External services

In the previous chapter, we saw a few service examples. For testing and demonstration purposes, we wanted all the services to be externally accessible. This was configured by the type: LoadBalancer element in our service definition. The LoadBalancer type creates an external load balancer on the cloud provider. We should note that support for external load balancers varies by provider, as does the implementation. In our case, we are using GCE, so integration is pretty smooth. The only additional setup needed is to open firewall rules for the external service ports.

Let's dig a little deeper and do a describe command on one of the services from the More on labels section in Chapter 2, Pods, Services, Replication Controllers, and Labels:

$ kubectl describe service/node-js-labels

The following screenshot is the result of the preceding command:

In the output of the preceding screenshot, you'll note several key elements. Our Namespace: is set to default, the Type: is LoadBalancer, and we have the external IP listed under LoadBalancer Ingress:. Furthermore, we can see Endpoints:, which shows us the IPs of the pods that are available to answer service requests.