🔗 Terminating elegantly: a guide to graceful shutdowns

Did you ever unplug your computer because you were frustrated? In the world of software, a similar concept exists: the hard shutdown.

This abrupt termination can cause problems like data loss or system instability.

Thankfully, there's a better way: the graceful shutdown.

In a nutshell, a graceful shutdown is a polite way of stopping a program, giving it time to finish things up neatly.

A good graceful shutdown has the following characteristics:

• complete ongoing requests (tasks)
• release critical resources
• potentially save state information to a disk or a database (so you can resume later)
• stop accepting connections

So let's dive into the world of graceful shutdowns, specifically for Go applications running on Kubernetes. We will be focusing on HTTP servers, but the main ideas apply to all types of applications, also not necessarily running on Kubernetes.