How load balancing and service discovery works in Kubernetes

Effective microservice management in Kubernetes requires load balancing and service discovery. This is a summary of how they function in Kubernetes:

1. Kubernetes Services: For accessing logical collections of pods and policies in Kubernetes is component called services is used. Pods can find each other without knowing each other's IP addresses thanks to services that facilitate communication between various components of the application.

2. DNS-Based Discovery: Pods can trade service names with each other because of Kubernetes integration of a DNS server. To maintain proper service discovery, this DNS resolution is automatically updated whenever pods are added/deleted. So service named abc-service is calling by using http://abc-service:port.

3. Environment Variables: When the pod is started Kubernetes injects environment variables that hold details about the service in the same namespace. Which helps to discover services.

1. Internal Load Balancing: Internal load balancing is provided by Kubernetes Services. When a Service is requested, Kubernetes uses a round-robin method by default to divide up the incoming traffic among the Pods that make up that Service.

2. External Load Balancing: You can use external load balancer to expose services to outside of the kubernetes cluster. To distribute traffic among Pods, this connects with load balancers from cloud providers such as Google Cloud Load Balancer and AWS ELB. You can also utilize an ingeress resource which functions as a router and can also load balance and route traffic among services.

3. Session Affinity: It allows traffic from the same client to be directed to the same Pod. Useful for stateful apps maybe this.

4. Service Mesh: Services mesh like Istio or Linkerd are used for advanced load balancing and service discovery features. These tools have the advantages of durability, observability and fine-grained traffic control characteristics.

• Service Discovery: Primarily managed through Kubernetes Services using DNS and environment variables.
• Load Balancing: Handled by Kubernetes Services for internal traffic and LoadBalancer or Ingress resources for external traffic.

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