What's the difference between Actuator's readiness and liveness probes, and why does the distinction matter?

Liveness should answer 'has this process fundamentally hung or deadlocked and needs to be restarted'; readiness should answer 'can this instance currently handle traffic' (e.g., is its database connection pool healthy right now). If you conflate them — using one health check for both — a temporary downstream dependency hiccup (database connection pool briefly exhausted) could trigger unnecessary container restarts (liveness failure) instead of just temporarily routing traffic away (readiness failure), worsening an incident instead of containing it.