Kubernetes Pods are ephemeral. They can come and go over time, especially when
driven by things like ReplicationControllers.
While each pod gets its own IP address, 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 the
backends?
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 goal
of services is to provide a bridge for non-Kubernetes-native applications to
access backends without the need to write code that is specific to Kubernetes.
A service offers clients an IP and port pair which, when accessed, redirects
to the appropriate backends. The set of pods targetted is determined by a label
selector.
As an example, consider an image-process backend which is running with 3 live
replicas. Those replicas are fungible - frontends do not care which backend
they use. While the actual pods that comprise the set may change, the
frontend client(s) do not need to know that. The service abstraction
enables this decoupling.
A service in Kubernetes is a REST object, similar to a pod. Like a pod a
service definitions 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".
{
"id": "myapp",
"selector": {
"app": "MyApp"
},
"containerPort": 9376,
"protocol": "TCP",
"port": 8765
}This specification will create a new service named "myapp" which resolves to
TCP port 9376 on any pod with the "app=MyApp" label. To access this
service, a client can simply connect to $MYAPP_SERVICE_HOST on port
$MYAPP_SERVICE_PORT.
Each node in a Kubernetes cluster runs a service proxy. This application
watches the Kubernetes master for the addition and removal of service
objects and endpoints (pods that satisfy a service's label selector), and
maintains a mapping of service to list of endpoints. It opens a port on the
local node for each service and forwards traffic to backends (ostensibly
according to a policy, but the only policy supported for now is round-robin).
When a pod is scheduled, the master adds a set of environment variables for
each active service. We support 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" exposed on TCP port 6379 and allocated 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. This restriction will be removed once DNS for
services is supported.
A service, through its label selector, can resolve to 0 or more endpoints.
Over the life of a service, the set of pods which comprise that
service can
grow, shrink, or turn over completely. Clients will only see issues if they are
actively using a backend when that backend is removed from the services (and even
then, open connections will persist for some protocols).
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.
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.
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 for services are actually populated in
terms of the portal IP and port. We will be adding DNS support for
services, too.
As an example, consider the image processing application described above.
when the backend services 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 service 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 MYAPP_SERVICE_HOST on the portal port (whether
they know the port statically or look it up as MYAPP_SERVICE_PORT), 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.
The net result is that users 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 accessing.
For some parts of your application (e.g. your frontend) you want to expose a service on an external (publically visible) IP address.
If you want your service to be exposed on an external IP address, you can optionally supply a list of "publicIPs" which the service should respond to. These IP address will be combined with the Service's port and will also be mapped to the set of pods selected by the service. You are then responsible for ensuring that traffic to that external IP address gets sent to one or more kubernetes worker nodes. An IPTables rules on each host that maps packets from the specified public IP address to the service proxy in the same manner as internal service IP addresses.
On cloud providers which support external load balancers, there is a simpler way to achieve the same thing. On such
providers (e.g. GCE) you can leave publicIPs empty, and instead you can set the
createExternalLoadBalancer flag on the service. This sets up a cloud provider specific load balancer
(assuming that it is supported by your cloud provider) and populates the Public IP field with the appropriate value.
We expect that using iptables for portals will work at small scale, but will not scale to large clusters with thousands of services. See the original design proposal for portals for more details.
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.