 2021/05/30 11:47:55 Liveness probe invoked. Pod is live.
probes-4-hpdtw 2021/05/30 11:48:01 Readyness probe invoked. Pod is ready.
probes-4-hpdtw 2021/05/30 11:48:05 Liveness probe invoked. Pod is live.

Note that this will pick one pod out of your replicas.

Stream OpenShift events

oc --namespace probes get events

which shows you when probes failed, containers are restarted, killed, ...

Further Reading & Exploration

For more in-depth information read

OpenShift Application Health

Kubernetes Configure Liveness, Readiness and Startup Probes

Startup Probe

Kubernetes added a startup probe which helps with slow starting pods.

OpenShift 3.11 does not provide a startup probe so you would need to adapt the example here to Kubernetes to play with that. You can adjust the code or the probe configuration to see how a slow starting pod is affected by readiness and liveness probes.

Start Over

If you want to delete all resources you created in the walk-through and start over execute

oc delete project probes