My App Was “Running”… But I Had No Idea If It Was Actually Working

There’s a moment every developer hits where things technically work… but you still don’t trust anything. For me, that moment came when I moved our deployment system to the cloud. As part of the project, we were building a platform where a user could upload a project, automatically build a Docker image, run it as a container, and get a live URL. On paper, everything worked. The VM was up. The service was running. Nothing had crashed. And yet… I had no idea if my system was actually working. The Only Way I Could Check At that point, I had built just one endpoint: POST /upload This endpoint did everything: Accept a zipped project Build a Docker image Run a container Expose a port Return a URL So if I wanted to check whether my system was alive… I had to deploy something. Upload → Build → Run → Pray That’s when it hit me: I had built a system where the only way to check if it was alive… was to deploy an app. Why I Added a /health Endpoint I stopped and asked a simple question: Why do I nee