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PROFESSIONAL-CLOUD-DEVOPS-ENGINEER · Question #82

You have an application that runs in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The application consists of several microservices that are deployed to GKE by using Deployments and Services. One of the microservi

The correct answer is B. Add a HTTP liveness probe to the microservice's deployment.. An HTTP liveness probe is the Kubernetes-native solution for detecting and automatically recovering from an unhealthy pod state. Configuring a liveness probe that targets an endpoint which reflects the pod's health causes Kubernetes to automatically restart any pod that starts re

Submitted by diego_uy· Apr 18, 2026Applying site reliability engineering principles to a service

Question

You have an application that runs in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The application consists of several microservices that are deployed to GKE by using Deployments and Services. One of the microservices is experiencing an issue where a Pod returns 403 errors after the Pod has been running for more than five hours. Your development team is working on a solution, but the issue will not be resolved for a month. You need to ensure continued operations until the microservice is fixed. You want to follow Google-recommended practices and use the fewest number of steps. What should you do?

Options

  • ACreate a cron job to terminate any Pods that have been running for more than five hours.
  • BAdd a HTTP liveness probe to the microservice's deployment.
  • CMonitor the Pods, and terminate any Pods that have been running for more than five hours.
  • DConfigure an alert to notify you whenever a Pod returns 403 errors.

How the community answered

(29 responses)
  • A
    3% (1)
  • B
    72% (21)
  • C
    10% (3)
  • D
    14% (4)

Explanation

An HTTP liveness probe is the Kubernetes-native solution for detecting and automatically recovering from an unhealthy pod state. Configuring a liveness probe that targets an endpoint which reflects the pod's health causes Kubernetes to automatically restart any pod that starts returning failure responses (such as 403s after five hours), resetting the runtime and restoring service. This requires minimal steps and no ongoing manual intervention. Option A (cron job) and C (manual monitoring) both require extra infrastructure or human effort. Option D (alert) only notifies - it does not automatically remediate the issue.

Topics

#Kubernetes#Liveness Probes#Service Reliability#GKE

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