services.md

Services in Kubernetes

Overview

Kubernetes Pods are mortal. They are born and they die, and they are not resurrected. ReplicationControllers in particular create and destroy Pods dynamically (e.g. when scaling up or down or when doing rolling updates). While each Pod gets its own IP address, even those IP addresses can not be relied upon to be stable over time. This leads to a problem: if some set of Pods (let's call them backends) provides functionality to other Pods (let's call them frontends) inside the Kubernetes cluster, how do those frontends find out and keep track of which backends are in that set?

Enter Services.

A Kubernetes Service is an abstraction which defines a logical set of Pods and a policy by which to access them - sometimes called a micro-service. The set of Pods targetted by a Service is determined by a Label Selector.

As an example, consider an image-processing backend which is running with 3 replicas. Those replicas are fungible - frontends do not care which backend they use. While the actual Pods that comprise the backend set may change, the frontend clients should not need to manage that themselves. The Service abstraction enables this decoupling.

For Kubernetes-native applications, Kubernetes offers a simple Endpoints API that is updated whenever the set of Pods in a Service changes. For non-native applications, Kubernetes offers a virtual-IP-based bridge to Services which redirects to the backend Pods.

Defining a Service

A Service in Kubernetes is a REST object, similar to a Pod. Like all of the REST objects, a Service definition can be POSTed to the apiserver to create a new instance. For example, suppose you have a set of Pods that each expose port 9376 and carry a label "app=MyApp".

{
  "kind": "Service",
  "apiVersion": "v1beta1",
  "id": "myapp",
  "selector": {
    "app": "MyApp"
  },
  "containerPort": 9376,
  "protocol": "TCP",
  "port": 80
}

This specification will create a new Service object named "myapp" which targets TCP port 9376 on any Pod with the "app=MyApp" label. Every Service is also assigned a virtual IP address (called the "portal IP"), which is used by the service proxies (see below). The Service's selector will be evaluated continuously and the results will be posted in an Endpoints object also named "myapp".

Services without selectors

Services, in addition to providing abstractions to access Pods, can also abstract any kind of backend. For example:

• you want to have an external database cluster in production, but in test you use your own databases.
• you want to point your service to a service in another Namespace or on another cluster.
• you are migrating your workload to Kubernetes and some of your backends run outside of Kubernetes.

In any of these scenarios you can define a service without a selector:

  "kind": "Service",
  "apiVersion": "v1beta1",
  "id": "myapp",
  "port": 80

Then you can explicitly map the service to a specific endpoint(s):

  "kind": "Endpoints",
  "apiVersion": "v1beta1",
  "id": "myapp",
  "endpoints": ["173.194.112.206:80"]

Accessing a Service without a selector works the same as if it had selector. The traffic will be routed to endpoints defined by the user (173.194.112.206:80 in this example).

Portals and service proxies

Every node in a Kubernetes cluster runs a kube-proxy. This application watches the Kubernetes master for the addition and removal of Service and Endpoints objects. For each Service it opens a port (random) on the local node. Any connections made to that port will be proxied to one of the corresponding backend Pods. Which backend to use is decided based on the AffinityPolicy of the Service. Lastly, it installs iptables rules which capture traffic to the Service's Port on the Service's portal IP and redirects that traffic to the previously described port.

The net result is that any traffic bound for the Service is proxied to an appropriate backend without the clients knowing anything about Kubernetes or Services or Pods.

Why not use round-robin DNS?

A question that pops up every now and then is why we do all this stuff with portals rather than just use standard round-robin DNS. There are a few reasons:

• There is a long history of DNS libraries not respecting DNS TTLs and caching the results of name lookups.
• Many apps do DNS lookups once and cache the results.
• Even if apps and libraries did proper re-resolution, the load of every client re-resolving DNS over and over would be difficult to manage.

We try to discourage users from doing things that hurt themselves. That said, if enough people ask for this, we may implement it as an alternative to portals.

Discovering services

Kubernetes supports 2 primary modes of finding a Service - environment variables and DNS.

Environment variables

When a Pod is run on a Node, the kubelet adds a set of environment variables for each active Service. It supports both Docker links compatible variables (see makeLinkVariables) and simpler {SVCNAME}_SERVICE_HOST and {SVCNAME}_SERVICE_PORT variables, where the Service name is upper-cased and dashes are converted to underscores.

