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In Kubernetes, pods are ephemeral — they can be created, destroyed, and rescheduled at any time. Services provide a stable network endpoint for accessing a set of pods, while Ingress provides HTTP/HTTPS routing for external traffic. On GKE, both integrate deeply with Google Cloud Load Balancing.
A Service is an abstraction that defines a logical set of pods and a policy for accessing them. Services provide stable IP addresses and DNS names that do not change as pods come and go.
| Type | Description | Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| ClusterIP | Internal-only IP, accessible within the cluster | Service-to-service communication |
| NodePort | Exposes the service on each node's IP at a static port | Testing, limited external access |
| LoadBalancer | Creates a Google Cloud Network Load Balancer | Direct external access to a service |
| ExternalName | Maps to an external DNS name | Accessing external services by name |
| Headless | No ClusterIP — returns pod IPs directly via DNS | StatefulSet discovery, custom load balancing |
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