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How does Spring Boot handle graceful shutdown in containerized environments?

Updated May 17, 2026

Short answer

Spring Boot supports graceful shutdown by stopping new requests and waiting for active requests to complete.

Deep explanation

With server.shutdown=graceful, Spring Boot stops accepting new traffic, waits for ongoing requests to finish, and then shuts down the embedded server. In Kubernetes, this works with terminationGracePeriodSeconds to avoid request loss.

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