Description: The term ‘unhealthy’ refers to a state in which a pod or service within a cloud-native environment is not functioning correctly. In cloud-native ecosystems, a pod is a collection of one or more containers that are deployed and managed together, and its health status is crucial for the operation of distributed applications. A pod is considered ‘unhealthy’ when it cannot respond to requests adequately, which may be due to various factors such as application failures, configuration issues, or insufficient resources. This state is determined through health probes, which are mechanisms that cloud orchestration platforms use to check the status of pods. If a health probe indicates that a pod is not functioning correctly, the orchestration platform can take automatic actions, such as restarting the pod or redirecting traffic to other healthy pods. Managing health status is essential to ensure the availability and resilience of cloud applications, as it allows systems to adapt to failures and maintain continuous service.
