What is the purpose of a readiness probe in Kubernetes?

Correct answer: To determine if a Pod should receive traffic from a Service

Option D is correct because a readiness probe tells Kubernetes whether a Pod is ready to accept incoming traffic from a Service. Until the readiness probe succeeds, the Pod is removed from the Service's endpoint list, preventing requests from being routed to it. Option A is incorrect because resource monitoring is handled by metrics-server and tools like Prometheus, not probes. Option B describes a liveness probe, which restarts a container if it becomes unresponsive or unhealthy, not a readiness probe. Option C is incorrect because Pod startup order is managed through init containers and Pod topology spread constraints, not readiness probes.