For anyone else here, if using helm to manage your deployments, you need to set initialDelaySeconds it in the deployments.yaml template in the /templates folder under livenessProbe. The livenessProbe will force restart your pod if the probe cannot connect, as was happening with mine. It wasn't giving my application enough time to build.

This could be solved by increasing the initial delay in the readiness check. Actually since the connection to the DB was taking more then the initial delay as a result of which the readiness probe was failing.

Helm:

I would recommend setting the initialDelaySeconds value in the values.yaml file and use an action {{ .Values.initialDelaySeconds }} to insert the value into the deployment.yaml template.

kubectl:

Just add the initialDelaySeconds: 5 if you want 5 seconds to your (deployment,pod,replicate set etc) manifest and apply your changes.

If it fails, get coffee and start looking at logs from the container

kubectl logs -h for more help