Health = 'am I alive'

Basic 'process is running' — usually fixed 200 OK. Cheap. Detects hard hangs.

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Liveness = 'restart me if broken'

Deeper check — DB connectable, dependencies reachable. Failure → K8s restarts.

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Readiness = 'send me traffic'

Ready to serve. During shutdown, flip to not-ready before draining. Excludes from LB.