How does graceful shutdown work in Spring Boot, and what can still go wrong?

Coordinates readiness, server draining, lifecycle timeouts, background work, and platform termination during a Spring Boot shutdown.

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TL;DR

On a normal shutdown, Spring Boot stops accepting new work through the supported embedded server and gives existing requests time to complete. The grace period is controlled by the lifecycle shutdown timeout. In a deployment, the instance should become unready before or while traffic is drained, and the platform's termination grace period must be longer than the application's own shutdown window.

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Embedded server behavior, lifecycle phases, shutdown timeout, readiness, SIGTERM, background tasks, and idempotency.

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Graceful shutdown gives in-flight work a bounded chance to finish; it does not guarantee every request or task completes.
On a normal shutdown, Spring Boot stops accepting new work through the supported embedded server and gives existing requests time to complete. The grace period is controlled by the lifecycle shutdown timeout. In a deployment, the instance should become unready before or while traffic is drained, and the platform's termination grace period must be longer than the application's own shutdown window.
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Long requests, streaming responses, scheduled tasks, and custom executors may outlive the web server unless their lifecycle is managed. I stop consuming new messages, prevent new scheduled work, and let owned in-flight tasks finish or cancel within a bound. Requests and jobs remain idempotent because a hard kill, node loss, or expired grace period can still interrupt work after a side effect.

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Assuming graceful shutdown prevents all interrupted work.
Giving the platform a shorter grace period than the application.
Leaving custom executors unmanaged.

How does graceful shutdown work in Spring Boot, and what can still go wrong?

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