I have deployed a next.js frontend server and an express.js backend server on a Kubernetes cluster, which issues automated health checks, currently on the root path ("/") on the two servers.
My question is, should I implement my own health check routes like "/health" and just return a 200 HTTP response code on that route or should I just let it be as it is right now?
I'm afraid that I will implement a lot of functionality on the root path ("/") endpoint on both servers, which would put a bit more pressure on my two servers, as the cluster continues to issue requests to those endpoints.
Actually, if you are concerned about affecting the performance of your application, from the compute/memory resources perspective it depends on what material you are serving under /.
If you are serving a big blob of HTML it will actually affect your performance and I'd recommend implementing a different endpoint /health for healthcheck to be used with Kubernetes Readiness Probes for example.
If the content of / is very light, it's unlikely that it will make a difference. In terms of improving the 'stress' you are putting on the resources when running a healthcheck using Liveness/Readiness probes in K8s, you could alleviate that by increasing the periodSeconds in them, but keep in mind that if you have multiple pods behind a Kubernetes service and one of the pods has some issue with the healthcheck it would take longer for that pod to be removed from the service causing a longer potential 'downtime'.