Service Discovery in Kubernetes

Applications deployed to Kubernetes are exposed through a service. This is an address that allows for direct communication within a Kubernetes cluster without having to go through an external ingress or load balancer.

Services available can be viewed with kubectl get service or shorthand kubectl get svc. The service name is the same in both dev and prod clusters. This allows for simpler configuration.

Google Cloud Platform

Warning

Ensure that you've set up proper access policies for your applications.

The full hostname of a service on GCP follows this format:

http://<service-name>.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local

On-prem

The full hostname of a service on-prem follows this format:

http://<service-name>.<namespace>.svc.nais.local

Short names

You often won't need to use the full hostname to contact another service.

If you’re addressing a service in the same namespace, you can use just the service name to contact it:

http://<another-service>

If the service exists in a different namespace, you must add the appropriate namespace:

http://<another-service>.<another-namespace>

Note for on-prem

If your application has webproxy enabled, you should use the full hostname for all service discovery calls.

This is to ensure that your application does not attempt to perform these in-cluster calls through the proxy, as the environment variable NO_PROXY includes *.local.