blog.md

Kubernetes Services

What Is A Kubernetes Service

A Service is a Kubernetes object that exposes a set of Pods as a network service. Moreover, it provides service discovery mechanism that dynamically adds or removes IP addresses of Pods to its endpoint list based on the creation or deletion of these Pods.

Service Types

Kubernetes provides many types of services but here only those frequently used ones are introduced. You can check this document for more details. Here only commonly used Services will be introduced.

LoadBalancer

A LoadBalancer exposes a set of Pods externally. A LoadBalancer is an L4 (Layer 4) load balancer, which means it can only utilize the information at the transport layer (Layer 4) to determine how to distribute client requests across a group of Pods.

Here is an example of LoadBalancer that makes the Kubernetes application foo public in demo environment:

https://gist.github.com/11ca7a0009398a373cae52e9ff78475f

From the spec, you can see that:

• It relies on the field spec.selector to select Pods.

• The field status.loadBalancer shows the external IP address that is automatically assigned by Kubernetes.

• The field spec.ports defines the ports that this service opens for the foo application.

• With the external IP address and then open port, the service foo in the demo environment can be accessed with address 10.254.2.127:443. When a request is sent to this address, the LoadBalancer will redirect it to the port 8443 of one of the foo Pods.

ClusterIP

A ClusterIP is a Service that exposes a set of Pods on a cluster-internal IP, which means this Service is only reachable from within the cluster. It is also a L4 load balancer that can only provide simple load balancing functionality based on information at the transport layer.

Here is an example of ClusterIP for the application foo:

https://gist.github.com/c18bc464ddb265852f231c3cd32e96da

From the spec, you can see that:

• Like a LoadBalancer Service, a ClusterIP Service also relies on the field spec.selector to select Pods.

• The field spec.clusterIP shows the internal IP address that is automatically allocated by Kubernetes. Only workloads within the same cluster can utilize this Service to access the application foo.

• The field spec.ports defines the ports that this service opens for the application foo.

Kubernetes will allocate a unique DNS address to a Service when it is created. The format of the DNS address is service-name.namespace.svc.cluster.local. For example, the DNS address for above ClusterIP Service is default-grpc.foo-demo.svc.cluster.local.

Ingress

An Ingress is an object that manage external access to one or more Kubernetes applications in a cluster. It is not a Kubernetes Service, but it does provides load balancing, SSL termination and name-based virtual hosting.

Unlike a Kubernetes Service which is L4 load balancer and can only manage one Kubernetes applications, an Ingress is a L7 (application layer) load balancer and can manage multiple Kubernetes applications based on path or host names. For example, the following shows an example of path based Ingress. With this Ingress, requests with the URL foo.bar.com/foo will be redirected to service1 (with the 8000 port) while requests with the URL foo.bar.com/bar will be redirected to service2 (with the 9000 port). service1 and service2 can either be ClusterIP or NodePort Services.

https://gist.github.com/f4a60c35ab48e1bc10fb9ae1440f9c0c

What is Next

Check this blog if you are curious about how to set up persistent storage in Kubernetes.

Reference

• Kubernetes Services
• Kubernetes Service Types
• transport layer
• Kubernetes Overview