What action should be taken to ensure smooth application operation while waiting for a fix to a problematic microservice?

Adding an HTTP liveness probe to the deployment is essential for maintaining smooth application operation while waiting for a fix to a problematic microservice. A liveness probe is a form of health check that Kubernetes uses to determine whether a Pod is still functioning correctly. If the liveness probe fails, Kubernetes can automatically restart the affected Pod, which helps to quickly recover from failures without manual intervention.

This ensures that any issues with the microservice do not persist and impact the overall application performance. It allows the application to maintain availability by ensuring that faulty instances are replaced promptly. In contrast, options like creating a cron job to terminate Pods or manually terminating them can introduce additional delay and resource management overhead, complicating the process of ensuring high availability.

Furthermore, although configuring alerts for Pods returning errors is beneficial for monitoring and awareness, it does not actively resolve the issues with the problematic microservice. Alerts alone won't automatically restart the service or correct operational failures, which is ultimately what a liveness probe accomplishes by facilitating immediate remediation.