[🐛 Bug]: Health check making nodes unavailable in Kubernetes, getting error - "Could not start a new session. Response code 500. Message"

What happened?

This behaviour is only observed when ran on Kubernetes using (deployment.yaml) and not observed when ran with images on normal linux servers.

We have observed that the health check for Selenium grid - starting from v4.29 and onwards is making the nodes unavailable during the health check causing error while running test
"org.openqa.selenium.SessionNotCreatedException: Could not start a new session. Response code 500. Message: Could not start a new session. java.net.ConnectException" and
"java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot invoke "org.openqa.selenium.TakesScreenshot.getScreenshotAs(org.openqa.selenium.OutputType)" because "driver" is null"

Command used to start Selenium Grid with Docker (or Kubernetes)

kubectl apply -f hub.yaml

Relevant log output

14:49:45.487 INFO [LocalDistributor.add] - Added node b68b3b27-0e5c-40c4-82af-59dd1ecc4212 at https://node-chrome:5151. Health check every 120s
14:50:17.284 INFO [GridModel.setAvailability] - Switching Node b70e99a7-5d2c-45ec-b261-9f1d87d79744 (uri: https://node-chrome:5454) from UP to DOWN
14:52:17.265 INFO [GridModel.setAvailability] - Switching Node 7570b122-08d9-43f4-aff8-3276defc251d (uri: https://node-chrome:5252) from UP to DOWN

Operating System

Linux

Docker Selenium version (image tag)

4.31.0-20250414

Selenium Grid chart version (chart version)

No response

Start with the Kubernetes configuration referenced by deployment.yaml and the kubectl apply -f hub.yaml command, then review the health-check log entries showing nodes switching from UP to DOWN. Reproduce the behavior with Docker Selenium 4.31.0 in Kubernetes and compare it with normal Linux servers. Done means health checks no longer make nodes unavailable or cause session-creation failures.