The mistake I've seen here is having the "health check" do little or nothing. In many web services, I've seen a /ping or /health api that the load balancer calls to ask "are you healthy?". But people get rushed or lazy or requirements change, and they wind up with that api just doing "return true".
Now you've got a host that can't access a database or can't do much of anything- but it can return true!
Health check APIs should always do some level of checks on dependencies and complex internal logic (maybe a few specific unit/integration tests?) to ensure things are truly healthy.
Now you've got a host that can't access a database or can't do much of anything- but it can return true!
Health check APIs should always do some level of checks on dependencies and complex internal logic (maybe a few specific unit/integration tests?) to ensure things are truly healthy.