Service Internal Traffic Policy

If two Pods in your cluster want to communicate, and both Pods are actually running on the same node, use Service Internal Traffic Policy to keep network traffic within that node. Avoiding a round trip via the cluster network can help with reliability, performance (network latency and throughput), or cost.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.26 [stable]

Service Internal Traffic Policy enables internal traffic restrictions to only route internal traffic to endpoints within the node the traffic originated from. The “internal” traffic here refers to traffic originated from Pods in the current cluster. This can help to reduce costs and improve performance.

Using Service Internal Traffic Policy

You can enable the internal-only traffic policy for a Service, by setting its .spec.internalTrafficPolicy to Local. This tells kube-proxy to only use node local endpoints for cluster internal traffic.

Note: For pods on nodes with no endpoints for a given Service, the Service behaves as if it has zero endpoints (for Pods on this node) even if the service does have endpoints on other nodes.

The following example shows what a Service looks like when you set .spec.internalTrafficPolicy to Local:

  1. apiVersion: v1
  2. kind: Service
  3. metadata:
  4.   name: my-service
  5. spec:
  6.   selector:
  7.     app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  8.   ports:
  9.     - protocol: TCP
  10.       port: 80
  11.       targetPort: 9376
  12.   internalTrafficPolicy: Local

How it works

The kube-proxy filters the endpoints it routes to based on the spec.internalTrafficPolicy setting. When it’s set to Local, only node local endpoints are considered. When it’s Cluster (the default), or is not set, Kubernetes considers all endpoints.

What’s next