Intro

How do components interact with each other inside a Kubernetes cluster?

There are different types of communication in Kubernetes:

• container-to-container (inside a pod)
• pod-to-pod
• pod-to-service
• external-to-service

Service

A service is an abstraction which defines a set of pods and a policy by which to access them.

The set of pods targeted by a service is usually determined by a selector.

apiVersion: v1

kind: Service

metadata:

   name: service

spec:

   type: ClusterIP

   selector:

        app: pod

   ports:

    - protocol: TCP

      port: 80

The above example suggests that this service applies to all pods with the label app:pod.

In this post we'll talk about the most common types of services:

• ClusterIP
• NodePort
• LoadBalancer

🔵  ClusterIP

This is the default service type.

It makes components reachable only from within the cluster.

If you still want to access it from outside the cluster, you can do it through a proxy.

🔵  NodePort

This type of service exposes pods on each node’s IP at a specific port.

apiVersion: v1

kind: Service

metadata:

   name: node-service spec:

   type: NodePort

   selector:

        app: pod

   ports:

    - name: http

      protocol: TCP

      targetPort: 80

      nodePort: 30000

Still, there are a few downsides to this method:

• You can only have one service per port
• You can only use ports 30000–32767
• If your Node/VM IP address change, you need to deal with that

🔵  LoadBalancer

This one exposes pods externally using a cloud provider’s load balancer.

If you want to send outside traffic to a pod, this is the default method.

apiVersion: v1

kind: Service

metadata:

   name: service

spec:

   type: LoadBalancer

   clusterIP: 10.0.171.239

   selector:

        app: pod

   ports:

    - protocol: TCP

      port: 80

Follow the Kubernetes 101 series on mindit.io.

Check out new-spike.net for other articles on Kubernetes and much more! 🚀