Health Check

The goal of Health Checks is to minimize the number of failed requests due to temporary unavailability of a target endpoint. By applying a Health Check policy you effectively instruct a dataplane to keep track of health statuses for target endpoints. Dataplane will never send a request to an endpoint that is considered “unhealthy”.

Since pro-active health checking might result in a tangible extra load on your applications, Kuma also provides a zero-overhead alternative - “passive” health checking. In the latter case, a dataplane will be making decisions whether target endpoints are healthy based on “real” requests initiated by your application rather than auxiliary requests initiated by the dataplanes itself.

As usual, sources and destinations selectors allow you to fine-tune to which Dataplanes the policy applies (sources) and what endpoints require health checking (destinations).

At the moment, HealthCheck policy is implemented at L4 level. In practice, it means that a dataplane is looking at success of TCP connections rather than individual HTTP requests.

On Universal:

type: HealthCheck
name: web-to-backend
mesh: default
sources:
- match:
    service: web
destinations:
- match:
    service: backend
conf:
  activeChecks:
    interval: 10s
    timeout: 2s
    unhealthyThreshold: 3
    healthyThreshold: 1
  passiveChecks:
    unhealthyThreshold: 3
    penaltyInterval: 5s

On Kubernetes:

apiVersion: kuma.io/v1alpha1
kind: HealthCheck
metadata:
  namespace: kuma-example
  name: web-to-backend
mesh: default
spec:
  sources:
  - match:
      service: web
  destinations:
  - match:
      service: backend
  conf:
    activeChecks:
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 2s
      unhealthyThreshold: 3
      healthyThreshold: 1
    passiveChecks:
      unhealthyThreshold: 3
      penaltyInterval: 5s