An application that starts and serves traffic is not production-ready. Production readiness means it shuts down cleanly, handles spikes, recovers from transient failures, and gives you visibility into what it’s doing. This article covers the operational layer. Graceful Shutdown When Kubernetes terminates a pod, it sends SIGTERM. Without graceful shutdown, in-flight requests are killed mid-execution — users see 500 errors or dropped writes. Enable graceful shutdown: server: shutdown: graceful # wait for in-flight requests to complete spring: lifecycle: timeout-per-shutdown-phase: 30s # max wait before forcing shutdown With this configured, Spring Boot:

Kubernetes is the standard platform for running containerized microservices. Spring Boot integrates naturally with Kubernetes — Actuator probes map directly to Kubernetes probes, and Spring configuration maps to ConfigMaps and Secrets. Core Kubernetes Resources Deployment # deployment.yaml apiVersion: apps/v1 kind: Deployment metadata: name: order-service labels: app: order-service spec: replicas: 3 selector: matchLabels: app: order-service template: metadata: labels: app: order-service version: "1.2.3" spec: containers: - name: order-service image: devopsmonk/order-service:1.2.3 ports: - containerPort: 8080 name: http - containerPort: 8081 name: management # Resource limits — always set these resources: requests: memory: "256Mi" cpu: "250m" limits: memory: "512Mi" cpu: "1000m" # Environment from ConfigMap and Secret envFrom: - configMapRef: name: order-service-config - secretRef: name: order-service-secrets # Individual env vars env: - name: SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE value: prod - name: POD_NAME valueFrom: fieldRef: fieldPath: metadata.