Bruce Lee to the Rescue! Health Checks for .NET Worker Services

As we start to develop more containers that are being run in Kubernetes, we encounter non-http workloads. I came across a workload that represents a non-http processor for queued events. In .NET, I used the IHostedService offerings to run a simple service in a container to do this work.

However, when it came time to deploy to Kubernetes, I quickly realized that my standard liveness/health checks would not work for this container. I searched around, and the HealthChecks libraries are limited to ASP.NET Core. Not wanting to bloat my image, I looked for some alternatives. My Google searches led me to Bruce Lee.

No, not Bruce Lee the actor, but Bruce Lee Harrison. Bruce published a library called TinyHealthChecks, which provides the ability to add lightweight endpoints without dragging in the entire ASP.NET Core libraries.

While it seems a pretty simple concept, it solved an immediate need of mine with minimal effort. Additionally, there was a sample and documentation!

Why call this out? Many developers use open source software to solve these types of problems, and I feel as though they deserve a little publicity for their efforts. So, thanks to the contributors to TinyHealthCheck, I will certainly watch this repository and contribute as I can.