Services

This section explains how to manage services.

Services are used to expose applications for access either within or outside the cluster.

In KubeSphere, applications run in pods, and multiple pod replicas of the same application are managed by workloads or jobs. While each pod has a virtual IP address accessible within the cluster, pods are non-permanent resources that may be deleted or recreated. When a pod is recreated, the new pod’s virtual IP address is generally different from the old one, and the old pod’s IP address becomes invalid.
Services provide a stable address (domain or IP address) for client access. Services route client requests to a specific pod and offer load balancing across multiple pod replicas, so as to solve the issue of the original address becoming invalid when a pod is deleted or recreated.
In addition to providing a stable access address for workloads, services can expose workloads outside the cluster through NodePort or LoadBalancer methods.