readiness

Everyone can recite the three. Explain what each failure causes, and why a badly configured liveness probe is more dangerous than none at all.

The pods are Running, the dashboard is green, and users get errors. The gap between Running and receiving traffic is where this question lives, and it has a precise answer.

A health endpoint that returns 200 because the process is running tells you the process is running. Interviewers want to hear where you draw the line between a check that pages and a check that removes traffic.