This option can help prevent outages caused by misconfigurations with parameters that are only used in production. Liveness and readiness probes are mechanisms to check the health and availability of the Pods and containers in a GKE cluster. Liveness probes determine if a container is still running, and if not, restart it. Readiness probes determine if a container is ready to serve requests, and if not, remove it from the load balancer. By configuring liveness and readiness probes in the Pod specification, you can ensure that your application can handle traffic and recover from failures gracefully during a rolling update. The other options are not optimal for this scenario, because they either do not prevent outages, but only alert or monitor them (B, C), or do not apply to GKE clusters, but to Compute Engine instances (D). Reference: https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/updating-apps https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/kubernetes-best-practices-setting-up-health-checks-with-readiness-and-liveness-probes