Using readiness probe to handle graceful shutdown

Question

From Kubernetes document, when readiness probe fails, it removes the Pod's IP address from the endpoints of all services that match the pod.

We are thinking about implementing SIGTERM handler to fail the health check and stop the pod from receiving future traffic. That's what we want, no more Inbound traffic. The question is, if the pod contains requests that depend on backend service which are not reside in the same pod, will the pod still be able to complete those outbound requests?

Answer 1

From the docs (emphasis mine):

Sometimes, applications are temporarily unable to serve traffic. For example, an application might need to load large data or configuration files during startup, or depend on external services after startup. In such cases, you don't want to kill the application, but you don't want to send it requests either. Kubernetes provides readiness probes to detect and mitigate these situations. A pod with containers reporting that they are not ready does not receive traffic through Kubernetes Services.

The pod can't be reached through Kubernetes services. You can still make outbound requests, and anyone using the pod name or IP directly will also still be able to reach it.