stefanprodan/podinfo

Podinfo is a small web application written in Go that serves as a reference example for running microservices on Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a system for running many small services in containers, and podinfo demonstrates the standard practices teams use when deploying applications that way. Rather than being a product deployed for actual end users, podinfo is a testing fixture and workshop teaching tool. The CNCF projects Flux and Flagger use it for end-to-end testing, meaning it gets deployed in real Kubernetes clusters to verify that deployment tooling works correctly. The app exposes a web API with many endpoints covering common patterns: health checks so Kubernetes can know whether the app is running correctly, readiness signals so the system directs traffic to it only when ready, fault injection endpoints that deliberately return errors or slow responses to test how the rest of the system responds, JWT token issuance, and a Redis-backed key-value cache. It also exposes a gRPC API with similar functionality. Seeing all of these in one small codebase makes it useful as a learning reference. On the operational side, the app includes Prometheus metrics for monitoring, structured logging, container image signing, and software supply chain attestation. It can be installed via Helm, Kustomize, Timoni, or plain Docker. The README walks through using Flux to deploy it and keep it automatically updated as new versions are released, illustrating how GitOps-style continuous delivery works in practice. The project requires Kubernetes version 1.23 or newer and is licensed under Apache 2.0.