Pattern 48 / OPS

Health Check Endpoint

Use this when letting infrastructure know whether a service should receive traffic.

Pressure: Letting infrastructure know whether a service should receive traffic
Mechanism: Expose liveness/readiness endpoints checked by load balancers and orchestrators
Toll: Shallow checks miss real failures; deep checks can overload dependencies

Diagram for Health Check Endpoint — Architecture plate48

Executive brief

Health Check Endpoint fits when letting infrastructure know whether a service should receive traffic. Mechanism: expose liveness/readiness endpoints checked by load balancers and orchestrators. Use it for containers, load-balanced services, deployment automation, and failover. The toll: shallow checks miss real failures; deep checks can overload dependencies.

Use when

Containers, load-balanced services, deployment automation, and failover.

Example

/healthz says process is alive while /ready checks db connectivity.

Review framing

Describe the pressure first, then the mechanism, then the cost. That keeps the design grounded.

Same pressure family

Observability and Operations Patterns

49Distributed Tracing 50Canary Deployment