How Does Traffic Actually Reach Your Pods? Kubernetes Services & kube-proxy Explained (opens in new tab)

Your backend Pod just crashed. Kubernetes created a new Pod with a completely different IP address. Yet your application didn't notice anything changed. How? Because applications don't talk directly to Pods. They talk to Kubernetes Services. A Service provides a stable virtual IP and DNS name, while kube-proxy quietly programs the networking rules that route traffic to the right Pods. In this post, we'll go beyond the usual "Service types" explanation and look at how traffic actually reaches ...