Health Checks: A Boon or a Curse? - Venil Noronha & John Murray, Stripe
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 2021-10-30

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. Learn more at https://kubecon.io The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.

Health Checks: A Boon or a Curse? - Venil Noronha & John Murray, Stripe

Health checks are an essential part of distributed systems of today that allow one to operate services in a reliable manner. Without health checks, operating a large latency-sensitive system becomes impossible. However, as the composition of environments differ, it can become a real burden to support health checks. Additionally, as the system scales, users tend to face the dreaded N-square problem, and then hit a tipping point, and traditional solutions don't seem to work. In this talk, we will discuss the benefits of health checks in Envoy, some problems we have encountered at scale at Stripe, and options to mitigate such issues.