Oct 26, 2026 · Backend Development

Spring Boot Graceful Shutdown: SIGTERM to Container Exit, Request Draining & Kubernetes Timing

This article dissects Spring Boot's graceful shutdown process, explaining how SIGTERM triggers request draining, the interplay between server.shutdown modes, Lifecycle phases, thread pool behavior, SmartLifecycle ordering, and Kubernetes terminationGracePeriodSeconds, with reproducible experiments showing how misconfigured timeouts cause deployment errors.

Graceful ShutdownKubernetesRequest Draining

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Spring Boot Graceful Shutdown: SIGTERM to Container Exit, Request Draining & Kubernetes Timing