For example, the Service "redis-master" which exposes TCP port 6379 and has been allocated portal IP address 10.0.0.11 produces the following environment variables:

REDIS_MASTER_SERVICE_HOST=10.0.0.11
REDIS_MASTER_SERVICE_PORT=6379
REDIS_MASTER_PORT=tcp://10.0.0.11:6379
REDIS_MASTER_PORT_6379_TCP=tcp://10.0.0.11:6379
REDIS_MASTER_PORT_6379_TCP_PROTO=tcp
REDIS_MASTER_PORT_6379_TCP_PORT=6379
REDIS_MASTER_PORT_6379_TCP_ADDR=10.0.0.11

This does imply an ordering requirement - any Service that a Pod wants to access must be created before the Pod itself, or else the environment variables will not be populated. DNS does not have this restriction.

DNS

An optional (though strongly recommended) cluster add-on is a DNS server. The DNS server watches the Kubernetes API for new Services and creates a set of DNS records for each. If DNS has been enabled throughout the cluster then all Pods should be able to do name resolution of Services automatically.

For example, if you have a Service called "my-service" in Kubernetes Namespace "my-ns" a DNS record for "my-service.my-ns" is created. Pods which exist in the "my-ns" Namespace should be able to find it by simply doing a name lookup for "my-service". Pods which exist in other Namespaces must qualify the name as "my-service.my-ns". The result of these name lookups is the virtual portal IP.

External Services

For some parts of your application (e.g. frontends) you may want to expose a Service onto an external (outside of your cluster, maybe public internet) IP address.

On cloud providers which support external load balancers, this should be as simple as setting the createExternalLoadBalancer flag of the Service to true. This sets up a cloud-specific load balancer and populates the publicIPs field (see below). Traffic from the external load balancer will be directed at the backend Pods, though exactly how that works depends on the cloud provider.

For cloud providers which do not support external load balancers, there is another approach that is a bit more "do-it-yourself" - the publicIPs field. Any address you put into the publicIPs array will be handled the same as the portal IP - the kube-proxy will install iptables rules which proxy traffic through to the backends. You are then responsible for ensuring that traffic to those IPs gets sent to one or more Kubernetes Nodes. As long as the traffic arrives at a Node, it will be be subject to the iptables rules.

An example situation might be when a Node has both internal and an external network interfaces. If you assign that Node's external IP as a publicIP, you can then aim traffic at the Service port on that Node and it will be proxied to the backends.

Shortcomings

We expect that using iptables and userspace proxies for portals will work at small to medium scale, but may not scale to very large clusters with thousands of Services. See the original design proposal for portals for more details.

Using the kube-proxy obscures the source-IP of a packet accessing a Service.

Future work

In the future we envision that the proxy policy can become more nuanced than simple round robin balancing, for example master elected or sharded. We also envision that some Services will have "real" load balancers, in which case the portal will simply transport the packets there.

There's a proposal to eliminate userspace proxying in favor of doing it all in iptables. This should perform better, though is less flexible than arbitrary userspace code.

We hope to make the situation around external load balancers and public IPs simpler and easier to comprehend.

The gory details of portals

The previous information should be sufficient for many people who just want to use Services. However, there is a lot going on behind the scenes that may be worth understanding.

Avoiding collisions

One of the primary philosophies of Kubernetes is that users should not be exposed to situations that could cause their actions to fail through no fault of their own. In this situation, we are looking at network ports - users should not have to choose a port number if that choice might collide with another user. That is an isolation failure.

In order to allow users to choose a port number for their Services, we must ensure that no two Services can collide. We do that by allocating each Service its own IP address.

IPs and Portals

Unlike Pod IP addresses, which actually route to a fixed destination, Service IPs are not actually answered by a single host. Instead, we use iptables (packet processing logic in Linux) to define "virtual" IP addresses which are transparently redirected as needed. We call the tuple of the Service IP and the Service port the portal. When clients connect to the portal, their traffic is automatically transported to an appropriate endpoint. The environment variables and DNS for Services are actually populated in terms of the portal IP and port.

As an example, consider the image processing application described above. When the backend Service is created, the Kubernetes master assigns a portal IP address, for example 10.0.0.1. Assuming the Service port is 1234, the portal is 10.0.0.1:1234. The master stores that information, which is then observed by all of the kube-proxy instances in the cluster. When a proxy sees a new portal, it opens a new random port, establishes an iptables redirect from the portal to this new port, and starts accepting connections on it.

When a client connects to the portal the iptables rule kicks in, and redirects the packets to the Service proxy's own port. The Service proxy chooses a backend, and starts proxying traffic from the client to the backend.

This means that Service owners can choose any Service port they want without risk of collision. Clients can simply connect to an IP and port, without being aware of which Pods they are actually accessing.