you can use a traefik backend health check defined in your k8s ingress through annotations. This way you don't forward to backends that are not active. For example:
kind: Ingress
metadata:
name: specific-deployment
annotations:
traefik.backend.healthcheck.port: 8080
traefik.backend.healthcheck.scheme: http
traefik.backend.healthcheck.path: /health
spec:
rules:
- host: specific.minikube
http:
paths:
- path: /
backend:
serviceName: stilton
servicePort: http
This way you can use the k8s readiness probes for your pods.