A Readiness Probe That Can't Fail Is Just Wallpaper

me@ssoriche.com (Shawn Sorichetti) — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Writing up a production outage report today, I was making the case that workloads should fail their readiness probes when they can’t reach their dependencies — databases, caches, anything required to do useful work. The collaborating Claude session put it better than I had:

A probe that doesn’t fail when its workload can’t reach its database isn’t a probe — it’s wallpaper.

That’s the whole thing. A readiness probe answers one question: is this pod ready to serve traffic? If the answer depends on a database connection and you’re not checking for that, you’re not answering the question — you’re decorating the pod spec.

Reliability on Shawn Sorichetti

A Readiness Probe That Can't Fail Is Just Wallpaper