Building a Health-Check Microservice with FastAPI

In modern application development, health checks play a crucial role in ensuring reliability, observability, and smooth orchestration—especially in containerized environments like Docker or Kubernetes. In this post, I’ll walk you through how I built a production-ready health-check microservice using FastAPI.

This project features structured logging, clean separation of concerns, and asynchronous service checks for both a database and Redis—all built in a modular and extensible way.

GitHub Repo: [https://github.com/DanielPopoola/fastapi-microservice-health-check]

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🚀 What This Project Covers

• Creating a /health/ endpoint with real service checks (DB, Redis)
• Supporting /live and /ready endpoints for Kubernetes probes
• Using async asyncio.gather() for fast, parallel checks
• Configurable settings with Pydantic
• Structured logging with custom log formatting using loguru.
• Middleware for request timing and error handling

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📁 Project Structure

project/
├── main.py             # App factory and configuration
├── config.py           # App settings via Pydantic
├── routers/
│   ├── health.py       # Health check endpoints
│   └── echo.py         # Echo endpoint (for demo)
├── utils/
│   └── logging.py      # Custom logger setup
└── ...

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🔍 Under the Hood: main.py

main.py acts as the orchestrator. Here's what it handles:

1. App Lifecycle Management

@asynccontextmanager
async def lifespan(app: FastAPI):
    logger.info("Application starting up")
    yield
    logger.info("Application shutting down")

This cleanly logs startup and shutdown events, essential for container lifecycle awareness.

2. App Factory Pattern

The create_app() function encapsulates app setup:

• Loads settings with get_settings()
• Sets up structured logging
• Registers CORS middleware
• Adds global and HTTP exception handlers
• Includes routers for modularity

3. Middleware

A custom middleware logs request data and execution time:

@app.middleware("http")
async def log_requests(request, call_next):
    start_time = time.time()
    response = await call_next(request)
    response.headers["X-Response-Time"] = f"{(time.time() - start_time) * 1000:.2f}ms"
    return response

4. Exception Handling

Two global handlers catch errors and format them consistently:

• One for HTTPException
• One for unexpected Exception

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⚕️ Health Check Logic (routers/health.py)

The routers/health.py file houses the core of this service:

✅ /health/

Performs parallel health checks using asyncio.gather():

async def perform_health_checks(settings: Settings) -> Dict[str, ServiceCheck]:
    checks = {}
    tasks = []
    if settings.database_url:
        tasks.append(("database", check_database(settings.database_url, settings.health_check_timeout)))  
    if settings.redis_url:
        tasks.append(("redis", check_redis(settings.redis_url, settings.health_check_timeout)))
    if tasks:
        results = await asyncio.gather(*[task[1] for task in tasks], return_exceptions=True)
        ...
    return checks

The result is a combined status response showing the health of each component.

🔁 /live

A simple liveness check returning HTTP 200 to signal the app is alive.

📦 /ready

Waits for both Redis and DB to pass checks before returning 200. Useful for Kubernetes readiness probes.

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📡 Root Endpoint and Echo

• / returns app metadata like name, version, and timestamp
• /echo is a simple test endpoint to verify connectivity

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🛠️ How to Run It

uvicorn app.main:app --reload

Or using the embedded __main__ block:

python -m main

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🌟 What’s Next?

• Add more service checks (e.g., external APIs, caches)
• Integrate with Docker’s HEALTHCHECK instruction
• Configure Kubernetes readiness/liveness probes

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🧠 Final Thoughts

Building robust health checks is one of the simplest yet most impactful ways to improve system reliability. With FastAPI’s speed and async support, this project offers a solid base for both simple and enterprise-grade applications.

GitHub: DanielPopoola/fastapi-microservice-health-check