Why shouldn't you use health checks?
This is a reprint of my post on FANDOM's engineering blog . At FANDOM we believe our applications should be resilient, that is they should be able to recover from failures and while the failure occurs still be useful for the users. Health checks are one of the ways to make applications self-healing. The idea is that the health checks detect when an instance of the application reaches an invalid state. A supervisor monitors those health checks and attempts to fix any issues. Depending on your platform the action might be different. Many frameworks (like Dropwizard and Spring) and platforms (like Kubernetes and Marathon) encourage you to implement health checks for your web applications. When a health check fails, AWS will stop sending requests to that instance. That’s pretty straightforward — we suspect the application is not healthy, so it might not respond correctly. Decreasing load on it might also help it recover. In Kubernetes, there’s a ...